The first thing I ever do with anything is question it. The main question I had about the devotion that so inspired St Louis-Marie de Montfort was, Why does this devotion consecrate us to Jesus through Mary, why not directly to Jesus?
The answer is that the easiest and most obvious way to get to Jesus is the way in which He came to us: through Mary. It was though Her that he was incarnated and became Man. His human person grew inside Her. She is the person most perfectly conformed to Jesus Christ. If we desire to leave our incarnated selves and become spiritually combined with God, then we should follow the same path but in the opposite direction: through Mary. In the normal way of things we live a sacramental life and pray to Mary now and again. Some of us have gone up a level in our devotion, me included, and concentrate on Mary: I feel a special connection with Her and I say the Rosary as a means to accentuate my prayer. If I want to go to the third level then I must consecrate myself to Her. This means trying to attain five things:
1. My devotion to Her should come from my deepest mind and heart, engendered by an understanding and love for Her.
2. My love for Her must be tender and confident in the way I loved my mother when I was a little boy.
3. My devotion will inspire me to imitate Her ten principal virtues: humility, faith, obedience, prayer, mortification, purity, charity, sweetness, patience and wisdom.
4. My devotion should be constant in driving out from me all that is not from God. I will become more courageous in witnessing Christ and His Gospel.
5. My devotion must be disinterested: I should not do it for temporal or spiritual reward, but to express my love for Her.
Did I attain these things? No, of course not! The thirty-three days of morning and evening prayer, reading and contemplation have made a difference though.
· I know my sinful nature better, understand a little better what temptations naturally attract me and I have been encouraged to take responsibility for my interior weaknesses.
· I have strengthened my faith.
· The Blessed Virgin Mary is driving out my fears. This is very much a work in progress. There is a lot of them.
· She is replacing my long-held fears with the confidence that she is walking with me at all times.
· I know that I will come to know her better all the time.
· Through Her, I have come to a better understanding of Christ and this can only grow and develop.
· When I venerate Her, I glorify Jesus. He sees Her delight in me and that gives Him great joy.
There are a few specific things that I have learned. These are drawn from the reading from St Thomas a Kempis “Of the Imitation of Christ” in particular.
Temptation and sin can bring me closer to God.
This is massively counter-intuitive. Sin is sin because it comes between us and God. Jesus died so that we might be forgiven our sins and make our way to God more readily. True, but I have to remember that God is always with me. I gradually chip away at the great iceberg of my temptations. It is an arduous task. I will never reduce it down to an ice cube, or see it completely melted away: not in this life. God loves to watch me working on it though, guiding the blows of my spiritual chisel as I realise what leads me to sin, or manage to overcome those deep-seated habits that I indulge in preference to Him.
Of course, before this I must have identified what leads me to sin. My conscience will tell me when I have missed the mark. It is in confession that the priest can help me fully understand the inspiration for my mistakes, but that is after the fact. Through this devotion I am seeking to avoid the need to bring my mistakes before Jesus Christ. Knowledge of my interior self is a prerequisite. I must be aware of the parts of myself, innate or acquired, that make me prone to making certain types of errors. Those are the “known knowns”, but there are also the “known unknowns” (thank you for the phraseology, Donald Rumsfeld): my frailties of which I am unaware. As I live a largely solitary life, I do not have the benefit of someone to tell me of them.
In the first week of the devotion, I meditated upon my concupiscence: my natural inclination to indulge my appetites for food, admiration, adulation, sex, and the anaesthetics of modern life such as television, gossip and alcohol. These things are not in and of themselves sinful until I put satisfying them in front of my appetite for God or my love for others. Temptation is not sin. When I give in to temptation then I may act sinfully, but when I repent and place that sinfulness before Him, I draw closer to Him in trust and love.
