Today we celebrate the birth of our Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary. With most other Saints, we celebrate their feast day on the day of their death.
That is, we celebrate most Saint’s birthdays with their birth into eternal life. Our Mother, though, we celebrate hers on the day of her birth. That’s because Mary is so much more than the other Saints. She was created as the ultimate mother, a person born without original sin and the disordered desires that go along with it. She became the new “Ark of the Covenant,” in which Jesus’s human body was formed, nourished, and protected. In her womb, God became man, and from her flesh, He took His body.
I began to reread “True Devotion to Mary” by Saint Louis De Montfort in preparation for this feast day. He reminds us that as members of the body of Christ, we too must pass through the womb. So right, if we are members of His Body, the Church, and His Body came from and formed in her womb, then we must do the same. Saint Louis compares this life to being in the womb, with death being our birth into eternal life.
This image is constructive when we think of this life as a place where we must be formed, completed, transformed into who we were meant to be. A womb is a place where we can’t see the outside world, into the reality of what’s beyond our senses. A place where we might think we know what’s going on, but we hear glimpses of the things going on beyond the veil. Just so like our experience here on earth, where we can’t see into Heaven but we get glimpses of the spiritual realm beyond our normal sense. So we count on our parents, especially our Mother, to guide and protect us so that we can be born into eternal life as the Saints God intended.
Who could help us more than she who was created to nurture, sustain, and protect Jesus Christ? What better mother could guide us than she who was so intimately united to the Holy Spirit that we call her His Spouse? She who was assumed to Heaven, being in the presence of God, is now able to see more clearly what we need than we can ever know for ourselves.
So, we turn to the Blessed Virgin to form us in this life. Ask her to guide us in our spiritual nourishment. Seek her protection from the external influences that we cannot see through the veil of our human limitations.
Something I would like to encourage today is to meditate on the silence of Our Mother, as September is the month of our Lady of Sorrows. Mary spoke only when necessary, but very few words were ever recorded from her, even in her anguish at the foot of the cross. Blessed Guerric of Igny said: “As the Christ-child in the womb advanced toward birth in a long, deep silence, so does the discipline of silence nourish, form and strengthen a person’s spirit, and produce growth which is the safer and more wholesome for being the more hidden.”
May she guide us to our own Sacred Silence. May we be more intimately united with Her Son and His Body, the Church. Mother Mary, help us choose our words carefully to bring God glory and lead us with hope toward our own birth into Heaven.
May we embrace in our lives a reverential and holy silence like hers and be strengthened to live as she did.
A reflection on the readings for the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary: September 8th, 2021