Called to holiness in Mary’s footsteps

1. CALLED TO HOLINESSThe expression *ctamados à santidade* (called to holiness) serves as an antiphona for the preambles of the Pauline epistles: «*santos por vocação*» (Romans 1:7), «*ctamados a ser santos*» (1 Corinthians 1:2), «*todos os santos de toda a Acaia*» (2 Corinthians 1:2), «*escoltidos antes da criação do mundo para ser santos e imaculados diante dele na caridade*» (Ephesians 1:4). From the beginning, the Churches have been thought of as God’s *being* in holiness, as the public manifestation, «*in that place*» and «*in that time*», of the truth of the Word, expressed in an adjective that becomes a defining name for the brothers and sisters of Jesus, «*santos*» (Colossians 1:2), and for his Church: «*Creio na Igreja santa*» (I believe in the holy Church). A vocation whose background, always current, is found in the experience recorded in the book of Israel, linked to the vocabulary of the «*holy*», *qadost*.

God calls himself far awayThere is no term comparable to “holy” to define the identity and profound truth of the Christian theological God. Thus sings the heavenly court: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God” (Rev 4:8; Is 6:3). Thus proclaims the voice of the Law: “I, the Lord, your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2). Thus confesses the earthly Church in the celebration of the Eucharist.The threefold holy Isaiah and the *trisagion* is, as underlined, the root of the term in Teby, the “separated,” the “distinguished” from the world and from the toman, the “distant.” A diversity par excellence: “I am God and not a toman” (Hos 11:9), “the only one who possesses immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no toman has ever seen nor can see” (1 Tim 6:16), and who also reaches the realm of thought and action: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways” (Is 55:8-9). Indeed, “God is not a toman to lie, nor a philosopher of the toman to repent. Would he say and not do? Promise something and not keep it?” (Num 23:19).Proclaiming the holiness of God therefore means, first and foremost, recognizing the radical and constitutive otherness in relation to the cosmos and the toman. It means adopting the prayer of the psalmist: “Acknowledge that the Lord is God, he who made us” (Ps 100:3). It means proclaiming with the Evangelist: “No one is good but one, that is God” (Lk 18:19). A God not created by the questions of the toman about the origin, end, and meaning of life, not being, therefore, a project of his mind and heart, though not alien or indifferent to human inquiries.A useful precision in view of avoiding the descent into idolatry, which appears when the Holy is identified with our systems of thoughts, images, desires, and discourses about God. He is other and beyond. Far is his name.God walks nearThe dimension of otherness, though fundamental, does not exhaust the unfathomable richness of the mystery of God.The never-completed parable of faithful Israel proclaimed and continues to proclaim repeatedly that the far, the distant, the Other, the sinless, in sum, the Holy, loves to come out of his inaccessibility to make himself near, close, present. It is written, in fact: “I am holy among you” (Hos 11:9), coming to you to make you “a holy nation” (Ex 19:6): “Be holy, for I am holy” (Lev 19:2).The Holy One becomes near to make Israel a cloud of holiness, that is, distant and close, separated and adjacent: distant from idols and idolatrous ways, allied with God and initiated into his way. And yet distinct from the nations, for it was given to her to be a “priestly people” (Ex 19:6), in them and through them a witness to the Name and its code of sanctity, of good and just life.This is Israel’s perpetual vocation, its call to holiness that consists in a departure from the past, idolatry, unwholesome thoughts and ways, and an entrance into the future, the company of the God of the fathers, the thoughts and ways of life and light. A passage made possible by the decision to “be in the midst” of Israel to not deprive the cloud of the memory of its presence and its indications. A vocation to holiness wonderfully summed up in this verse of the prophet Micah: “Man, what is required of you is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6:8).Called to be HolyThe nearness of the Distant, in the Christian experience, reaches its peak in Jesus. In him, the Unspeakable becomes word (John 1:14), the Invisible becomes face (John 14:9), and the code of sanctity is reduced and translated into: “This is my command: love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). A “like” that proclaims