However, this is a perilous path to take towards Him. I could so easily deal too harshly with myself and others in trying to avoid sin. Like the man who nearly falls off his bicycle to the left, he over-compensates, lurches to the right and falls off completely. In seeking repentance and penance, I may fall into another sin just as grave or worse than the one I have avoided. In Luke 17: 1 – 10, Jesus warns His disciples against leading others astray, even inadvertently. If I were to correct the error of another (which I often do in my head), I must do so with love and compassion and the intention to be of service to them and not do it for my own gratification or enhancement (which I pretty much never do in my head, my condemnation is usually angry and resentful). Even when I think I am doing the right thing, I must be watchful. I have a strong inclination towards being of service, which is generally a good thing but can lead me astray and I have gone astray as a result many times, sometimes with painful consequences for myself and others. The degree to which we can get things badly wrong, even while trying to do good, should not be underestimated. So trying to reach God by cannoning off my sinfulness is not be relied upon.
Small temptations are easy to handle. However, if I fail to take them seriously, then they grow will within me and I may become inured to them. If I am weak and promise myself to deal with these things tomorrow, or later, or when God helps me, then I am just nurturing them. There was a folk tradition that a witch could not enter your house unless you invited her across the threshold. Once she was in your home, you became used to her being there. She sat beside the fire, helped around the house and looked after the children, but she quickly gained control of you and destroyed you. Stories like these were parables about the dangers of letting temptation become part of your life. If we let temptations into our lives, they become a normal part of ourselves and our identity; so much so that we cannot imagine who we would be without them. Lent is a good time to deal with the small temptations, identifying them and dealing with them before they become a part of our ‘new normal’. God has given me the tools I need to get the job done and the strength to wield them. For my part, I must find the will to start and carry on until it is done.
Suffering does not bring me closer to God, but it can bring me closer to others.
Wealth and riches, earned or not, are a problem. They make the whole business of getting to God much harder. We all have wealth of some kind; material wealth or physical gifts or intellectual gifts, and are expected to use them for the ultimate benefit of others. We all have gifts to some extent, but some grow up with a plenitude of gifts and for them it is much harder. Through my suffering, I have experienced frailty, misery, wounding, healing, joy and deliverance. These experiences can help me to empathise with my brothers and sisters and enable me to give them with the love they deserve.
Love grows when it is given away.
Love withers when it is hoarded in the dark, like an old battery that eventually loses its charge. It grows and flourishes when it is passed from one person to another, it is re-energised and sparks wonderfully. Love should never be secret.
We are called to choose, not to succeed.
When faced with a tough moral choice, which may be controversial or invidious, I am tempted to think, “whatever God wants to happen will happen”. In which case I have abrogated my responsibility and made Him choose for me. If it then goes wrong, it’s His fault! So often, I am mired in the quicksands of my confusion; I cannot see through the clouds of possible consequences whichever way I choose. Yet God does not want me to choose right, but rightly. He wants me to choose a moral path and follow it in love for Him and all others. Whatever I choose is His plan, because His plan was for me to make the choice.
The necessary death of ambition.
St Thomas `a Kempis tells us that Jesus had no ambition for Himself here on Earth, but that His ambitions and hopes for us are boundless: far greater than any of His disciples understood at the time. To be more like Him, I need to put aside personal ambition, my aspirations for myself and self-aggrandising dreams. I should welcome failure, degradation and humiliation because it was through these things that Jesus Christ triumphed. My own ambitions have withered under the onslaught of reality. God intervened in my life to rid me of any reason for pridefulness or hope of material success. Yet still I harbour ambitions and aspirations that are solely about myself. I must try to put these aside and truly die to myself and place Jesus at the centre of all that I am or could be, only then will my life bear fruit. The seed has to “die”; to stop being a seed in order for the plant to grow, flower and bear fruit containing many seeds. The tadpole and the caterpillar have to cease to be what they are in order for the frog and butterfly to exist.
My prayers for an instructive and enlightening devotional month have certainly been answered. One morning my prayers were answered very directly. During prayer, my mind had wandered to a slight I had received and felt deeply. My anger and resentment against the person in question grew and blotted out the prayer like a cloud over the sun. I turned to the reading of the day.
“Do not judge and you will not be judged; because the judgements you give are the judgements you will get and the amount you measure out is the amount you will receive.”
It is still impossible for me to really understand one thing:
While I understand why I need to go to God, why in heaven’s name would He want to come to me?
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