Prayer and Mystical Life in the School of Mary

Introduction

In Novo millennio ineunte, John Paul II invites us to undertake a renewal of our life, taking as a point of reference Christian prayer in all its beauty and in all its demands, as a response to the great thirst for spirituality of our time, which leads many to seek esoteric paths of prayer and of mysticism.

In this context, we wish merely to touch on the theme of prayer and of the mystical life with our gaze fixed on Mary, even though the Pope does not name her in this part of his Letter.

We wish to do so within this end-of-year gathering with Mary, not because we intend to set out the whole subject, much less the whole reality of prayer, but because it seems opportune to us to reread what the Pope proposes to us with our gaze fixed on the Virgin Mother, in a special way in the mystery of the Incarnation, as the Pope does, in the Trinitarian light of prayer and of the theology of the saints.

Prayer and mystical life can be kindred concepts, when it is a matter of highlighting that all prayer belongs to the mystery of Christ, has its root in us and in the sacraments, and that everything is gift, God’s grace toward us, the opening of his gifts to our poverty. In the proper sense, the mystical life is the supernatural charismatic experience of the Christian life granted to some because they have a particular personal grace in the Church, a specific charismatic task, and at the same time because they receive from God certain gifts of understanding and of experience of the Christian mystery so as to be qualified witnesses in the Church to the mystery of salvation, which they live as though seeing the invisible.

In Mary, in fact, everything is mystical and everything is normal. Her experience is at once of the highest supernatural quality, of a clear and distinct evidence, yet everything takes place within the normality of the mystery of the Incarnation. Mary’s mysticism is not phenomenology, like that of some saints, but the mysticism of the Incarnation itself, of the revelation and of the manifestation of the mystery of her Son. And everything is lived by her with a disarming simplicity.

These two progressive moments of the spiritual life, prayer and mysticism, will also be the two fundamental points of our exposition, yet without losing contact with the Virgin Mary, even if, as I have said and repeat in order to avoid misunderstandings, in the Pope’s Letter there are no specific references to Mary’s prayer and mystical life.

In our case it is fitting to refer with simplicity and sobriety to this aspect of the life of Mary, who remains for us a sure guide also in our changing world.

Prayer and mystical life in the life of Christians

A first part of our reflection must be devoted to what the Pope indicates to us as the path of prayer and of the mystical life.

The path of prayer and of Christian mysticism

In the wake of the path to holiness, the Pope proposes a privileged path for Christians, that of prayer. He in fact desires a Christian life of holiness that shines through the gift and the art of prayer: “For this pedagogy of holiness there is need of a Christianity distinguished above all in the art of prayer” (n. 32).

Upon these simple words there opens a kind of little symphony on Christian prayer, within the great symphony of spirituality for a new millennium. Indeed, to the urgency of prayer in the Church John Paul II devotes several incisive paragraphs of a theological, spiritual, liturgical, and pastoral character, which can mark a turning point, at the beginning of a new millennium, in renewing the fabric of Christian life, at the personal and community level.

“Starting afresh from Christ”: this is the title of the third part of the apostolic Letter. It is precisely to start afresh from the prayerful contemplation of his face, from the very filial sentiments of his prayer, and from the sharing by which Christ continues the mystery of his unbroken dialogue with the Father in the prayer of his Church and of each one of his faithful.

But we may ask ourselves: is it right to speak of the “art of prayer”? Even though the answer seems evident, and there is also a recent book by an Orthodox spiritual writer, Chariton of Valamo, that bears this fascinating title, someone might dispute that one can speak of an art, almost as though the delicacy of such learning were to impart value to the qualification of gift that is proper to Christian prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines prayer above all as gift, covenant, and communion (nn. 2559-2565). But the expression “art of prayer,” besides presupposing that it is a gift, the fruit of the action of the Spirit who, as supreme artisan, shapes the words, the thoughts, the affections, also indicates the beauty of its inspiration and the joy and the effort that are always present in a learning that is also artistic. This is why it is right to speak of the art of prayer: “prayer is not to be taken for granted.” It therefore needs the refinement of a pedagogical itinerary that begins from the contemplation of Jesus at prayer. This is the beauty of the art of praying, which must be cultivated and guided under the inspiration of that most refined master of prayer who is the Holy Spirit, who awakens it and shapes it within us. Perhaps for this reason some spiritual masters attempt to speak of prayer as of the harmonic notes of a zither, which the Holy Spirit himself causes to resound in the heart of the faithful. Gift and effort, predisposition and apprenticeship, the beauty and joy of praying, docility to the action of the Holy Spirit: such is the art of prayer. Teresa of Jesus speaks explicitly of the art of praying when she refers to the form of the prayer of recollection, which is oriented toward contemplation.

