As much as the Core was all about Jesus, step 1 for me is all about Mary, the human part of my spirituality. The Incarnation is all about the joining of the spiritual to the physical. Jesus wasn’t simply the Son of God, He was also the Son of Mary. He came from within a very human body and and was fully God and fully man Himself, thereby instilling humanity with dignity and meaning.
While listening to some teachings this morning on Mary, I heard a talk from one of the Franciscans of the Immaculate speaking about the White Ladder of Mary. I don’t believe I had heard of this before, or at least it hadn’t clicked for me until now. The Lord gave me this teaching just when I needed it the most. Jesus is my CORE and Mary stands at the top of the ladder as one who has gone before me and gives me her hand and encourages me to keep going. I have to have the humility to reach for her.
In the Core we looked at four different facets of the spiritual life. Humility,Fasting,Obedience,and Reconciliation. We will be revisiting each of these as we step forward.
We start here with humility. We look to Mary to show us… “And Mary said, Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.” Some translations use ‘slave’ instead of handmaid. What humility!
We need humility to even get started, sometimes we can get frozen in our perfectionism which is a huge indication of pride. The subconscious attitude that if we can’t do it perfectly then we won’t do it at all. It takes humility to take risks, to risk being rejected even. We really need to come to a place where we don’t care about anything but doing God’s will. That we will do all and risk all for love of HIM! We are going to put forth our very best effort, but we will leave the results to Him! So If He tells us to start a blog, even if we feel as insecure as a teenager and not eloquent enough to hold our own, nor have the right command of the English language to appease the grammar nazis…we do it anyway…even if only one person will ever read it! You don’t know what it might mean for that one person…and perhaps our simplistic writing style was just right for that one person. 😉
(Trying to get this blog post through has been an interesting endeavor. First I messed up while switching the domain over to my main site and ended up losing the blog. Then I put a blog post through this morning and ended up losing that when I got up for a break. So…hmmm…I’m thinking that the evil one is a bit put off by all of this…so yay…GOOD! So I keep at it. 😉 But the graces too are amazing. First the ‘white ladder’ story, then while looking for a photo to post here I came upon the one above that I took while in Fatima a couple of years ago. It was taken at the little church where the Shepherd children were Baptized in Aljustrel, Portugal. Yep…white spiral stairs…lol. God is indeed good! 😀