It's HER Month!

I am working on a longer post about spiritual sight and mindfulness from my time at the retreat. However, I didn't want to get too far into May without noting that May is Mary's month. And what a month May is! Full of busy-ness, activity, growth ( personal and horticultural), and in Minnesota the beginning of the let's-get-outside-now-while-we-can season.

Mary is the orginal Earth Mother, clothed with Sun and with the moon under her feet. She hands the world over to her Son through the head-crushing heel which liberates the world from captivity to the Evil One.

"We now have a deeper understanding of the nature of the spiritual life that begins with our rebirth in baptism. Mary and the Church exert their influence on every soul. Christ is forever born, attacked and glorified on earth. All this is still seen indistinctly, as if veiled by a humiliating exterior.

But all is already present: new birth, eternity, the radiant light of the sun in the transfigured Lord. and so let us venerate the sublime woman who is our Mother Mary and Mother Church. Let us love her because it is she who gives birth-in-pain to the Christ life in ourselves. But one day this woman will also be carried away to God's throne in the wake of her Son, and all of us who are in Christ Jesus will go with her.

Thus Mary and the Church are a comfort to us amidst the troubles of the spiritual life that will be a daily dying as long as we are on earth. But at the same time they are also a guarantee of the "radiant dawn of eternity" which even now begins to shed its light in the secret depths of our hearts. Even now we are clothed with the sun; the moon of this passing world is already beneath our feet. Soon "the day will dawn and the sun will rise in our hearts.

As long as the darkness lasts let us turn our eyes to the great woman with the moon beneath her feet; in her we already see the consumation of all that in ourselves is yet to be fulfilled."

written by Father Hugo Rahner (+1968) a German Jesuit priest and a renowned Church historian.