Consecration Aids: 19: She Feeds Them!
Fr. Christopher Lee, SMM
She Feeds Them!
I don’t know about you, but I, for one, never could put up with a selfish person. I can stand a lot of things in the other fellow, but don’t ask me to overlook his selfishness. To me it’s such a mean, low, crawling thing that I have often wondered how Almighty God Himself must feel about such people.
Naturally, the thought never once occurred to me to include myself among the cads – until the day I set out seriously to live my Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary. What an eye-opener that was for me! I had never dreamed a fellow could be so blind to his own selfishness. Let me explain.
Like any other slave of Mary one of the first things I learned while preparing for my consecration was that this total dedication is a way of life: a way of thinking as well as a way of praying or speaking or playing. To put it clearly: I was told that after my consecration I must thenceforth offer up all my actions (thoughts, words and deeds) to Jesus through Mary. And that meant that I would have to give up my only too often selfish motives to take on Mary’s sublime motives and intentions.
Besides, who ever heard of a slave doing things his own way?
Eat For the Glory of God
Let’s take a specific case: my meals. Eating is one of these necessary functions on this earth of ours, sometimes pleasant, sometimes less so. It can be a joy, it can be a sacrifice, it can be a source of merit, it can be an occasion of sin. The main thing is to eat soberly for the honor and glory of God, according to these words of the Apostle “. . . he who eats, eats for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God” (Rom. 14:6).
Eat for the glory of God! How seldom – despite my good habit of saying grace before and after meals – had I thought of eating for the glory of God! Of course, saying grace did help, but it didn’t make me less fussy or less ”choosy” about my food. I was still complaining that the breakfast toast was too light (or too dark ! ), that the mashed potatoes were too ”soupy” or the sponge-cake too ”spongy !” And all the while I must have been priding myself with eating for the greater glory of God!
With my consecration, eating took on a new aspect: one I had never noticed before, namely, that everything we eat is God’s gift to us, His creatures, His slaves by nature. And, therefore, St. Paul’s words of giving thanks when eating began to make sense. Moreover, I reasoned, if food is God’s gift to us through nature, then what right have I to spurn that gift? Besides, who ever heard of a slave complaining to his master about the food that is given to him ?
Author: Fr. Christopher Lee, SMM
This is the nineteenth in a series of articles covering Consecration Aids.
…The main thing is to eat soberly for the honor and glory of God, according to these words of the Apostle “. . . he who eats, eats for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God”.
Did I say: slave? Yes. And I’m speaking of a slave of love, a slave of Jesus and Mary. What should be his attitude at meal-time? I once read that many of the saints approached the table with fear and trembling – the Latin expression was, I believe, tam-quam ad patibulum, as one going to the gibbet! Now they had a reason for this. They knew that human nature, if not checked, is prone to gluttony. And I, all these years, had been approaching the breakfast, dinner and supper table with more or less of a selfish motive, more or less to pamper and glut this body of mine. But now, I realized, I would have to adopt new motives, I would have to purify my intentions, I would have to get rid of my own selfish, egotistic inclinations and adopt Mary’s own sublime intentions at every meal.
I was now a slave of Jesus and Mary, and a slave has no right to complain about his food. Instead of picking the best piece of meat on the platter for myself and leaving the second best for the next fellow, I would have to remember my condition as a slave; and what slave ever gets the best on the plate? In a word, I was beginning to understand that I must cultivate my taste to suit Mary’s – and Mary’s taste, everyone knows, is God’s taste, God’s will.
She Feeds Us!
Besides, it gradually dawned on me that of all God’s creatures, Mary was the most mortified – and by mortified, I mean not only dying-to-self but living for God. For Mary had no tainted nature to die to, she was the Immaculate; but she had Someone to live for, her God! Her food was to do His will in all things. Her food was her own divine Son, in the Eucharist! No wonder then that all earthly food was tasteless and insipid when compared to the food of her soul!
And that, incidentally, is the food she feeds her slaves with, according to these words of St. Louis Mary de Montfort: ”She gives them (her slaves) to eat of the most exquisite meats of the table of God ; for she gives them to eat of the bread of life, which she herself has formed” (True Devotion, No. 208). What slave would attach any importance to earthly food once he had realized that it is but a figure of the Bread of Life once formed in Mary’s virginal womb, and still as fresh as ever the Fruit of her womb! What slave, tell me, could ever expect to be better fed?
Vol. #009
July – August 2021
