The Humble Greatness of Mary: Six Quick Points

As a former Protestant who entered the Church only a few years ago, I love discovering the depths of the faith. On the feast of St. Anne, mother of Mary, here are six fruits of meditation on Our Lady as the New Eve who helps bring supernatural life.

1: She reverses first Eve’s disobedience when she responds to the Archangel Gabriel: “Let it be done to me according to your Word.” Unlike all previous divine-human encounters or commissions, divine authority is met with complete and utter humble acceptance. All divine-human encounters climax and complete in this one — and in the child it creates.

2: She bears the Christ-child in her womb for nine months. For the first 22 days her heart beats for him until his heart beats for itself. Her blood runs through his veins. She then bears the Christ for 33 years, up to and including when he sheds his blood (and hers) for the sins of the world.

3: As Christ bears us on the Cross, she bears him in her heart and after death she bears him in her arms. It’s a double burden she carries: the burden of Christ and the burdens of Christ. As Simeon warned: “a sword will pierce your soul too.”

4: In the mystery of Mary lies the mystery of woman and the mystery of salvation. To “bear one another” in our hearts and minds is the essence of intercession and the heart of Marian spirituality. Marian femininity is true femininity.

5: The test of an authentic relationship with God is this Marian “bearing of another.” The secret of each one of us lies in another. And to be a person is to be incomplete — being both derived and completed in one another. Humanity illustrates the “openness of being.”

6: The mystery of Mary is thus the mystery of the feminine — and because of that it contains the mystery of masculinity also. As shown here, Mary shows Jesus how to crush the serpent’s head. Jesus’s own education in spirituality, in his humanity, comes from his parents, notably his mother. His spirituality is Marian.

Now who has a low view of woman? It was not the people who taught me this but rather the ones who obscured it.

Image: Jungfrun i bon
by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato

By Tory Baucum