Our Lady

We rejoice to honor Our Lady today in prayer and song as Queen of heaven and earth. We often imagine what her response would be to a friend, a bit jaded, complaining to us some years ago about Mary’s feast days, annoyed and confused. “I don’t understand what it all means. It gives her too much, makes her too privileged.” Mary’s response would be, we imagine, something like this, “I was, I am as amazed as you are. All I can tell you is that the Almighty has done great things for me. He has looked on his servant in her nothingness. This, this alone is why all generations have called me blessed. It has little to do with me; it’s all about him, his pleasure, his delight in my nothingness.” Clearly to be distracted by Mary’s privileges would be to miss the point. For her story, is our story, individually and as Church. For the Virgin Mary of Nazareth shows us our true self - as total capacity for God in Christ.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Coronation of the Virgin, Sevilla, 1599 - Madrid, 1660.