Week two: Getting to know Mary - Day 3

The Immaculate Conception

Prayer to the Holy Spirit 

O Holy Spirit, inspire me. God’s love, engulf me. Holy Mary, my Mother, guide me in the right ways, look at me, and together with Jesus, bless me. Keep me from all evil, from all delusions and all threats. Mary, The Spouse of the Holy Spirit, obtain for me the grace of getting to know you and delving into the gift of the Immaculate Conception. Amen!

The Word of God 

“And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name’” (Lk 1:46‒49).

Meditation 

The privilege of the Immaculate Conception of Mary results from her Divine motherhood and constitutes a new beginning. “This decisive point in the history of salvation is precisely the ‘Immaculate Conception’. God in his eternal love has chosen man from eternity: He has chosen him in his Son. (…) Neither original sin, nor the whole history of personal faults and social sins have been able to dissuade the eternal Father from this plan 132 WEEK TWO: GETTING TO KNOW MARY of love of his. They have not been able to cancel the choice of us in the eternal Son, the Word consubstantial with the Father. Since this choice was to take form in the Incarnation, and since the Son of God was to become a man for our salvation, for this very reason the eternal Father chose for him, among men, his Mother. (…) He chose her from the beginning, from the very first moment of conception, making her worthy of the divine motherhood to which she would be called at the appointed time. He made her the first heir to the holiness of her own Son. The first among those redeemed by his blood, which he had received from her, humanly speaking. He made her spotless at the very moment of conception.”14

This is how the promise from Paradise was supposed to be fulfilled: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers” (Gen 3:15). We are continuously participating in this spiritual warfare and—as John Paul II comfortingly assures—neither the history of our personal guilts, nor that of our social sins is not able to thwart God’s plan of salvation. At the very centre of this plan, there is the new Adam, Christ, and the new Eve, Mary. Through obedience and trust in God, humanity is to return to the Father and Creator.

Among many shining examples of total trust in Mary, we have St. Maximilian Kolbe. His total devotion to the Immaculate Virgin Mary led him to the extraordinary activity that transformed reality. Starting with changing an empty field at Niepokalanów near Warsaw into a monastery inhabited by 600 monks, through a real influence on society thanks to distributing the periodical “Rycerz Niepokalanej” (Knight of the Immaculata) amounting to 1 million copies, missionary work in Japan, to a true testimony of love in his martyrdom at Auschwitz. It was in Niepokalanów where John Paul II, during his pilgrimage, said that St. Maximilian’s “heart and thought focused mainly on this new Beginning, which in the history of mankind was—thanks to our Redeemer—the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of His earthly Day 3 133 incarnation.”15 An encounter with the Immaculate, the Mother of the new Beginning of mankind, i.e., Jesus Christ, may become a new beginning in life for us. St. Maximilian wrote: “Only God really understands what ‘immaculate’ means (…) ‘Immaculate Conception’ is an expression that abounds in the most consoling of mysteries.”16 These consoling mysteries open for those who entrust their hearts to Mary.

Prayer by St. Maximilian Kolbe (d. 1941) 

Who are you, O Immaculata? I cannot delve into the meaning of being God’s creation. Even the idea of being an adoptive God’s child exceeds my comprehension. And who are you, O Immaculata? Not only God’s child but, what is more, God’s Mother, and not only His adoptive mother, but really and truly the Mother of God. And that is not just a hypothesis, a probability, but something sure, complete certainty, a dogma of the faith. But are you still the Mother of God today? The title of motherhood never changes. In eternity, God will say to you, “My Mother.” The Lawgiver who established the fourth commandment will honour you in eternity, for ever. Who are you? The Incarnate God relished in being named the Son of Man. But people didn’t understand it. And even today few souls comprehend it and do it very imperfectly. Allow me to praise you, the Blessed Virgin.

I praise you, our Father in heaven that you placed your only-begotten Son in her all-pure womb.

I praise you, the Son of God that you deigned to descend into her all-pure womb and became her true, real Son.

I praise you, O Holy Spirit that you deigned to shape the body of the Son of God in her unblemished womb.

I praise you, O Holy Trinity, O God in the Holy Trinity, for such a divine elevation of the Immaculate. I will not cease to praise you every day after waking from sleep and humbly worship you, Holy God, repeating thrice: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and 134 WEEK TWO: GETTING TO KNOW MARY to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

Allow me to praise you, O Virgin Most Holy.

Allow me to praise you with my commitment and personal sacrifice.

Allow me to live, work, suffer, be consumed and die for you, only for you.

Allow me to bring the whole world to you.

Allow me to contribute to an ever-greater exaltation of you, to the greatest possible exaltation of you.

Allow me to render such glory unto you as no one has ever rendered unto you so far.

Allow others to pass me in zeal for your exaltation, and grant that I may surpass them, so that in noble emulation, your glory may grow deeper and deeper, faster and faster, more and more intensely, as the One wishes Who raised you up so ineffably above all beings.

In you alone was God worshipped incomparably more than in all His saints.

For you God created the world. For you God called even me into existence.

Where does this fortune of mine come from? I pray you, grant that I may praise you, O Most Holy Virgin!

Spiritual reading 

“There is not and there will never be, either in God’s creation or in his mind, a creature in whom he is so honoured as in the most Blessed Virgin Mary, not excepting even the saints, the cherubim or the highest seraphim in heaven.

Mary is God’s garden of Paradise, his own unspeakable world, into which his Son entered to do wonderful things, to tend it and to take his delight in it. He created a world for the wayfarer, that is, the one we are living in. He created a second world—Para- Day 3 135 dise—for the Blessed. He created a third for himself, which he named Mary. She is a world unknown to most mortals here on earth. Even the angels and saints in heaven find her incomprehensible, and are lost in admiration of a God who is so exalted and so far above them, so distant from them, and so enclosed in Mary, his chosen world, that they exclaim: ‘Holy, holy, holy’ unceasingly.” 

St. Louis de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, 19

Homework 

I will thank God for the gift of the Immaculate Mother of Christ and my Mother. In hardships, I will repeat her name: Mary, Mary, Mary. 

Prayer of consecration 

I am all Yours, and all that I have is Yours, O most loving Christ, through Mary, Your most holy Mother. Amen!