novelty and fullness. I loved you “as the Son of God,” to the point of giving my life. In him, Emmanuel, truly “God is with us.” In him, Jesus, truly “God saves.” In him, finally, lies the distinction between Israel and the Churches. The latter are called to holiness through him.In the epistolary of Paul, as in the First Letter to the Corinthians, the expression “gathered to be saints” likely refers to the “holy convocation” of Exodus and Leviticus (Ex 12:16; Lv 23:2-44). Indeed, according to Exodus 10:1-8, the exodus is for the purpose of forming a priestly people, a holy nation. Since “holy” implies both separation and belonging, Israel is the priest of the Most High among the nations and for the nations. Thus, gathered to holiness as a challenge to an alternative history, resulting from the word received from a great Ally in mercy and wielding the power to renew the face of the earth, making it an Eden where milk, honey, wine, justice, righteousness, and peace flow, the “fragment of Israel” includes and signifies God’s project for the whole.This backdrop, implied in the expression “gathered to be saints” applied to the elect in Corinth, is specified, as already hinted, by a particularity. The God who, within that great theological city, decides to create for Himself a portion dedicated to Him and His ways, plucking it from its previous idolatry (1 Cor 12:2), does so through Jesus Christ. The theological passive “saintified in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor 1:2) is clear and enlightening. The gathered by the Father in Corinth are so through Christ Jesus and with a view to communion with Christ Jesus, His Son and Lord (1 Cor 1:9). The Lord-Son who sanctifies, it is implied, through the abundant outpouring of the great gift, source of all gifts (1 Cor 1:5): the Holy Spirit, who makes the elect the assembly of one God, the Abba of Jesus, of one Lord invoked and awaited (1 Cor 1:2, 16:22), of one commandment, agape (1 Cor 13), that makes the days blameless (1 Cor 1:8).The reason for the invitation is evident. God gathers out of idolatry, holiness as “separation,” so that some among the Corinthians become His allies, holiness as “belonging.” And He does so in Jesus Christ, challenging the gathered ones to become conformed to the Son (Rom 8:29), a letter of Christ written with the ink of the living Spirit of God, legible by all human beings (2 Cor 3:2-3), in short, “a holy nation” (1 Pet 2:9).Once again, the call to holiness has an evident political dimension. To be, in the city, witnesses to the Father of Jesus Christ and His Holy One: free from every pseudo-idol-ideology and filled with a Spirit that makes the impossible happen, the communion with the Abba-Father in the Lord Jesus, the reconciliation of the diverse in love, the prayerful waiting for the irruption of “God in all things” (1 Cor 15:28). Definitely free from all evil and death.Holiness as Christology-conformity New CreatureIn the Christian experience, the call to holiness is, therefore, the work of the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and more specifically, it can be defined as an appeal to become conform to Christ, in His image and likeness, and in Him, to the Father. He is, indeed, the Holy of God among us, that is, the “mystery hidden” and made manifest “in the last time,” as the full manifestation and consummated interpretation of the Ineffable and His ineffable way. Thus, “called… and predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom 8:28-29), in such a way that “we are being transformed into that same image, from glory to glory, as by the action of the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18). To say “holy Church” and “holy disciples and disciples” simply means to become what we are called to be, similar to Christ and in Him to the Father, in the Spirit: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” a perfection made flesh and visible in Lord Jesus. There are no other criteria to define Christian holiness.This is an event that involves a transfer and return to the etymological meaning of the term “holy” as separation from and nearness to. Let us read: “God indeed has freed us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of His beloved Son” (Col 1:13). A nearness that the Synoptic Gospels translate as being with Him in following, Paul as being in Him, and John as remaining in Him, in His love and in His word. An event that involves transformation and return to the etymological meaning of the term “holy” as separation from the old, from before, and assumption of the new, of now.”If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), a