But in order to enter into the truth of Christian prayer the Pope proposes that we look to Christ and make our prayer authentically Christological and Christocentric, since in him we have the master, the model, and the one who still prays in us and continues in us his prayer on earth.

To imitate Jesus, the one who prays par excellence, to weigh the importance of prayer in his Trinitarian and filial experience, to learn from him how to pray, to follow his counsels, is the guarantee of an adult Christianity, of a faith daily renewed at its sources. For this reason the pedagogy of holiness presents itself as a renewed pedagogy and mystagogy of prayer, in order to learn ever anew how to pray, according to the most genuine and original Christian sense.

It is, in fact, a lesson never completely learned, an art that can produce masterpieces of continual and ever bolder experiences of communion with God and with our brothers, as the life of the great men and women of prayer demonstrates.

But it is necessary to give density, as the Pope does, to the meaning of prayer in a strictly Christian sense. Prayer, therefore, as communion, as dialogue, that is: mutual communion and abiding of one in the other and reciprocal “symbiosis” with Christ, according to Johannine terminology. “In prayer there develops that dialogue with Christ which makes us his intimate friends”: the life of Christ becomes our life, and our life his life. A reciprocity and an exchange of gifts between Christ and us, in the common breathing and beating of the heart of our prayer, which cannot but be also his prayer, if the same vital principle is the Spirit of Christ, who allows us to say: Abbà, Father! (cf. Rom 8:15; Gal 4:4).

Some theological indications of this art of prayer are offered to us by the Holy Father in order to deepen the meaning of authentic Christian praying as reciprocity between Christ and us, a theological condition that constitutes, as it were, “the very substance, the soul of the Christian life,” the breathing and the inspiration of every authentic pastoral life.

First of all it is fitting to highlight its Trinitarian dimension. In one of the many Trinitarian formulas that are typical of the Letter, the mature fruit of the theological and Trinitarian preparation for the great Jubilee, it is stated: “Accomplished in us by the Holy Spirit, it opens us, through Christ and in Christ, to the contemplation of the face of the Father.” The Holy Spirit, “the diamond point of the Trinity,” digs into the depths of man, calling forth and fostering his prayerful response. The Son is the mediator who prays for us and in us. The Father is the source and the term of our contemplation and of our prayer, as of Christ’s: Abbà, Father!

Then, with an indication of a pedagogical character, there is presented to us the concrete realization of this Trinitarian dimension in its typically ecclesial form, which is proper to the liturgy, the summit and source of the life of the Church. The liturgy, in fact, is a dialogue of words and of actions between God and his people. At the very heart of the liturgy, which is the Eucharistic celebration and prayer, we find an exemplary and authentic Trinitarian prayer that is reflected also in other expressions of the liturgy. A prayerful experience that ought to shape, as school and mold of the Christian life, the expressions of personal prayer.

From these Trinitarian and ecclesial premises there springs the seriousness and the fruitfulness of a prayer that forges a personalism of faith and of life, unrepeatable and unrenounceable, even though we may also pray for others and pray with others, without disowning the personal relationship with God the Trinity. It is a matter of recovering a vital Christianity that rediscovers its own roots, that plunges into the sources of its own faith as a vital response to God, that is regenerated in the grace of its own baptism, but that is realized also in the secret of one’s own Christian personality: the living presence of the Trinity, communion with Christ, the living water of the Spirit poured out in our hearts.

With this robust theology of prayer, at once Trinitarian, ecclesial, and anthropological, the Christian of the third millennium can face every challenge and can give new answers.

The references to the Virgin Mary could be gathered immediately, by affinity with the experience of Christ. In Mary too prayer is Trinitarian; her praying is already the prayer of the nascent Church and with the nascent Church; her personal relationship with the Trinity is realized in a personalism of faith and of love, in a standing before the Trinity and in communion with it, in order to receive and to give, to welcome and to make fruitful in a maternal way the grace of Trinitarian communion that was communicated to her.

