Mary, experience of Paradise
The greatness of Mary is a reflection of the greatness of God: his image and likeness, as should be expected in a creature who wanted only to be the actualization of God’s will. A greatness that is utterly one with simplicity. Nothing is complicated in her: everything is straight and clear and simple. No need of fancy words and clever gestures to approach her. It is enough to say what you think, that she says what she thinks, wholly and completely truthful.
This is why she is free. Free from the endless precaution and carefulness that people use as they come together with their fellows, bearing their burden of fear and calculation, of fantasies and desires. She does not even scare Herod, or the Praetorian Guard, or even the unleashed masses: she does the Father’s will, what does anything else matter? If God is with her, who is against her?
This is her way of being a creature, someone who has understood life and lives it: she did not pass years cultivating illusions and waiting for the right occasion, and wailing over delusions, waking every morning with a new agony only to torment herself in the evening with a new defeat. She gathered from her existence the most beautiful thing that existence can give: faith in the Eternal One; the decision to live minute by minute in union with the Eternal One; and in that union, in that shared life, persons and things appear in a limpid light, and being loved they lose their spectroscopic complications.
In her bearing there is no sign of personal complacency, of self-love, of pride or of boredom: she received from God and from Jesus on earth and from Joseph the greatest love and she shared it out around her. To define her conduct, it should be enough to say that she loved everyone, she loved each one, she loved always: the servant of God in the person of the children of God.
Outside Nazareth few people knew her; and inside Nazareth few people spoke about her. Her day was bound by silence. But, usually, the person who keeps working, stays chaste, does normal duties, is not talked about: the newspapers are stuffed full of tales of housebreakers and killers, of people who violate the laws of modesty, of order, of freedom. In the news the main roles are given over to divas and demagogues, the twisted and the criminal – two or three hundred names most often repeated – more than millions of mothers and workers, of nuns and missionaries, the humble masses who keep society going.
And Mary was the prototype of this full, real life: if as a result of the passion of Jesus she suffered the most atrocious pain, as a result of the mission of Jesus, to which she had linked her existence on this earth, she had the delight of the most exquisite joys. Her love for God and other people fed her with ecstasies: and among those reconciled upon the earth she was, as later she was among those who sought her in heaven, a giver-away of joy: cause of our joy (causa nostrae laetitiae). Joy was God in her: God who gave meaning and value to what happened in her: suffering too.
And there is beauty in this: that in Mary and with Mary, who put Jesus in circulation, therefore God Almighty, existence can become a foretaste of paradise: a blessed experience coming from the divine that is worth the effort, indeed worth the joy, of living.
from: Maria modello perfetto, Città Nuova, 2001, pp.214-219.