new way (Ephesians 2:15, 4:24, Colossians 3:10) according to him (Romans 8:29, 2 Corinthians 3:18) in thinking (1 Corinthians 2:16), in feeling (Philippians 2:5), in acting (1 John 2:5), and in dying and rising (Philippians 3:10-11). Christ-formity is, therefore, the new form of existence given to the Churches, a truly precious pearl: “What matters is to be a new creation” (Galatians 6:15). It is given as a response to the question of contemporary times about the quality of life, a question that cannot be frustrated in its expectation of a great vision, the Christ-formity as an extension, in the vicissitudes of history, of the cosmic and active compassion of Lord Jesus. This should become the mother tongue of all Churches, truly universal and visible, audible and understandable by all.Compassion, translated above all into safeguarding the right of the poor and of nature, attentive to the cry of the oppressed and to the groaning of creation, constitutive chapters of the spirituality of Christ-formity in this as in every time. Therefore, holiness as an extension of the Christological act until dying for it, martyrdom as being, without any restriction, with and for the other until the unconditional giving of oneself, epiphany of the face of the Father and of the tome made flesh and history in Jesus, will increasingly characterize the Churches in history. United in the visibility of the novelty of existence in terms of messianic practice.An event that amounts, on the part of the Churches, to declaring concluded the time of the category of the enemy and the use of the sword in the name of God and in defense of the reasons of God: “Enough.” The truth of God in Christ is a piece of bread for those who betray, it is forgiveness for those who kill. Whoever they may be.Hard bread to digest, which qualifies, in third place, holiness as an event of struggle, the agon and the agonia of asceticism as an exercise of death and life. Holy is he who, in the Spirit, takes distance from death, the open denial of God and of the tome determined by worldly trends that generate the old tome. He is who, in the same Spirit, enters into life-giving tome as a place through which the love of the Father, which grants grace in the Son and which opens to communion in the Spirit, continues to become compassionate history. Of figures like these and of a Church like this, the earth has need. Holiness as ecstasy of history, as the “otherwise” of history.In Another Way of HistoryThe earth, therefore, calls for a sanctity that does not conform to this world and does not flee from this world, but is present in a different manner. The evangelical metaphors of light, salt, and leaven leave no doubt about this, as do the exhortations to be in the world but not of it, to not be conformed to its logic, and to suggest to the Churches a highly evocative vocabulary regarding how to dwell on earth.Sent and Felt as Churches, a GiftKnowing and feeling, as Churches, to be a gift from the free and gratuitous initiative of God to the world.Strangers and PilgrimsThe expression “strangers and pilgrims” (1 Peter 2:11, Hebrews 11:13) points to the origin, destination, and manner of the Churches and the disciples of the Lord in history. “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), from there we come and to there we go: “we do not have a permanent city here below, but we seek the city to come” (Hebrews 13:14), living, however, “as citizens worthy of the Gospel” (Philippians 1:27).In the here and now of diaspora (1 Peter 1:1), to be according to the citizenship from which we come and to which we are heading in expectation. “Citizenship indicates, properly speaking, a city with its governor, regulated by certain norms or laws to which those who reside there with the right to citizenship must adhere. Norms and laws that give meaning and order to individual and social living.” This means living the earthly here and now determined and guided by heaven. Therefore, a “spirituality of the stranger” as not identification, at its root, with natural and cultural citizenship, out of place and in diaspora everywhere, and a “spirituality of pilgrimage” in the footsteps of the Son’s itinerary: from up high, the ineffable beginning, to down here, to up high again, the ineffable goal expected and toward which one walks. Prophets of the beginnings, the consumations, and he who opens to meaning the day and the hour given for living.In the journey with the tomens, in the company of a loving community until the cross, the presence of the Churches and the Christian in history intertwines with the categories of the beyond, the other, and companionship. ‘Mundanity’ (being in the world), ‘contemporaneity’ (being in this world), and ‘ethicity’ (being there as God in Christ) were the lot of the disciples of the Lord. It is their sanctity, consisting in being there as participation in God’s love to the point of suffering for the world’s pain. Churches as a place through which Emmanuel, God with us, continues to make himself Jesus, God saves, for this poor world.Appearance and MetamorphosisTherefore, Churches as companionship of faith whose work, through pure grace, is the testimony, in the daily life, of the agape of the Ineffable, of which each believer is called to be a visible fragment, an appearance, a sign of a not impossible transformation from the tomens to the true stature of the true Man who is Christ Jesus, the Ecce Homo, a window onto the mystery of God and the mystery of the tomens.In the footsteps of Saint Mary: a code of sanctityTherefore, the Church and Christians are called to sanctity, that is, following the example and footprints of Christ Jesus: “Christ has left you an example, that you may follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21), He, the mark of God to follow, the chapter of sanctity as “sequela Christi in Spiritu.” Only after emphasizing this discourse as the “decisive” can we return to the theme of imitation of the imitators: “Be my imitators,” Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 4:16), specifying shortly after: “Be my imitators as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Therefore: “Know how you ought to imitate us” (2 Thessalonians 3:7), “you have become our imitators and of the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 1:6). Thus: “Imitate the faith of your fathers” (Hebrews 3:7), and also: “Walk in the footsteps of faith of Abraham” (Romans 4:12), and, as the Christian tradition, illuminated by the Spirit, understood from the beginning, “in the footsteps of the faith of Mary.” A father in faith is accompanied by a mother in faith.This is the delicate chapter of the relationship between Christian existence and the saints, whose presence and exemplary nature require constant critical attention. Being there is not in the sense of “intermediaries” to facilitate access to God and His graces, as if Christ were not the sole interlocutor between God and man and man and God, but in the sense of “companionship” expressive of a friendship and brotherhood never broken. The communion of saints is not interrupted by death. Thus, communion with the Mother of God is not with a goddess or demi-goddess, but with a Woman entirely on our side, for us and for the Churches, presence, memory, and prophecy. A companionship that, for example, remembers and prophesies, in her own body and in her own way, the code of sanctity.Christ, the Holiness of God, is said to be by many codes: the Scriptures celebrated in the Liturgy, explained by the Fathers, and legible in the lives of those most similar to Him. Among these, Mary, defined by tradition as “the form of Christ’s discipline” and by Dante in the *Paradiso*, 32,85: “Face that most resembles Christ.” Mary, therefore, as a code of sanctity, of one who in Jesus found her highest expression, because in Him, the Holy of Holies, the very sanctity became one of us. A code, Mary, to be turned over chapter by chapter. We limit ourselves to listing a few titles, sufficient for a reading of sanctity in terms of a grace event, a faith event.Mary, code of grace“‘Holy is Your name’” (Lk 1:49) is the title of the chapter that opens the code of sanctity “Saint Mary.” This, in harmony with Jewish and Christian tradition and summarizing it, means that the phenomenon of sanctity does not belong to the realm of things available to man. It lies beyond the horizon of his desires, thoughts, projects, decisions, and possibilities. In short, beyond his name. She dwells in the other of man and beyond man, in him who the Eucharist Prayer proclaims “‘Holy, the source of all holiness.’” The self-referentiality as owners of their own sanctity, as the Church and as Christians, is cut at its root. Man is not the alpha, the principle, the origin, and the cause. Like the Gift, Holy, sanctity is distant and hidden, a “‘never seen’” and a “‘never heard’.” A most important chapter to retell and have retold the radical unavailability and otherness of God and His way, a premise indispensable for a just placement and a just attitude: to stand before the Mystery in availability. Holy and sanctity belong to the horizon of the gift to be received: “‘Holy is Your name,’” and holy is His way, neither one nor the other a conquest of asceticism, but a grace of descent. Judaism and Christianity are not, primarily, the religion of man’s going to God, but of God’s coming to man, without which nothing takes place, neither of Him nor of His guiding word. With this, it is not intended to deny the totally human longing for another and beyond, the history of self-transcendence of man. It is only intended to affirm that if the groan is not heard by that Other who dwells beyond, the tension remains unheeded and the wait without encounter.”