Interior Practices of Devotions to Mary

Interior Practices of Devotions to Mary

“In addition to (the exterior practices),” . . .

. . . writes St. Louis de Montfort in his True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  “There are some very sanctifying interior practices for those souls who feel called to a high degree of perfection by the Holy Spirit.”

Now, right here there are no doubt quite a few well-meaning and thoroughly pious people who would consider themselves
excluded from what Montfort is saying. The very expression: “for those who feel called to a high degree of perfection by the Holy Spirit”, might leave them with the impression that Montfort is talking about those who are called to heroic sanctity, to people who are already so close to God that their future canonization is imminent.

Such humility is, of course, commendable. None of us think of ourselves as great saints. But the fact is that Montfort is referring to all of us who have made this consecration. All of us who are trying our best to live up to it. There is no reason to be frightened off by the words: “called to a high degree of perfection by the Holy Spirit.”

It was, after all, our divine Lord Himself who made the goal of Christian living clear to us.  “Be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect”.  We may believe, sinners that we know ourselves to be, that this is an unattainable end to reach. But, nevertheless, Christ our Lord expects us to try.

Interior Practices Summarized

Montfort summed up these interior practices: “They may be expressed,” he wrote, “in four words, doing everything through Mary, with Mary, in Mary and for Mary, in order to do them more perfectly through Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus and for Jesus.”

Montfort arrived at the notion of these interior practices by considering the centuries’ old prayer of the Mass, the one that comes at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer. And he adapted it to his own form of consecration. The Mass prayer reads: “Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor are yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever.”

He used the three words of the prayer: through, with and in, and applied them to our Blessed Lady, stressing the aspect of her universal mediation of grace and her role as the one who leads us to Christ. He added the word for in his formula: “ . for Mary, in order to do them (our actions) more perfectly . . . for Jesus.”

The use of these four prepositions . . .

. . . is an attempt to indicate the totality of this form of consecration, just as the Mass prayer connotes the idea of our total belonging to Christ.

Montfort Indicates the Fulness, the Completeness, the Totality of . . .

Now, one of the difficulties we may encounter in considering these four interior practices is that we might be inclined to look for a complete and separate understanding of each one of them. This, however, is impossible to do. Montfort himself never intended them to be clearly and adequately distinct from each other. You cannot, for example, perform an action with Mary, without at the same time performing it through, in and for Mary. Montfort’s purpose in using the four words is, as was mentioned above, to indicate the fulness, the completeness, the totality of our belonging to Jesus through Mary.

Through Mary, he tells us, means that “we must obey her always and be led in all things by her spirit, which is the Holy Spirit of God”.  This entails that “… the person who wishes to be led by this spirit of Mary should renounce his own spirit … for the darkness of our own spirit and the evil tendencies of our own will and actions, good as they may seem to us, would hinder the holy spirit of Mary were we to follow them …”

To act with Mary, we should look to her as the model of virtue and perfection. “In every action,” Montfort says, “we should
consider how Mary performed it or how she would perform it were she in our place”. He suggests that we meditate on the great virtues she practiced during her life, especially her faith and her fidelity to God’s will, her humility and her boundless purity of heart and soul.

Doing our actions for Mary is self-explanatory.  “… we should do everything for her as if we were her personal servant and slave.”

. . . Our Belonging to Jesus through Mary

Montfort hastens to add — knowing that there were hyper-critical minds in his day as there are in ours — “This does not mean that we take her for the ultimate end of our service, for Jesus alone is our ultimate end. But we take Mary as our proximate end, our mysterious intermediary and the easiest way of reaching Him.”

What St. Louis de Montfort means by in Mary . . .

. . . is a bit more difficult to grasp. His explanation becomes a kind of lyric mysticism, the literary genre known in his day as an “elevation”. He compares the Blessed Mother to the earthly paradise that God made for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Montfort speaks of the untold riches, rarities, beauties and delights that are present within Our Lady. He speaks of Christ as the New Adam living in the paradise that is Mary, taking His delight within her for the nine months before His birth. In Mary, he explains is everything that is good, pure, wholesome and conducive to salvation.

“Only the Holy Spirit,” he maintains, “can teach us the truths that these material objects symbolize”. And perhaps that is what we should be content with doing: let the Holy Spirit unfold the meaning of in Mary to us in His own good time. When we have attained this remarkable grace by our fidelity, Montfort explains, “we should be delighted to remain in Mary. We should rest there peacefully, rely on her confidently, hide ourselves there with safety, and abandon ourselves unconditionally to her …”