When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” Luke 2:48

These past few months have been difficult. I am not sure how to even explain it. Now that mom has passed, of course there’s grief, and also relief, but this has been more than that. I felt paralyzed and unmotivated to do anything, even church. It’s as if all the years on DEFCON 1 caring for mom and dad along with a pandemic and the other things of life, all while the enemy relentlessly attacked, had taken a massive toll. I was empty and spent. The stress that had been stored in my body was now trying to exit in ways I did not foresee. Tears came when least expected. Though I didn’t feel like doing church, or even praying, I still did, but it was a massive effort. I questioned everything but resolved to know God is good. I felt like I had been through a passion and I was struggling not to fall backwards into my old life, the one I knew before I knew Him. And it finally hit me, this is the desolation Saint Ignatius speaks of. All I have to do is to not give up. The Ignatian method tells me to do more to battle the powers and principalities. But it isn’t the doing more God seeks from me, for He knows that I am tired. What He seeks is me loving more. I have a choice to make. Loving more can actually happen under the covers in your bed. It is not to be mistaken for devotion out of duty. It is a choice to have a disposition to love even while just sitting and being because you know in your soul that God is profoundly good and you are not experiencing anything that Christ Himself did not take on. I must love God. I must love myself. I must love others. I need rest. It is okay to rest. In my effort to choose love, I am led to more devotion, but the devotion itself comes from the act of the will to choose to love, not a duty or obligation. The devotion came out of me in the form of praying multiple Rosaries a day because it was the best way I knew to love God in these desolate moments.

Then came the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I was often puzzled by Mary’s anxiety only from the perspective that anxiety can sometimes fall into sinfulness because it shows a lack of trust in God. But knowing that Mary is sinless, I knew this wasn’t the case. I listened carefully to the reading that day.

 When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents were unaware of this.  Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends.  When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.  And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.  When his parents saw him they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.”  He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them, and his mother treasured all these things in her heart. Luke 2:43-51

Then it struck me. Obviously, Mary’s anxiety isn’t the sinful kind. It is the kind that comes from not having complete wisdom and understanding yet. To not understand completely is a human condition. As we age, we grow in wisdom and understanding. Mary treasures, or ponders, in her heart that Jesus is found in the Father’s house. Her journey of growing in wisdom and understanding from the age of 14 when Jesus was conceived in her womb (according to mystics) to the age of 47 when he dies on the cross, would have been a journey to restoration.  She was already redeemed by the merits of the cross applied outside of time, and always pure. But in time, at the cross and resurrection, she is a fully restored daughter, the completion of the plan of God. She is a house of prayer, a temple complete.  Having endured the passion and offering of her Son, her heart has only grown in purity and the mysteries of God.  In the resurrection and ascension Jesus can leave and send the Advocate because there’s a temple complete – her. He will be in his Father’s house, and she is the Fathers house with Christ as the foundation. Through her grace flows to the rest of us.    There needed to be at least one Apostle at the Cross for the complete restoration.  So it is that through Mary and the Priesthood that Christ gives us a pathway to our restoration.  The Priests have such an intercessor in Mary.  I get so sad when she isn’t embraced by them.

It does make her mediatrix of grace and coredemptrix because God willed it for mankind.  I totally believe one day that will be proclaimed. She holds the key to the Divine Will and it was given to her by the Trinity, it was also handed to Peter.

In the Pieta above we see what looks like God dead, but the reality is He is very much alive in her. In His resurrection we see love has won the victory. She was a part of this victory.

I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.  In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.  They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” John 14:18-21

So bound to the Spirit is she, so in her is Christ, that the Fathers Blessings pour out through her.

It’s her humility, she wants none of the glory for herself, that allowed God to glorify her the most and allowed his glory to pour through her to us.

Which brings me back to the Rosary. If ever there comes a time again, like COVID (which I believe will come), when we don’t have access to the Mass, the worship we do should be the Rosary.  The Rosary is an entrance into the Temple of Mary, a walk through the life of Christ with his Mother, the completed temple built on the foundation of Him.  When the Virgin Mary gave this Psalter to Saint Dominic, she said that it was a battering ram. A battering ram tears down walls. It tears down sin which is a wall between us and God. Dominic was fighting the Albigensian heresy. This was a heresy that believed the material world and the body was bad. The ideology of transgenderism is Albigensian, an ideology that mutilates the body. Dominic was having trouble converting people, until she showed up with her Psalter. It is why Dominic’s preaching was finally heard.  There’s grace in a Rosary prayed from the heart that comes from Mary as mediatrix of grace.  When man destroys literal temples there’s nothing that can destroy the temple of Mary which was built by God Himself.

With each Our Father we invoke the will of God. With each Hail Mary she intercedes for us.

I do believe we are on the verge of a new Pentecost, hold Mary’s hand and keep your eyes on Jesus, just like she did.

The Vision of Saint Dominic by Bernardo Cavallino, 1640

If you would like to purchase the Family Healing prayer book, The Queen’s Triumph, I co-authored with Ashley Blackburn, please click this link.