Vigils Reading – Immaculate Heart of Mary

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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

◊◊◊

“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

 

 

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June 8
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