A Living Sacrifice
Fr. Donald Macdonald, SMM
A LIVING SACRIFICE
Even if the boy’s face had not told the story as be left the store, his mother’s words did.
“How can you have anything if you never spend anything?” Clearly be had gone into the big store with money in his pocket, but could not decide on what be really wanted. As his mother could not stay there all day he left empty-handed and upset. Generally in life you get what you pay for.
Saint Paul’s instructive self-description as he opens his letter to the Romans – “Paul slave of Christ Jesus” (Roms. 1.: 1) – makes just that point. God, he saw, had given everything in Christ. Paul gives himself utterly in return. ‘Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s”. (Roms. 14:8). One must give to receive.
To receive the gift of God in Christ, “Therefore, present your bodies as a living sacrifice . . . which is your spiritual worship. (Roms. 12:1). Sacrifice is not a negative idea of doing without or giving up like a person on a diet. Rather is it, for Paul, a giving to, one’s whole being offered to God, which, if authentic, is genuinely spiritual worship. The core of our being offered to God becomes a living sacrifice.
CONSECRATION TO MARY
As basic Christian life is sacrificial, and as it is so difficult to find the courage and faith to give ourselves as “a living sacrifice”, we need help. It is within this context that St. Louis Marie so values Our Lady. Before St. Paul, and in response to the same God in Christ, she too gives herself as, “The Lord’s slave”. (Lk. 1:38). Give ourselves to her, he says, and she will draw us to her Son.
“We should choose a special feast day on which to give ourselves. Then, willingly and lovingly and under no constraint, we consecrate to her unreservedly our body and soul.” (Secret of Mary, #29). Our Lady is preeminently a living sacrifice, always and ever given to God in spiritual worship. At one with her is no diversionary, distracting tactic fading us away from God in Christ. To approach her free from any pressure is to be drawn to and held by what she now sees, as long as we are freely open
to her influence.
LIVE FOR GOD IN CHRIST
As we intend to live for God in Christ, we lay claim to nothing but the faith that will enable us to live like this. All else can go. This is, in part, St. Louis Marie, as St. Paul, is so much at home with the self-description, “Slave of Christ Jesus”. “How can you have anything if you never spend anything”? These men gave all. They took their identity from their Lord. The vocabulary followed from the insight expressing the gift. Note that there is a vast difference between a servant and a slave. A servant is free to leave his employer when be likes . . . but a slave belongs to his master for life”. (SM #33).
Painting: Madonna and Child: Pinturicchio (1454-1513)
This is a first of two articles in a series on Mary in the Mystery of Christ and the Church: Is Marian Spirituality Evangelical?
To receive the gift of God in Christ; “Therefore, present your bodies as a living sacrifice . . . which is your spiritual worship”. Sacrifice is not a negative idea of doing without or giving up like a person on a diet. Rather is it, for Paul, a giving to, one’s whole being offered to God, which, if authentic, is genuinely spiritual worship. The core of our being offered to God becomes a living sacrifice.
St. Louis Marie emphasizes the total nature of the gift, which he sees as expressing the basically sacrificial nature of Christian living. “Notice that in this devotion we sacrifice to Jesus through Mary all that is most dear to us. (SM #29). He cannot believe that in so aligning himself with Mary he needs to spend time looking at the small print of their relationship. All that he has is hers. As she is wholly God’s, she can only draw him to what she now sees.
INVITE OUR LASY INTO OUR LIFE
“Mary is above all the example of that worship that consists in making one’s life an offering to God. This is an ancient and ever new doctrine that each individual can hear again by heeding the Church’s teaching, but also by heeding the very voice of the Virgin . . . ’I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me’. (Lk. 1:38). And Mary’s ’Yes’ is for all Christians a lesson and example of obedience to the will of the Father, which is the way and means of one‘s own sanctification”. (Marialis Cultus 21). Clearly then St. Louis Marie has heard the voice of the Church and Our Lady.
Enthralled by the gift of God in Christ through the Spirit, he wants to give himself to what he sees in faith, and so become a living sacrifice to God. To try to make this wholly positive, outgoing gift of himself truly spiritual worship, he needs help. It is not easy to break the hold of a contemporary world and an innately selfish self and so “be transformed by the renewal of (his) mind”. So he invites Our Lady into his life.
It is then the voice of experience talking he sums it up in saying. “But happy, very happy indeed, will the generous person be who, prompted by love, consecrates himself entirely to Jesus through Mary as their slave, after having shaken off by baptism the tyrannical slavery of the devil”. (SM #34).
FOOTNOTE
I. The Secret of Mary (SM). All references are from this book.
