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3MI Newsletter from May 31st, 2024
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Below are passages taken from the book Christ the Life of the Soul written by the great Benedictine abbot, Columba Marmion. For Christ to reign in us, our thoughts, our words, our actions, our inaction, our judgements, our likes, and our dislikes must be deprived of all that is of the self. How can Christ become the Life of our soul? We must forget ourselves.
Let us recall then, on this feast of Our Queen, the close of the Marian Month, the creature which more than any other in history forgot self to gain the remembrance of God.
Abbot Marmion states:
"If we wish nothing to interpose between us and God, nothing to hinder our union with Him, if we wish Divine blessings to flow in upon our souls, we must not only renounce sin and imperfection, but moreover despoil ourselves of our personality in so far as it constitutes an obstacle to perfect union with God. It constitutes an obstacle to perfect union when our judgment, our self-will, our self-love, our susceptibilities, make us think and act otherwise than according to the desires of our Heavenly Father."
Abbot Columba Marmion
How did Mary as Queen bring her judgement, her self-will, her susceptibilities, and even her personality to conform to the desires of the Heavenly Father?
She forgot herself.
"Believe me, our faults of frailty, our miseries, our human limitations, hinder our union with God infinitely less than that habitual attitude of the soul which, so to speak, wills to keep in everything the proprietorship of its activity. We must therefore not annihilate our personality — which is neither possible nor yet willed by God — but bring it to an entire capitulation before God. We must lay it down at God’s feet and ask Him to be by His Spirit — as He is for the humanity of Christ — the supreme mover of all our thoughts, of all our feelings, of all our words, of all our actions, of all our life."
Mary Help of Christians in cupola of church Basilica Maria Ausiliatrice by Giuseppe Rollini (1889 - 1891)
How did Mary, the Queen of the Universe by the Grace of God, attain to the place of such a habit of soul that all her activity was that of God’s?
She forgot herself.
"When a soul arrives at the state of having stripped itself of all sin, and all attachment to self and the creature; of having destroyed in itself, as far as possible, all purely natural and human springs of action in order to surrender itself completely to the Divine action; of living in absolute dependance on God, on His will, His commandments, on the spirit of the Gospel; of referring everything to the Heavenly Father, then it can truly say: Dominus regit me; "The Lord ruleth me; everything in me comes from Him, I am in His hands"."
How did Mary as Queen acquire such a high degree of the "Lord ruling over her"?
She forgot herself.
"This soul has attained to the perfect imitation of Christ to the point that its life is the very reproduction of that of Christ: Vivo ego, JAM NON EGO, vivit vero in me Christus. God directs it; it is in everything, moved under divine impulsion: that is sanctity, the most perfect imitation of Christ in His being, in His state of Son of God, as in His primordial disposition of belonging altogether to His Father, in His person and in His activity. Do not think it is presumption on our part to wish to attain so sublime an ideal: no, it is God’s own desire; it is His eternal design for us: Praedestinavit nos conformes fieri imaginis Filii sui."
How did Mary’s life become the greatest reproduction of the Life of Christ?
She forgot herself.
"The more we are conformed to His Son, the more the Father loves us because we are more closely united to Him. When He sees a soul fully transformed in His Son, He surrounds it with His special protection, the most tender cares of His providence; He showers His blessings upon it, He places no limit to the communication of His graces: that is the secret of God’s extraordinary gifts."
How did Mary become the creature that God loves more than all other creatures?
She forgot herself.
"The soul of Our Lord contemplated at every moment the divine essence. With one and the same glance, His Soul saw the ideal conceived by God for humanity, and each of His actions was the expression of this ideal. Let us then lift up our eyes, let us love to know Christ Jesus more and more, to study His life in the Gospel, to follow His mysteries in the wonderful order established by the Church herself in her liturgical cycle from Advent to Pentecost; let us open the eyes of our faith and live in such a way as to reproduce in ourselves the features of this Exemplar, to conform our lives in accordance with His words and acts. This model is divine and visible and shows us God acting in the midst of us and sanctifying in His humanity all our actions, even the most ordinary; all our sentiments, even the most intimate; all our sufferings, even the deepest."
How did Mary sanctify more than any other creature, her ordinary actions, her sentiments, and sufferings?
She forgot herself.
Let us remember that – and her.
Christ the Life of the Soul, Abbot Columba Marmion, 1922, passages from pp. 42-44
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