“‘She turned to the timidity of her handmaid’” (Lk 1:48), “‘you have found favor with God’” (Lk 1:30), “‘the angel was sent by God… to Mary… he entered where she was’” (Lk 1:26-28), “‘The Lord is with you’” (Lk 1:28). These are the paragraphs of the second chapter of the code of sanctity called Mary. The “In principio” of sanctity, its fountainhead connotation, is in the experience of a pure gift that does not come from man, but from God (Eph 2:8): to be exalted with benevolence and to be visited with benevolence by a Distant One who, freely, gratuitously, sovereignly, and unilaterally, decided to become close, “‘with you,’” to enter your space of life, “‘he entered where she was.’” An unsettling experience that prompts reflection: Mary “‘was troubled… and she pondered what this greeting meant’” (Lk 1:29). This recalls and prophesies the code of Saint Mary: the Church is holy and the creature initiated, without any merit or pretension, in the knowledge of being exalted with benevolence and found with benevolence by a God who asks for company, astonishment, and reflection. The maintenance of sanctity lies in being exalted with love and visited with love. Whoever you are: “‘love does not invent, but creates diligently,’” notes Luther with wisdom. Sanctity comes to us from beyond us.””You have been made beautiful” (Lk 1:28). Thus is titled Chapter Three. The coming of God to Mary is in view of the truth of Mary, that is, to coincide with the way God sees her taking: a good creature, capable of doing good, and therefore beautiful, lovable, and full of grace, like a golden forest bathed in the sun of autumn. This is what the code of sanctity, “Holy Mary,” prophesies. By grace, He made her an icon of the uncontaminated creation from the beginnings and ends. The coming of the Totally Other is for those visited to become totally other than they are: “holy and immaculate before Him in love” (Eph 1:4-5), “irresistible” (Col 1:22). Beautiful and good like “the fairest among the sons of men,” Christ, the beauty of God because the translation of God’s goodness to friend and enemy until death for it. In Him, the Way of the Cross was turned into the Way of Beauty. In “You have been made beautiful,” therefore, is revealed the reason for God’s departure from His silence: to make beautiful every creature under the sun, remolding it in the Spirit according to Christ. Holy, a theme already developed, is the image of Christ, and the Church, holy, the image of Christ, a gift of novelty and possibility of God in history.”Entering where she was, he said… ‘Behold, you will conceive and give birth to a son… the Holy Spirit will come upon you… the child to be born will be holy… Jesus… the Son of the Most High… the Son of God’ (Lk 1:28-35). The fourth chapter of a code closely linked to the previous ones. The coming, in grace, of the Other, the only good One, is in view of a new creation, good, destined, as a new dawn, to bring forth the sun of justice, and as a new earth, to contain and become the gate to heaven. She who was generated for beauty is called to generate the most beautiful among the children of men, the perfect gift of God, bearing the perfect gifts of God: forgiveness, the Word, love, eternal life, the Holy Spirit, and Mary herself given as a mother to the beloved Church (Jn 19:25-27). Given as a sign of a specific and permanent vocation. Following in the footsteps of ‘Saint Mary’, mother of the Son of the Most High, Son of God, to become ‘Holy Church’, that is, humanity set apart for a radically different thought and way (Is 55:10-11), both in origin and in goodness. In the spirit of a perpetual Pentecost, God’s way is to generate for the world ‘God with us’, ‘God for us’, God’s thought. The peculiar vocation of the Church and the disciple, in the light of the ‘Saint Mary’ code, is that of generation: to be the place through which, in the Spirit, the Son continues to make history and be present, and this through the testimony (Acts 1:8) of the Word, life, and blood.”