“Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfill the high hopes the heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign.” (Archbishop Fulton Sheen).
There are so many flaws in my personality and character. No matter how hard I try to improve, I will spend the remainder of my earthly life in a sinful state. There might be days where I sin a little less than others, but overall, the sins of my soul will be extraordinarily intense and will fly in the face of my Beloved and insult Him in the very moment when I should be begging for His forgiveness for me.
And I have been thinking about all those limitations in my personality and character today – my impatience, my lack of charity, my dishonesty, my disloyalty, my pride. And I am thinking about what it is that I should be – how it is that I should be behaving.
And there is a beautiful explanation of this that I read the other day and I could not phrase it any more clearly in my own words, so I used the words of Archbishop Fulton Sheen from his book “A Year with Mary” at page 15, below…
“There is, actually, only one person in all humanity of whom God has one picture and in whom there is a perfect conformity between what he wanted her to be and what she is, and that is his own mother. Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfill the high hopes the heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign. The ideal that God had of her, that she is, and in the flesh. The model and the copy are perfect; she is all that was foreseen, planned, and dreamed. The melody of her life is played just as it was written.”
And I have been reflecting on the perfection of that Role Model. After all, what did her equal sign look like? It looked like the injustice of travelling from her home to Bethlehem while she was heavily pregnant. It looked like arriving and having no place to stay to deliver her child. It looked like utter and abject poverty and powerlessness. It looked like watching an unjust trial and an unjust execution in silence – without standing to speak in her Son’s defence or saying a word at the Foot of the Cross.
In reality, her equal sign looked like she was giving her life and all its potential and all its opportunities away. And when you stop and think about it – that is exactly what she did. She gave away all her power and all her strength and all her glory into the hands of unjust men. Because it was not the men who she was really giving her power to. It was God Himself. And God Himself has infinite power of control all the behaviours of unjust men. And if God Himself wanted things to be different – they simply would have been.
And today, as I consider all my flaws – centred on myself – I consider also the perfection of the Blessed Virgin, who gave her life away to unjust men in order to give it to God Himself…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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