From this discourse on prayer, the Pope directs us toward a discernment very necessary in our time in order to discover “a widespread demand for spirituality and, consequently, a renewed need for prayer.”

It is something that lies within the folds of our history, which translates into the restlessness of the man and the woman of today, and at times presents itself as the admiration and the attraction exercised over many Christians by the deeply religious experiences of ascetical and meditative exercises of the other world religions. A remarkable spiritual challenge has invaded our Western world and comes from other ascetical and mystical traditions, especially of the non-Christian East, already widespread in our world, which has become multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural. From these premises proceeds the rise of a new interest, even if at times merely cultural, in Christian and non-Christian mysticism.

The fascination of the religious sense, which reaches the highest peaks in the witness of the mystics of certain religions and offers attractive answers, is a challenge for Christians. It is therefore the moment to study, to make known, to bring closer Christian mysticism and the Christian mystics who, moreover, uniting heaven and earth, the divine and the human, without confusion and without separation, offer the genuine meaning of the Christian mystery, lived and taught by the great Christian mystical tradition of the East and of the West.

It is still a matter of a Trinitarian mysticism, which starts from faith and becomes experience: “We who have the grace to believe in Christ, the revealer of the Father and the Savior of the world, have a duty to show to what depths the relationship with him can lead.” Of such mysticism the Pope offers us this beautiful Trinitarian description, as the summit of the path of prayer: “It shows how prayer can progress, as a true and genuine dialogue of love, to the point of making the human person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit’s touch, filially abandoned in the heart of the Father…” (n. 33). Beautiful and profound words, founded on the language of John the evangelist, theologian and mystic par excellence, to whom the Pope turns in order to recall the promise of Jesus: “Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and will manifest myself to him” (Jn 14:21).

Mysticism is therefore an epiphany of the love of God in Christ, grace and availability, an absolutely gratuitous gift of God, the expression of his freedom in giving himself, but also an openness to response. It is the gift of two freedoms that hand themselves over to each other, up to the summit of the spousal union, which is not an absorption of one into the other, but a personal communion that maintains the difference between the Creator and the creature.

The Pope does not hesitate to reaffirm certain fundamental concepts of classical mysticism. A mysticism of the two limits: the human limit of kénosis, which experiences the dark night. The utmost limit of the divine gift made to the creature, which is the spousal union, as certain great masters teach, so close to the experience and the teaching of the Pope: Christian mystics named explicitly, such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.

Such is mysticism, seen as the flowering of the work of the Holy Spirit in a prayer that is varied in the symphony of human sentiments, transfigured by grace. A prayer that is at the same time thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening, ardor of affections, even to that falling in love, indeed to that “falling in love” of the heart with a God who is Love and is the Beloved.

A mysticism, however, that is balanced and realistic, capable of accomplishing the great ascents toward God and the no less demanding descents of love and of service toward our brothers, now looked upon with the eyes of God. A mysticism that becomes the building up of history, according to the design of God, as Saint Teresa of Ávila teaches, for example, at the end of the Interior Castle.

At this point we cannot ignore that there exists a universal openness to Christian mysticism. The question becomes clear if we refer to an essential paragraph of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which speaks without mincing words of this vocation of Christians, in virtue of creation, of baptism, and of the Eucharist, to share in the life of Jesus through participation in his mysteries.

The Catechism states, in fact, that: “progress in the spiritual life tends toward ever more intimate union with Christ. This union is called ‘mystical’, because it participates in the mystery of Christ through the sacraments, ‘the holy mysteries’, and, in him, in the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. God calls us all to this intimate union with Him, even though special graces or extraordinary signs of this mystical life are granted only to some, so as to make manifest the gratuitous gift given to all” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2014).

This magisterial text is of the utmost importance for the Christian, also in order to understand the genuine meaning of prayer and of mysticism that he can learn in the light of Mary.

The first fundamental affirmation is that prayer and life tend toward the greatest union with Christ. A union in the reality given to us in the mystery, that is, in the gratuitous gift of the communion of life with Christ, which is brought about through the sacraments, especially baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist, the initial and initiatory sacraments. The mystical life is therefore life in Christ, the deeper the more intimate is communion with Him. But the mystical life is the life of Christ in its Trinitarian dimension, as indeed his life and his prayer were, communion with the Father in the Spirit. The Christian mystical life is not, in the first place, that of mystical phenomena, but that of the grace of Christ, identification with Him, becoming one with his mystery: a life given to all and, for this reason, possible for all.

