49 d, e
At every moment I will tell you what I want of you; thus it will be I myself who will do everything in you and with you. You will always act, as it were, under my sweet motherly inspiration. And thus you will grow continually in a life united with me. My life will be your life. It will become painful and insupportable for you to live even for a moment outside of me.
I have this ‘habit’ of sometimes envisioning Mary with me at Mass. I think I may have read it somewhere and then started practicing it. The feeling is so authentic and real that the experience stays with me long after the moment has passed. When I started having this experience, she would come to me right after Holy Communion as I was still kneeling in prayer, she would drape her mantle over me and then give me her Baby to hold. It was such a sweet, Grace filled moment.
This was repeated several Sundays. She’d always cover me with her mantle first. She never told me why, actually there was never any conversation of any kind. Just an amazing moment. But I started to wonder, why the mantle… is there more to it. At that time, I started getting bombarded with articles about veiling. And it hit me. She was covering me in preparation for receiving her Son. I was hit with a feeling so strong that that’s what she wanted that I started veiling right away. Not the most comfortable of acts of obedience, especially when attending a NO Mass and no one else veils. But the Lord graced me with strength and determination and removed my self consciousness and brought my focus to worshiping Him.
That was close to a decade ago. Now fast forward to yesterday, and I had a completely different experience. Instead of sitting by my side as she had in the past; she now came within me as I was walking up the aisle to go receive Her Son. She let me glimpse the congregation with her eyes, and get a sense of how dearly she loved everyone, but there were a select few that she held particularly close because of their love and consecration to her. At that point she directed my glance to a man kneeling in prayer next to his family and I couldn’t help but smile (under my mask) at the love that poured forth.
I was also gravely aware that the love I was feeling was only a tiny minuscule of hers, because although I had gone to Confession recently and had no mortal sin in my soul, my venial sins had mounted.
So back to today… I’m reading her message to Fr. Gobbi and my soul is on fire…I have no doubt that this is true. That fleeting moment that I experienced in church is what she’s looking for from me.