Can any words of mine do justice to the mother of
my Creator and Savior, whose holiness drew down forgiveness for my sins, whose
wholeness obtained for me incorruptibility, whose virginity gave the Lord the
means of loving this soul of mine and enabled God to plight me his troth? Can
any tribute I may pay to the mother of my Lord and God be adequate if her
conceiving brought me redemption from captivity, her delivery delivered me from
eternal death, and her Child raised me from ruin, and from exile and misery
restored me to the bliss of my Father's house?
All this the blessed Fruit of your womb bestowed
upon me, O blessed among women, at my baptism, when he brought me to birth
again. Some of it he gave me possession of at the time, the rest I was to count
on having later. Yet by my sins I have deprived myself of it all. I no longer
have what I then possessed, and it is all I can do to count on what was
promised me for the future. It is my own fault that such blessings have faded
away; but that does not mean that I should not be thankful I have received
them: I must not be ungrateful to her through whom they came my way in the
first place. God forbid that I should add that sin to all the rest. No; I thank
her because I once had these things, I grieve because I have them no longer, I
pray that I may have them back again; for sure I am that just as the Son's
grace enabled me to receive them, so the mother's merits will help me to
retrieve them. You are the gate, Lady, that opens on to life, the door that
gives access to salvation, the road to reconciliation, the avenue to
restoration. I beseech you, Lady, by your fruitfulness, the source of our
salvation, pray that my sins may be forgiven and the grace of a holy life
conferred upon me; and may this servant of yours be safe under your protection
forever.
Amazement lays hold of us, Lady, when we think of
your maidenhood, for none other has ever approached it. We love you because in
conceiving you procured our salvation; we revere you for your holiness beyond
all price. You it was that showed the world the Lord and God it had failed to
know. You made visible to it the Creator it had never seen. You bore for it the
One it needed to raise it from ruin, the Peacemaker it could not itself provide
because of its guilt. Because you were fruitful, Lady, the sinful world was
justified, its damnation changed to salvation, its exile to restoration. Your
delivery, Lady, redeemed the world from captivity, healed its sickness and
brought it from death to life. Assailed by evil spirits with craft and
violence, it lay wrapped in darkness; but when it received the light of the Sun
that rose from your womb, it escaped their snares and could despise their
power.
The sky and the stars„ the earth and its rivers,
day and night, and everything else that men were meant to control and use,
rejoice at the return of their former beauty—for thanks to you, Lady, they have
been in a way restored to life, and a new and stranger beauty has been bestowed
upon them. They all suffered a kind of death when they lost their native
privilege of serving the will and convenience of the worshippers of God. That
was the end they were created for, but when they were used by idolaters, who
were not their destined masters, they were wrested away from it and defiled. Subject
once more to men who acknowledge God, they have recovered their value through
the use they are put to; they can rejoice in life anew. And there was further
beauty, priceless beauty, to gladden them when God himself, the God who had
created them, the God they knew was over them invisibly ruling them, was seen
among them, visible, using them and making them holy. Such were the great
blessings that came to the world through blessed Mary and the blessed Fruit of
her womb.
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