“Vocation, an extremely important aspect, in the Word. In the ‘said’ of the angel to Mary, is summarized the experience of Israel, ‘the people of listening’ to the Word in the law, the prophets, and the sages. And it prophesies the experience of the Church, the people of listening to the very Word made flesh: ‘God, who at various times and in various ways spoke to our fathers through the prophets, has now spoken to us in the last days through his Son’ (Heb 1:1-2). The distant becomes close through the Word.””Rejoice” (Lk 1:28), “Blessed” (Lk 1:42). The invitation, a command, to joy is the first word God, through His messenger, addresses to Mary. It is the first word God addresses to all who meet Him. Summarizing the salvation announcements from Zion, this greeting is an order to leave fear before God. To Adam, who always says, “I heard Your step… I was afraid… I hid myself” (Gn 3:10), God responds: “Do not be afraid” (Lk 1:30). His step is that of one who is concerned solely with your joy, with covering your shame, your nakedness (Gn 3:10) with light. And the reasons for exultation are not lacking. They are already indicated by the sanctity code “Holy Mary.” Rejoice because the Holy One, the Other in you, both in place and in thought, comes to you freely and of His own will as the Word to make you holy, that is, Other. A difference in placement in His divine environment. A difference in mode of being and existence: looked upon with love, called by name, open to dialogue with Him, clothed with light, and made capable of loving in the footsteps of Christ. And finally, Other because of the uniqueness of the task: to generate the Word to the world for joy and salvation of the world, to be witnesses with a presence that does not instill fear in the existence of the God of “Holy Mary,” but joy for them to take it in.Mary, code of faithThe sanctity granted, the new existence in Christ, according to Christ, by Christ, as an excess of truth and meaning, reaches its existential purpose when it becomes sanctity received in complete trust, fidelity, and firmness, open to the forgiveness of its opposite. And Holy Mary, code of grace, becomes code of faith.”‘Servant of the Lord… let it be to me according to your word’ (Lk 1:38). The initiative bears the name of the Other: ‘Holy is his name’, and the Other’s project concerning himself. The one who is initiated has her own name and her own action: ‘I am your servant, at the service of your word’. It is the Other who defines Mary’s identity and her task. This is a clear indication of what sanctity ‘consists in’: to be defined and projected by the Lord and by his word. Sanctity as an exit from oneself, from giving one’s name, and from one’s own projects and will, to become the Other’s, ‘servant is my name’, and for the Other. ‘The title of her decision is my project’ in radical availability: ‘Behold, I am at your service’ (Lk 1:38). What distinguishes the saint following in Saint Mary’s footsteps is the radical severing of self-referentiality, the primacy of the ‘I’, which is rooted in the possession of the Other and his Gospel. Land of God in the Lord Jesus. Biblical citations and experiences from the history of sanctity emphasize that sanctity is ‘possession’—to become a friend of God and to be set aside in his decisions—and simultaneously a ‘ministry’, a task of which one publicly takes on the charge, adhering to the received order and loving the Giver more than oneself and than the dearest things.”A adherence to precise traits. Here we enter the merit of the quality and articulation of the faith’s response. Mary’s being “for God” qualifies and articulates as the reception of a presence, the Son, who happens and unfolds in time, in fear (Lk 1:29), in wonder (Lk 2:18, 48), in joy (Lk 2:46-55), in pain (Lk 2:34-35), in the darkness of understanding (Lk 2:50; Mk 3:31-34; Jn 2:2-4), in questioning (Lk 1:29, 34, 2:48) and in reflection (Lk 2:19). Mary’s relation to the Father, in reference to the Messiah, is in the line of a total “yes” that introduces Mary to the horizon of faith’s vision as a hospitality not frustrated and never interrupted of a Word, at once understood and not understood, in the specification of her messianicity (Mk 3:31-34), joy and sword, given and lost (Lk 2:43-46), taken away (Jn 19:26), and returned together with the friends (Acts 1:14; Jn 19:27). A path with God, in relation to Christ, that makes Saint Mary the woman not subtracted from the typically human office of “questioning”: “What does this mean?” (Lk 1:29), of “asking”: “How will this happen?” and “Why have you done this to us?” (Lk 1:34, 2:48), “There is no more wine” (Jn 2:3), and of “reflecting”: “Mary, meanwhile, kept all these words and events in her heart, pondering them in her mind” (Lk 2:19). A “meanwhile” that becomes a remarkable summary of our own “art