Saint Teresa of Jesus already, at the end of her Interior Castle, after having spoken of the mystical graces received, states that God can do us no greater grace than to give us the very life of his Son. For this reason the highest graces are, in different ways and with various nuances, communion with the life of Christ, participation in his mysteries in acting, in suffering, in loving, in serving. The Virgin Mary, for good reasons, stands at the summit of this mystical life, as the one closest to the mystery of Christ. If there are mystics who have had the experience of these graces, and they are not lacking in the Church, this means that they become witnesses for their brothers and sisters of the truth of this participation in the very mystical life of Christ.

The mystical life is therefore a life of Trinitarian communion, of becoming one with Christ and with his mysteries, of the fullness of ecclesial life. The figure of Mary, as we shall see, illuminates the sublimity and the simplicity of Christian mysticism. A mysticism of communion, a mysticism of understanding of the truth, but always within the realm of faith, of identification with Christ in the splendor of Tabor and in the abyss of Calvary, a mysticism of passive and active participation in salvation, that is, the knowledge and the experience of being saved, the awareness and the commitment to collaborate in salvation. Precisely like the Virgin Mary.

In reality, Mary’s mysticism is the fullest and most real participation in the mysteries of Christ: it is a Trinitarian mysticism, real, lived in everyday life, not like that of a mystic who participates from a distance in the mysteries of Christ. For her, participation, the highest participation, as bride and as mother, is total. For this reason too Mary is for us a sure guide. Hers was always an experience of the mystery, yet lived in the normality of her maternal existence, at the side of her Son, living in him and for him. The reference to the mystery is constant in her experience. By her example of a wholly Christocentric and Trinitarian mysticism she directs us toward the mystery of Christ as the fundamental reality of true and authentic mysticism, of a life in Christ, of a living with him and like him.

A pedagogy of prayer

This exhilarating perspective, which at the outset is a path open to all, always crowned by the grace of a God who opens his treasures to whom he wills, as he wills, and when he wills, must be traveled in its entirety, discovered in its entirety and followed step by step in the classical and modern spiritual itineraries, through a renewed education in prayer.

In order to reach this objective the Pope issues a challenge, calling for a pastoral plan that cannot be postponed and that can make the Church grow in depth and in extension: “Our Christian communities must become authentic ‘schools of prayer’”!. Thanks be to God, in the Church of the end of the twentieth century and of the beginning of the millennium, there is no lack of a renewed teaching on prayer that has made so many and such worthwhile experiences of the pedagogy of Christian prayer flourish: some inspired by the classical and almost connatural method of “lectio divina,” others marked by the mystical tradition of the Christian East, others by the great renewed and simplified tradition of the various methods of mental prayer, others finally, with the necessary and vigilant discernment and guidance, taking up what can be put into practice from the traditions of the great Eastern religions.

The Magisterium of the Church itself has in recent times offered Christians valid indications of content and of method, of orientation and of discernment. First of all in the Letter Orationis formas of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on certain aspects of Christian meditation (October 15, 1989), which the Pope cites in a note, but also in the splendid fourth part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: two texts that can very fittingly be a guide for all persons and Christian communities desirous of learning and handing on a renewed pedagogy of Christian prayer in all its forms, along the paths of meditation, of contemplation, and of mysticism.

The call to prayer, like the vocation to holiness, is universal. It is rooted in the religious sense of man, made by the Creator himself “capax Dei,” invited to dialogue with Him, and in the grace of holy baptism. All, therefore, are called to prayer, especially consecrated persons, the Pope affirms.

But all Christians, so as not to be mediocre, “Christians at risk,” because not rooted in a strong and personal communion with God, are called in these times to be people of prayer, friends of Christ, Christians who are adult in faith and in love. Against the excesses and the deviations of the return to the sacred, against the substitutes of alternative religious proposals, Christian prayer is not only a salutary antidote, but the nourishment of the soul and the source of life.

For a genuine growth of faith and of life the Christian must cultivate personal dialogue with God, which brings faith to maturity in the everydayness of life. There is, in fact, an indissoluble link between faith, prayer, and life. The structure of Christian faith guides prayer. Prayer actualizes faith and makes it personal. It has been said that faith without prayer dissolves, and that prayer without faith is blind.

From these premises the Pope draws some conclusions of an immediate and urgent pastoral character. Education in prayer becomes the defining moment of the pastoral work of the future in all its forms, with a broad vision of its various possibilities.

