Holy Father

You who called me into the desert

to speak to the heart of my heart,

Tu, that I fought against

and you won,

do that by giving up my alibis

and my defenses,

finally have the courage

to let me be loved by you,

to let myself be contemplated by Your gaze

penetrating and creative

I ask you for the love of Mary,

yours and our Mother. Amen

The contemplation that accompanies us today will be the mystery of a single word: Mary's YES.

Simple word that does not require exegesis or hermeneutics. We can all grasp the shocking truth that it announces to us: the infinite love of God and the response the total love of Mary for her Lord.

With his, the universe was made to exist, he elected a People, he became man in Jesus of Nazareth by implementing the Incarnation, he lived his life as Messiah entirely within this yes to the will of the Father, he accepted a cursed death. And the Father responded with the yes of the resurrection glorifying his Son Jesus.

In this story of his love he wanted to involve us and asked us for our YES.

“If you want to be my disciple, go, sell what you are, come and follow me".

We said our yes with all our contradictions, between struggles, weaknesses, moments of generosity to the point of heroism and moments of betrayal.

Who gave his AND with all the inner energy of her heart and will she was a gift: Maria. “Behold the servant of the Lord, let your word be fulfilled in me.

With her yes, Mary made possible the realization of the project of the Father's crazy love.

He said yes and the Incarnation took place. He said yes to the wedding at Cana and yes

the marriage between God and us is achieved. He said his silent yes at the foot of the Cross and the first Christian community was created.

The yes marked and defined Mary's spiritual life by building in silence, his life of discipleship in prayer and daily work.

Mary's lifestyle challenges us and questions us about the meaning and fidelity of our discipleship.

In front of Mary we can contemplate the ideal image of the disciple and compare our life of belonging to the Lord, recover in depth the authenticity of our spiritual life, our" have to be".

Our "be real” is very often full of contradictions and sometimes very compromised.

This discrepancy is sometimes the result of our laziness, of our disengagement, other times instead it is a serene consequence of our limits.

The more we immerse ourselves in a filial relationship with Mary, the more we feel that the desire to respond to God's expectations for our lives increases..

Therefore contemplating Mary like having to be of our life is to rediscover the trust that you, Mother and Sister, she will not abandon us on this journey because she too did it and did it with our difficulties, with the contradictions that we also know.

Maria repeats us with the sweetness of a mother: "do not be afraid, enters you, reach into your depths and party, rejoice, give praise to God because He who loves you has accomplished great things in you.”

Sometimes we suffer from spiritual myopia, we are unable to glimpse the beautiful things that God has done and continually does in our more or less brilliant lives.

Psychologists say that to have correct knowledge of ourselves we must go deep within ourselves.

If this is true of human self-knowledge, it is equally true of spiritual knowledge as well. But it is necessary to create the conditions: silence, humility, abandonment.

John Joseph Surin. Abandonment is placing all interests in the hands of God so that the soul can practice evangelical self-denial. If the soul decides to marry Jesus Christ entirely and to bind its own interests so closely with those of the divine spouse that it becomes one and the same thing, then his life will abandon him, Health, one's happiness and even one's salvation. The man who out of love put his life in the hands of God, he can do nothing wiser than to abandon his own wisdom, one's knowledge and one's light to this husband, practicing what our Lord said to Saint Catherine: “Think of me and I will think of you”.

Here is the true disciple of the Lord.

It's Mary, the docile woman, transparent and abandoned, docile to every call of the Spirit

Transparent because she is poor, it doesn't look for itself, he exposes himself to the Word, in the light of GOD.

She is abandoned and it is this abandonment that gives courage, originality and strength to MARIA throughout her life.

In our itinerary of discipleship we are so afraid in our hearts of abandoning ourselves to the Lord, we are afraid of Him, of his needs we are afraid of His Love.

While we want it for ourselves on the other side we don't want it to get too much inside us.