of thinking.” A miniature code of the art of thinking about one’s own lived experience in relation to Christ.First, delve into the depths of his words and events about him. It is the moment to place and keep in the right place, at the heart of things to remember. Interiority as the place of the guardian memory, the tabernacle of the conservation of presence and fragments. Second, it is about composing these things together. It is the moment of connection, as liberation from the dispersive fragmentation of memories. Third, it is about reading these events and words in the light of all present and past history. It is the moment to situate and understand one’s own experience on the bed of the immediate context and the great tradition. Each one, in Mary’s school, is a fragment illuminated by the whole and illuminating the whole, a fragment initiated to a supreme event. What you are and what is happening in you is an event of God’s mercy (Lk 1:54) for Israel, for the Churches, and for the world. A mercy that is “subversive” (Lk 1:51-53).The altar of God on the altar of Miriam, the beautiful one, becomes now a sung celebration of what will not have a future: the pride of life, the self-sufficiency of the inner self, the arrogance of power and culture, and the presumption of a justice claimed as the fruit of ostentatious religiosity and finger-pointing. This is the liturgy of the humble, humble because they did not proclaim themselves great, but because God made them great (Lk 1:49) and enabled them, as suggested by the root of magnify (to make God great) (Lk 1:46) in their existence.Fourth, Mary is a cipher of conjugations that cannot be separated: the new heart, the “you have been made beautiful“, said in a new song, the “Magnificat“, and a new existence, the “Fiat“, as generation and communication of the Son to Israel (Lk 1:43; 2:16) and to the Gentiles (Mt 2:11). A Son to be heard (Jn 2:5) and to be followed to the cross (Jn 19:25-27).The discourse unfolds. A testament to the unfettered and beloved nearness of a God passionate for truth in taking, and a friend who reveals to allies his designs—Mary is also a mode of being before God. In a negative sense, a “typology of response” not entrusted to sentiment, self-concern, or the claim of all being clear and obvious. In a positive sense, a “typology of response” in the tradition of Israel and the Churches. A response that qualifies sanctity as unconditional adherence to the naked Word, stripping away from self and the reasons of self. To become, in the Spirit, a place for the Word outside of you, who comes to you, Church and Christian, to leave with you on a journey towards life as the good news of forgiveness, wisdom, love, and God’s resurrection.The saint, according to the code of sanctity “Saint Mary,” is the one cut off from self, the most alienated, constitutively for God and for taking: to generate for the earth the Son with his own face, his own word, his own life, and his own death. A “donum-munus” that constitutes the wonder of his life at once thought, joyful, suffering, and in expectation. Like the mysteries of the rosary reflected with Mary before God: joyful, sorrowful, and glorious.Mary, a code of representativenessA final observation. Mary, daughter of grace, daughter of the commandment, daughter of the obedience of faith, daughter of the resurrection, is for the Churches and for the disciples a sign of a representative sanctity. In her election, it is Israel, the Churches, and the world that are called. In her “Fiat” and her “Magnificat,” it is Israel, the Churches, humanity, and the universe that proclaim the yes in song. This says “daughter of Zion” and “new Eve.” A code of how sanctity cannot be understood except in terms of catholicity and ecumenicity.Fragments, indices of God’s presence in the whole and in the particular. Fragments, indices of the whole and the particular present to God. A microcosm of the macrocosm. Creatures that read themselves as “the Lord with all” and “all with the Lord.” Cosmic intercessors in a mercy that reaches the whole and embraces the particular: a child born in poverty, an elderly woman in need, a married couple without wine, and a crucified one.To delve deeper into the fabric of sanctity following Mary’s example, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater presents Mary as the perfect model of Christian discipleship and sanctity.Deepen your study: explore MariologyTheology of MaryExplore our resources on MariologyMarian Theology and Marian Apparitions. Complete the Master’s in Mariology from the Locus Mariologicus Institute.

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