Giving Mary a Chance on This 1st Sunday of Lent

Lent has begun. Our Lenten discipline, based on the Three Pillars of Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving now colors our days, maybe even shapes them. It's good to focus on these, to attend to them, to practice them faithfully, in a spirit of sacrifice. 

Our sacrifices recall the great Sacrifice of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Lent will lead us to His Crucifixion on Good Friday. That terrible day, when He suffered beyond anything we can fathom for our sake, marke the defeat of Satan - represented by the tempting serpent that caused our First Parents, Adam and Eve, to throw away their life in Paradise for... well, for what? It's something to contemplate, isn't it?

So here we find ourselves now, saved, but struggling. We are saved but only to the extent that we cooperate with the graces God gives us which, among other things, entails that we follow the Commandments. To help us do so, He has Himself provided us with a personal, very concrete example of how to think, speak, and act,  in the Person of Jesus Christ.

While Jesus, God and a man, provides the perfect example for us to emulate in thought, word, and deed, that fact that He is God (as well as a man) may at times seem to preclude our ever succeeding in following that example. Not that it should; but it might.

And so God has also given us many other examples in the saints, the greatest of which is Mary, Mother of God and Our Blessed Mother.

Yet even here we may think it difficult to follow her example burdened as we are with a fallen human nature. After all, Mary was born immaculate, free from Original Sin. And she who was born immaculate in every way remained so throughout her life. 

But before we discount her example as being beyond our reach, let's give Mary a chance. Along with the deference of our devotion, we might, on this 1st Sunday of Lent, aspire to imitate at the very least her interior life. For some specific advice on just how we might go about doing that, we turn to Father John Grou:

“How shall we then show our solid devotion to the Blessed Virgin? By striving to imitate her interior life, her lowly opinion of herself, her love of obscurity, of silence, and of retirement; her attraction to little things, her fidelity to grace, the beautiful simplicity of her recollection and prayer, the only object of which was God and His holy will, Jesus Christ and His love, her continual sacrifice of herself and of all she loved most dearly and had the greatest reason to love. Let us ask her every day that she may serve us as our guide and model in the interior life, and let us beg of her to obtain for us the graces which are necessary for us, that we may correspond to the designs of God upon us. And these designs are most certainly our death to ourselves and the destruction of our self-love.” (Father John Grou, S.J., 1731-1803)

"We're only human" must not intervene here. Father's focus is on our Interior Life. Our exterior thoughts, words, and deeds may show the effects of our fallen human nature. With constant buffeting by the world, the flesh, and the devil, they may not be perfect in every way. But our Interior Life - that center of our spiritual life, the place where God Himself dwells within us - can and should be perfection itself, at least to the extent God's grace shapes it. So this little explanation of Mary's Interior Life can indeed be an example for us.

Let's give our Blessed Mother a chance to lead us to the perfection we need in our Interior Life. Lent provides the perfect backdrop for our efforts.

We adore Thee O Christ and we bless Thee

Because by Thy Holy Cross Thou hast Redeemed the world