The Holy Father alludes to the renewed experience of biblical catechesis on the Psalms, offering an example already begun with his Wednesday catecheses on the Psalms of the Liturgy of the Hours, of Lauds and of Vespers. Further on in his Letter he will allude to the ancient and ever valid tradition of “lectio divina” (cf. n. 39), but he already proposes the necessary awakening of the prayer of the Church in Christian communities, following also the example of many lay communities, the necessary education in the popular forms of prayer and, in a particular way, the normal celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, of Lauds and of Vespers, cardinal moments of the prayer of the Christian community, from ancient times, in all Christian communities.

Such is the urgency and the gift of prayer for our millennium now beginning. A new century opens to the promises and the surprises of the Holy Spirit: a century in need of prophecy and of message, of new paths and of a deep religious sense. The Holy Father dreams of a Church deeply rooted in prayer at every level, in every vocation, able to follow the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, so as to continue to furrow the sea of history, with sails driven by the wind of the Paraclete. And he dreams of a workshop of beauty for each of the faithful and for each Christian community, where Christ is the model and the Holy Spirit becomes the secret master of the art of prayer.

Three necessary orientations for living and authentic prayer

For the necessary asceticism of prayer, which can and must issue in contemplation and in commitment, and at times in mysticism, some lines of spirituality, merely sketched, may be of service, within a program that embraces the whole of life.

Knowing how to re-create daily prayer

Perseverance is the New Testament word for prayer. It is the “proskarteréo” ([προσκαρτερέω]) of the community of the Upper Room and of the first Christians of Jerusalem, who persevered in prayer (cf. Acts 1:14; Acts 2:42). Christian prayer will always demand perseverance, the capacity to begin again every day, to know how to be present with one’s whole being, to continue in prayer of one accord, crossing the many deserts that the experience of prayer must overcome. Creativity or animation presupposes the capacity to make prayer alive, the prayer of a living and lively community, with all the possibilities that the Church offers.

The Virgin Mary present in the Upper Room indicates this essential dimension of Christian prayer, the path of perseverance and of fidelity.

Knowing how to persevere in prayer so that it becomes contemplation

It is an attitude that requires a clear and visible relationship of faithful commitment to Christ, who calls us to prayer, and to the Spirit, who prays with us. It is fidelity to the community that accompanies us, to the universal and local Church that we represent, to the world for which we pray. Personal contemplation is a gift, but it also requires liturgical contemplation, which presupposes a progressive unification of the one who prays, a theological consolidation that gives form to and enlivens his whole prayer in words, gestures, silences. It is the capacity, a gift of the Spirit who is the animator of the contemplation of the Church, to make the prayer formulas one’s own, to feel them as re-created in one’s own prayer, to let oneself be gently led by the formulation that the Church proposes to us and to pour into it the richness of our prayer, made ecclesial as the “voice of the Bride to the Bridegroom.” Whoever knows how to pray in this way also learns the law of gratuitousness, of disinterested praise, of time “lost” and offered to God. In this way, in fact, one values the gift that God makes to us in introducing us into the mystery and the richness of prayer more than the “service” that we render him with our worship. This is the point one must reach through the experience of ecclesial prayer, if we do not wish to succumb to the temptation of abandoning it because of its apparent social or pastoral ineffectiveness.

Understanding the formulas of prayer with vital realism

A prayer with existential thickness. The prayer of the Church, like that of those who prayed in the Old Testament and like the prayer of Jesus, must be realistic, demanding, and committed to concrete existence, not detached from it. Of the one who prays and of the community there is asked that existential vibration which transforms the dry bones of the formulas into a living body that breathes and moves under the impulses of the Spirit. Into the riverbed opened by this ecclesial euchology, the Christian introduces the realism of history, the existence of men, their labors, the problems of peace and of justice. Thus prayer commits the one who prays. And thus the one who prays commits himself to live, in the continuity of existence, the thousand details of the desires expressed, of the good intentions pronounced, so as to carry on in life that covenant with God which he is asking of him, through the prayerful dialogue of revelation, unto the effective realization of the words and of the prayer, in a history of salvation which, as in the past, must always be an effective witness of the love of God among men.

Thus the prayer of the Church, with all its richness, is the celebration and the actualization of revelation and the continuity of the history of salvation.

