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Vigils Reading – Immaculate Heart of Mary
June 8
THE TEMPLE OF THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY
By St Elizabeth of the Trinity7
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“The Virgin kept all these things in her heart”: her whole history can be
summed up in these few words! It was within her heart that she lived, and at
such a depth that no human eye can follow her. When I read in the gospel “that
Mary went in haste to the hill country of Judea” to perform her loving service
for her cousin Elizabeth, I imagine her passing by so beautiful, so calm and so
majestic, so absorbed in recollection of the Word of God within her. Like him
her prayer was always this: “Ecce, here I am!” Who? “The servant of the Lord,”
the lowliest of his creatures: she, his Mother! Her humility was so real for she
was always forgetful, unaware, freed from self. And she could sing: “The
Almighty has done great things for me, henceforth all peoples will call me
blessed.”
This Queen of virgins is also Queen of martyrs; but again it was in her
heart that the sword pierced, for with her everything took place within! Oh! How
beautiful she is to contemplate during her long martyrdom, so serene,
enveloped in a kind of majesty that radiates both strength and gentleness. She
learned from the Word himself how those must suffer whom the Father has
chosen as victims, those whom he has decided to associate with himself in the
great work of redemption, those whom he “has foreknown and predestined to
be conformed to his Christ,” crucified by love.
She is there at the foot of the Cross, standing, full of strength and courage, and
here my Master says to me: [“Behold your Mother.”] He gives her to me for my
Mother. And now that he has returned to the Father and has substituted me for
himself on the Cross so that “I may suffer in my body what is lacking in his
passion for the sake of his body, which is the Church,” the Blessed Virgin is
again there to teach me to suffer as he did, to tell me, to make me hear those
last songs of his soul which no one else but she, his Mother, could overhear.
7 Complete Works, vol. 1, translated by Sr. Aletheia Kane, OCD, Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1984, pp. 160-161.15