12. Close to my Heart in prayer
August 21, 1973
Feast of Saint Pius X
“Why do you not write down everything that I make known to your heart? You tell Me that these things are too intimate, too beautiful. But some day it must be made known how much I have loved you, and what great things I have worked in you.
And this only because you have offered your nothingness totally to my Heart.…
Accustom yourself to being trampled on, to being put aside, to being neither understood nor esteemed. It is necessary that this happen to you! And when you feel an interior rebellion within yourself which causes you to say to yourself ‘Why? This is not right! I must claim my rights!’, answer immediately: ‘Get behind me, Satan! Will I not drink the chalice which the Father has prepared for me?'(…) I myself will come to the aid of your great weakness!
But as for you, remain at every instant close to my Heart in prayer. Let Me work ever more and more within you!“
Some Thoughts:
One of my favorite sayings is ‘pray and obey’. But living in a state of obedience is not an easy undertaking. It’s just not natural for the majority of us, we (speaking for myself mostly here) can be quite rebellious at times. Needing to watch for number one…our selves. This self protective stance can become a block in totally uniting our will with His. This is where Mary comes to our aide. She is always the first to tell us ‘do whatever he tells you’ and she shows us how.
One, Holy, Catholic, and Neuter by
The Marian mystery is one of humble, feminine receptivity to the grace of God and the love of Christ. It is modeled on Mary’s fiat in the Annunciation—”Let it be done to me according to your word”—followed by the Incarnation of Christ in the womb of Mary. All of us are first called to imitate this Marian fiat before receiving the grace of Peter’s boldness in proclaiming the Gospel. As the Latin legal maxim reminds us, Nemo dat quod non habet. “No one can give what he does not have.” Applying this phrase to the spiritual life, it is clear that no one can give to others what he has not first received from God. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “What do you have that you did not receive?”
Catechism of the Catholic Church:
773 In the Church this communion of men with God, in the “love [that] never ends,” is the purpose which governs everything in her that is a sacramental means, tied to this passing world.192 “[The Church’s] structure is totally ordered to the holiness of Christ’s members. And holiness is measured according to the ‘great mystery’ in which the Bride responds with the gift of love to the gift of the Bridegroom.”193 Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is the Church’s mystery as “the bride without spot or wrinkle.”194 This is why the “Marian” dimension of the Church precedes the “Petrine.“195