Prayer and mystical life in the light of Mary

A continual prayer

The mere statement of these words opens a very vast horizon that I certainly do not intend to develop, neither from the biblical point of view, nor from the theological, nor from the spiritual and mystical. I will therefore make only a few small and brief notes, so as to gather the fundamental message that comes to us from Mary as a sure guide in the field of prayer and of mysticism.

We may begin from a series of fundamental affirmations, almost simple theses, which help us to grasp with simplicity the icon of Mary at prayer.

In the life of Mary, as in that of Christ, the unity between prayer and life is perfect, because in her communion with God is perfect and constant. Mary is always presented to us in that incessant interior attention of hers to God and to the mysteries of her Son.

But, as in the life of Jesus, so too in the life of the Virgin there emerge moments of explicit prayer and explicit prayers, even though the realism of a silent and industrious praying predominates.

Mary’s prayer at the announcement of the Angel is reflective and dialogical. It is the prayer of her self-surrender and offering to the will of the Father, with the words: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” the summit of the prayer of the Old Testament (cf. Lk 1:26-38).

The Magnificat is a prayer of praise, with the modulations of the biblical prayer of the Fathers of the first covenant (cf. Lk 1:46-55).

The generous offering of the Son in Jerusalem is prayer, even in the silent offertory procession of the mother, of Joseph, and of the Son (cf. Lk 2:22ff.).

That simple “They have no wine” at the wedding of Cana of Galilee is a prayer of intercession (cf. Jn 2:3).

Her standing at the foot of the Cross, silent and desolate, the living Mother of the scattered children, is an ineffable communion with the highest prayer of the Son, as if to give meaning and maternal collaboration to the priestly prayer of the Son at the Last Supper.

Her prayerful presence, in persevering expectation and in solicitous maternal communion, with the disciples in the Upper Room, is a model and an expression of ecclesial prayer (cf. Acts 1:14).

It is enough to recall her praying always, her being always docile, her “being prayer” in the various circumstances, always in communion with Christ, always turned toward the Father, always under the action of the Paraclete.

For now I will dwell only on one detail of her prayer, the one that Luke emphasizes twice: the prayer of the contemplative heart (cf. Lk 2:19 and Lk 2:51).

Spiritual depth of a contemplative heart

In the spiritual profile of Mary, and therefore in her spirituality, the Lucan note that reveals an autobiographical page of Mary is decisive: “She kept all these things, pondering them in her heart,” “His mother kept all these things in her heart” (Lk 2:19 and Lk 2:51). This is the twofold Lucan reference.

This reference, in the context of the infancy episodes, when the period of the manifestations of the newborn Son opens and unfolds, and after his being found again in Jerusalem, is important. Mary remains fixed within the great sapiential tradition that knows how to remember and to meditate on the wonders of God in order to hand them on to future generations. She lives the words and the events with contemplative depth. She remembers, actualizes in a dynamic way, meditates, discerns. There are those who seek to interpret the attitude of Mary in a plastic way with these words, which allude to a kind of game of dice: the term “symbállousa” [sumbállousa], proper to Luke alone, means to decipher an enigma, to harmonize extremes that are apparently contrary. “To symbolize” in the Greek sense means “to put together” (as we say of the “symbol of the apostles”), or to shake the dice in the hollow of the hand. Mary shakes words and events in her heart, thus producing between them a salutary collision and a clarification of each of them. This is the observation of the exegesis of our time.

It has been said that the heart is the ecclesial place par excellence, the organ that sums up the person and freedom. As a consequence, the cordial, sapiential, contemplative dimension, which is one of the essential traits of Mary in the Gospel of Luke, offers us the key to understanding her personality: a woman of pure and deep heart, who takes up history, capable of drawing a comparison between the promises and the events of grace, the announcement and the fulfillment, a woman who seeks the light in apparent contradictions, a heart rich in memory for remembering, especially, as often happens, in the hour of trial, when the heart becomes more sensitive to memory and to life.

This attitude of Mary was recalled in an implicit way, with reference to (Lk 2:19, 51), by the Second Vatican Council in the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbumn. 8. As appears in this paragraph, which speaks of the living transmission of revealed truth, under the action of the Holy Spirit, in the Church that believes and that prays, the Church looks to Mary in order to magnify the meditation on the words and the experience of the realities handed on that the faithful live, imitating Mary, so as to arrive at a deeper experience of revelation in time. Here lies the secret of the contemplative depth that is able to put together the word and history, revelation and the everyday event. And it is here that Mary becomes the model of a prophetic Church which, from the depths of the heart, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, deciphers the signs of the times, grows in the understanding of the truth, utters categorical words of meaning for the men and the women of today, makes decisions and evangelical choices, and lets itself be made fruitful by the power of the Spirit.