When instead we let him in and abandon ourselves to him, then wonderful things really arise in our spirit and in our life.

The L.G.. al n.67 it tells us what true and authentic devotion consists of.

"The faithful in turn remember that true devotion does not consist of sterile and fleeting sentimentality, nor in a certain vain credulity, but rather it proceeds from true faith, from which we are led to recognize the pre-eminence of the Mother of God, and we are driven to filial love towards our Mother and to the imitation of her virtues".

This text is important for a review of our devotion to Mary, because it doesn't have to be a sentimental devotion, but it must be authentic; It is not just our prayers that make it authentic, but it's our life, it is the style of our life.

We can pray and pay homage to Mary, but if our life is far from the exemplary nature of her life we ​​do not honor Mary.

We need a theological conversion regarding Mary, that is, a change of direction starting from the scriptural-liturgical source where the Virgin is captured in her quality as an exemplary model of the life of discipleship.

And again the L.C. al n. 53:

" For her faith and obedience to the Word, Mary is also recognized as a super-eminent and completely singular member of the church and its figure and excellent model in faith and charity.".

Here are the two elements that qualify Mary's life and also qualify the life of the disciple.

MARY is supreme to us, excellent model especially in this size: faith and charity.

Faith that becomes abandonment, the faith that becomes a search for God's will in our daily life, faith that becomes interiority and charity that allows us to place ourselves alongside others with great love, with an opening of love in our hearts where there is room for everyone.

Mary is the creature who was given to the Church as a mirror and memory of her journey in total service of the Father translated into a radical YES to his will and his plan of salvation in love for his children.

This is the great figure of Mary who also becomes our image.

Feeling that we come from the Love of God and we must return to the Love of God. But while we understand this our origin and this our goal, on the other hand we ask ourselves what to do. Here's what, we are called to do: to walk in the total service of the Father which means walking in the service of the Spirit so that CHRIST may still be generated in the midst of the world today, the Son of God, the hope of men.

And this is a great task, this is an immense vocation; and this vocation is not given by the quantity of our actions, but it is given above all by strength, from the authenticity of our love; of our love for God and our love for our brothers.

Of this eminent presence in silence, rich in intercession and loved, the Church thanks the Father.

And we too are called to thank the Father for having given us Mary, for giving us this Woman who with her intercession, with his silence, and with his life he shows us the path towards the Father, and shows us the authentic ways of our service to the Holy Spirit.

But at the same time we also need not fear. Like Elizabeth we proclaim her blessed and blessed. She who is the exemplary, as the Council tells us, blessed of God, of the blessed because they are obedient to the Word, and of the blessed because they are submerged by the favor of God.

And if Mary is on our side it is clear that she becomes for us the model par excellence of our spiritual life.

S. Therese of Lisieux, in his writings "Last Words" he said: HOLY WEEKIt should not be understood that Mary, through her prerogatives, obscures the glory of all the Saints just as the sun at its rising makes the stars disappear.. A Mother who makes the glory of her children disappear? My God, how strange! I think quite the opposite. I believe that it will greatly increase the splendor of the elect". It's clear, because Mary is on our side, Mary is Church and therefore evidently does not obscure our paths; not even to enlighten, it empowers them, non "hides" our commitment, our generosity, our desire, our request, rather he strengthens it with his help.

G. in Burge, a 13th century Jew. converted to the Christian faith, in one of his homilies on Matthew he said this: the Jews, the heretics, pagans seek Christ but do not manage to find him because they do not seek him in the proper way, that is, with Mary his Mother. It is not possible to find God without Mary".

And Paul VI il 24 April 1960, he stated: "If we want to be Christians, we must be Marian, that is, we must know the essential relationship, vitale, providential that unites the Madonna to Jesus and that opens for us the path that leads us to Him. I believe we have no difficulty convincing ourselves of this. Our difficulty instead is that of concretely assuming the dimension, the figure, Mary's life as exemplary and as an outline of our daily life."

Don Mario Guariento