In festo Immaculati Cordis Beatae Mariae Virginis
Saturday 13 June, 2015
Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Confirmata est Cor Virginis
THE HEART OF THE VIRGIN, immaculate, as she too was
conceived, full of the grace of God; a grace which is pure love. What do we
celebrate today, if not the love to which we shall all aspire? Not the love of
the human state, which waxes and wanes with the phases of our emotional
attachments to this mortal world, but the divine love, which is given for those
who would receive it with an assent to love that yields it totally to its
source; which is so totally penetrating that nothing can assail it; which is inexhaustible
in its profusion, such that it may be given without ever counting the cost.
For how shall we doubt that the gift of love, which she was
conceived to receive as the purest vessel of grace, was not surrendered
completely to her Lord and God in her Fiat; in that perfect acquiescence with
the divine love that desired to be united with man in her womb? And what may we
do but witness in awe of that love, as it endured even the cruelest torment
without malice, but oblating itself on the altar of the Victim who reconciles
all in His sacrificial love? And how may we honour her whom, from the Cross,
the Saviour gave as our own Mother, that we might behold the love that knows no
bounds and is given daily, without being consumed, in prayerful intercession, before
the throne of her love, for us whom she loves with the devoted tenderness with
which she nurtured the Christ child?
For the love of God we shall honour her, and today gaze upon
her Immaculate Heart as our model for our own love of God, for our fiat to His
love that dwells in our own hearts, for the love of those he sends to us in
this world that we might walk with them in love to the next.