We can affirm that this is the fundamental prayer of the Christian, in the light of Mary: a constant memory in the heart of the action of God in one’s own life and in history, in the light of the word and of life. But with the depth of a contemplative heart.

In this way, life is illuminated by the word, one lives from the depths of the heart, and prayer is inserted into the fabric of life, in full Trinitarian communion.

Mary, a sure guide on the path of Christian mysticism

Mary is certainly a sure guide on the ways of Christian mysticism. She in fact participated fully in the mystery of Christ with a total identification, at the summit of Trinitarian communion and of human solidarity, in every instant of the life of Christ, Mary always following him step by step, as Mother and as Bride, as Church.

In Mary there is the inebriation of Trinitarian mysticism, of total communion with the Son, of extreme docility to the grace of the Holy Spirit. She too crosses the abysses of paradox in the mysticism of the dark night at the foot of the Cross and beyond, until the radiant dawn of the Resurrection. She too, Mary, has a particular mystical experience of the glorious presence of the Son in heaven and of his communication of himself, in faith, to her, during the time that elapsed between the Ascension and her Assumption.

Perhaps it is necessary to highlight that Mary lives a mysticism that is not individual, but distinctly communal, in a we with Christ and with the Church.

Mary’s mysticism is also the mysticism of everyday life, of the divine-human balance of the life of Nazareth, in communion with the Son and with Joseph, in a period of supreme and disarming normality with heaven on earth. No ecstasies or visions, no locutions and flights of the spirit, no stigmata or other phenomenal experiences.

In Mary:
ecstasy is to live outside herself, attentive to the Son and to the will of the Father
vision is the gaze of faith upon her Son
locutions are the listening to his word and the wonder before his silence
the only flight of the Spirit is Mary’s moving about in the normality of the house of Nazareth. No other phenomenal experiences, even though Mary bears in her heart, pierced by the Word, the secret of a heart open and attentive to the promises and the surprises of God.

To the man and the woman of today we must restore the simple mysticism of Mary of Nazareth, in the fullness of her human and divine living, with heaven on earth, but with the earth steeped in the divine.

This is the true Christian mysticism, to which we must all aspire, toward which we must journey, having in Mary a sure guide.

A Marian mysticism

I would not, however, wish to omit a word about a way of living Marian devotion, which is precisely the doctrine of the great master of Marian spirituality of all times, Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort.

True devotion, as taught by Montfort, is in reality a Marian mysticism. To live the mystery of Mary means to live with her and through her the mystery of salvation, collaborating in it and responding to it. If one does not place oneself in this mystical perspective of the Treatise, it becomes difficult to understand its profound meaning. At times, contemporary spirituality lacks a true attention to mysticism. For this reason it does not grasp certain depths that come from Christological-Marian mystical theology and from Marian mystical experience, from the history of the past and of the present. I am referring to authentic Marian mysticism, of pure stock, not apocryphal but true, confirmed by truth and by a life according to the Gospel.

In reality, the strength of Montfort’s Marian message rests on this “mystical” vision of spirituality and, therefore, of salvation. His central pages refer to this mysticism, which expresses the plan of God, which is the mystery of Christ, and bears the seal of gratuitousness.

It is the mysticism of grace that shapes the Christian. It is the well-known comparison of the image formed with the chisel and with the mold. The first is the ascetical way. The second, that of the mold, is the mystical way, the Marian way. It reveals a grace and an attitude that consist in fully making room for God in our life. To abandon oneself, to give oneself, to let Mary form Christ in us. A mystical dimension of grace, of the superabundant gift, as at the summits of Christian mysticism, where God acts and the person, actively and passively under the action of the Spirit, is purified, illumined, united to God, conformed to Christ. The figure of the mold is a splendid image, taken up by Montfort also in The Secret of Mary, given its effectiveness.

This mysticism requires a certain passivity, but one enlivened by an intensity of theological life, in welcoming the action of God who works in a maternal way through Mary. It is a way of expressing and experiencing her motherhood, her maternal mediation. This entails a presence, a transparency, a communion that shapes an effective conformity to Christ, who is the term of identification and of conformity. We are “formed” to the image of the firstborn Son.

