Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
We cannot rise to anything like a passion of holiness unless we have
found God to be all in all. Only so can we lose ourselves in God. And I
must, at whatever risk of over-dwelling, stress the fact that we can
only attain this point of view by dwelling on God and not on self. Let
God be the foreground of our thought. Let our souls magnify the Lord.
Let us dwell upon the "great things" God has done for us. In every life
there is such a wonderful manifestation of the divine goodness--only we
do not take time to look for it. It is well to take the time: to write
out, if need be, our spiritual history. We shall then find abundant
evidence of the goodness of God. It may be that it is a goodness that is
seen chiefly in offers, in opportunities to be something which we have
declined or have only imperfectly realized. Be that as it may, there is
no life, I am quite convinced, that has not a spiritual history which is
a marvellous history of what God at least wanted to do for it. It is
also a history of what He actually has done: a history of graces, of
rich gifts, of deliverances. It matters not that we have been so
heedless as to miss most of what God has done. The facts stand and are
discoverable whenever we care to pay enough attention to them to
ascertain their true meaning. When we do that, then surely we shall be
compelled to do, what blessed Mary never needed to do, fall at God's
feet in an act of penitence, seeing ourselves, perhaps for the first
time, in the light of God's mind.
The Magnificat, if we consider it as a personal expression, is a
wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the
glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts. It is, too, a
thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the
Mother of the Saviour. Out of her lowliness she has been exalted--how
highly she herself cannot at the time have dreamed. We can see what was
necessarily involved in God's choice of her, and to-day we think of her
as in her perfect purity exalted in heaven far above all other
creatures. Mother of God most holy we call her, and in the words of her
canticle ever repeat her thanksgiving as our thanksgiving, too, for the
vocation that God sent her and for the gift which through her has
come to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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