The way to this collaboration, which entails the ascent of availability, is synergy in the Holy Spirit. It requires, in the interiority of true devotion, total consecration and growth in an interior exercise of communion. It is that way which is at once mystical and ascetical, resting on the indissoluble link of through Mary, with Mary, in Mary, and for Mary, in an equivalence that the Spirit of Christ brings about in Mary and in us, so as then to act through Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus, and for Jesus. A way that entails the necessary pneumatological dimension, the action of the Spirit in us, welcome and response in the Holy Spirit.

A reciprocity similar to the “in Christ” dimension, according to the well-known expression of a monk of Mount Athos, who had almost fixed in a formula his life in Christ: “His life is my life.” He was referring to Christ. A reciprocity that entails also the truth of the expression: “My life is his life.” Montfort had the grace to propose it in clear terms.

Today, however, the richness of the spirituality that contemplates the spiritual profile of Mary, a profile of holiness as communion with Christ, realistic and committed, offers Montfortian mysticism a necessary complement, should it perhaps be needed. And it is in these terms that contemporary spirituality can and must receive the message of Montfort.

All through Mary. An existential depth of spiritual communion with the spirit of the Mother. To be like Mary, or to be Mary… It is the mystical dimension of the being of Christ in us, of Mary in us.
All like Mary. It is the line of imitation brought up to date, with the theological and spiritual connotation that we have highlighted. The relationship of Mary with Christ, and even before that with the Trinity, is unique, but it is exemplary. For this reason she is also, for the Christian, the true human archetype of response and of total collaboration with the plan of God. It is a matter of imitating, but in depth, to the point of reliving the sentiments of Christ Jesus and the sentiments of Mary of Nazareth… No one can live in Christ who does not live like Christ. No one can live in Mary who does not live like Mary. It is the reciprocal demand of communion and of imitation, from the deepest level, but with the evangelical norm of what Mary lived, with the note of the path of growing fidelity.
All in Mary. It is the mystery of the presence, or the metaphor, of the co-presence of Mary in our Trinitarian communion or indwelling. The dwelling of Mary is the Trinity. In this communion, Mary has an indwelling of her own in the Christian, always in the communion of the same Spirit. The Christian, through Christ in the Spirit, also has his root in this paradise, in this sanctuary, in this Marian life. But without disjunctions; rather, in a rediscovered harmony of communion with Mary in the same Christ and in the same Spirit. It is then that the phrase of the monk of Mount Athos can also be referred to Mary, as appears implicitly in the doctrine of Montfort. One will be able to say equally: “My life is her life.” It is an authentic communion of life. The Christian can offer himself as a supplement of humanity, so that Mary may live in us, so that Christ may live in us.
All for Mary and for Jesus, in the dimension of finality, of service, of collaboration in the plan of salvation. Service is total dedication, being servants, transparency of the will of God.

The Virgin is the “theological tablet,” written by God, as the Byzantine Office of the Dormition expresses it. The will of God is written in her heart, engraved by the Spirit. She is the summit of the Covenant lived out. Mary is, as Chiara Lubich read her, the “inclined plane of Heaven” that brings God and his will near, that makes it present in the world and sets in motion the history of salvation, forming disciples in her image, in the image of Christ.

Conclusion

In the third millennium, the Church asks us to live the grace and the commitment of prayer: gift and art, commitment and grace, communion with God and with our brothers, daily encounter with the Lord of life and of history. But it also proposes, for the Christian man and the Christian woman of today, a life that bears the savor and the wisdom, the interior unction and the exterior fortitude of Christian mysticism. This is the way of truth and of life, of a Christianity lived with the seal of experience.

In the face of deviant proposals of prayer and of spirituality, of mysticizing exaggerations and of fanaticisms or empty devotionalisms, the sure guide of prayer and of mysticism is Mary, in her immense greatness of communion with the Trinity and in her disarming simplicity of mystical life, lived in mystery, lived as mystery. But with that balance which we may call the mysticism of everyday life, the mysticism of Nazareth, of the Mother of the Lord in the human-divine everyday, which is all heaven on earth and the divine in the human.

The apostolic exhortation Marialis Cultus of Paul VI explores in depth the role of Mary as model and teacher of the life of Christian prayer and contemplation.

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