Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Purification of Our Lady. Forty days having passed since the birth of her Child, the Old Law required that every woman who gave birth to a Son should make an offering after this period of time as a sacrifice for her purification before she was once again permitted to enter the Temple. The Law also stipulated that every first-born son belonged to God and that an offering had to be made in order to redeem the child. So today, Our Lady, faithful to the laws of the Lord, comes to the Temple to fulfil what is required.
Like at the Annunciation, Our Lady hear accepts wholeheartedly the Will of God for her and her Son. She who was immaculate in both body and soul, who had given birth to her Son without loss of her virginity, carried out faithfully the law that, as such, did not apply to her: she did not require purification in either body or soul, and yet to have disregarded the Law would not only have caused scandal but would have been impossible for Her whose focus was not on her own self but only on the Will of God.
Still more startling however is the fact that the helpless Child that she carries into the Temple with her, is the One whose presence fills not only the Temple but all of heaven and earth. God “makes himself subject to the Law to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons.” In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses exclaims “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us[?]” How much further God was willing to lower Himself in order to be near His people that He was willing to take on human flesh and dwell amongst us; how much still further in His continuing to live amongst us today in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
Whether the Will of God is manifested by the prescriptions of the Law, through the message of an angel, or through the circumstances of the events that unfolded, Our Blessed Lady, the Virgin Most Faithful, not only accepts but embraces and loves the Will of God.
And so, having before us the example of Our Most Blessed Mother, we must look also at ourselves and our own response to the Will of God, as it is manifested in our lives: whether through law, through inspiration, or through the circumstances and events that Divine Providence permits.
Divine and natural laws
In his revelations to Sr Mary of St Peter, Our Lord asks for devotion to His Holy Face in reparation for blasphemy and for the desecration of Sundays and Holy Days. Our heavenly Father gave the Ten Commandments to His people as the foundation of our relationship with Him, to show the very minimum of what he requires in order not to lose His favour, and also to show us the very minimum of what is required in order for us to be the people He created us to be. If we break these laws, we not only grievously offend Him but we also go against our own natures, a perversion of how we were created to function.
Perhaps never before in the history of creation have the laws of God been so despised as in our own day. A time when even the highest prelates in the Church allow and encourage the worship of idols; when attendance at Sunday Mass throughout Christendom is at its lowest levels; where public adulterers are now permitted to receive the Sacraments; and those who campaign for the possibility to destroy the body of the unborn child are encouraged to partake of the Body of the Lord.
In asking ourselves whether we truly love the laws of the Lord and embrace them, let’s try also to love them to the extent of making reparation for those who do not love them and who spit in the Holy Face of Our Lord through their blasphemous and sacrilegious acts.
Inspirations
Although most of us will not experience the vision of an angel telling us directly what God is asking of us, God does, in the ordinary development of our spiritual lives, grant to us “inspirations” (not as in the common usage of the word meaning simply an idea, but a communication of His Holy Ghost: the word “spiritus” behind found within the word “inspiration”). These inspirations might come to us in our explicit times of prayer, but often for those who are trying to maintain a close relationship with Him they can come at other times: perhaps the sudden remembrance of a particular line from the Scriptures; or a particular clear sense of what course of action we should take in a decision we are facing; the communication might come through the words of someone else or through a passage in a book which seems to strike us in particular deep way.
However Our Lord might choose to whisper (or sometime perhaps proclaim rather loudly) His Will for us into our ear, the question is whether we are willing to say Yes. Right now, in the presence of Our Lord, we might reflect on what we feel the Lord is asking of us: whether it be in connection with our spiritual lives, or perhaps some decision we need to make, or maybe some way He is asking us to reach out to someone in need.
Circumstances of Providence
And finally we have the Will of God as manifested by the circumstances and events which He permits to happen in our lives. In today’s feast we have before a beautiful baby, only a few weeks old, being brought by His loving Mother into the House of God. And yet, upon receiving the Child into his arms, the prophet Simeon, having cried out in joy that He had found the One who would fulfil the prophecies he had waited his whole life to see fulfilled, said to his Mother: “A sword shall pierce your own soul too.”
Our Blessed Lady was not asked by God simply to be the Mother of a beautiful Divine Child: she was asked by Him also to witness and to accompany that Child to the point of his suffering the cruelest of deaths at the hands of pagan executioners. The devotion which Our Lord asks of us in order to make reparation for the sins of today’s pagan executioners, the Communists, who wish to kill God in souls and in society, the devotion is not to the Risen and Glorified Lord, but to His Holy Face which we see asleep in the sleep of death; His Face battered and torn by the insults of sinners.
For the Christian, there is no other route than the Cross. Whether it be periods of illness, relationship or financial problems, spiritual dryness. The Holy Cross is the route by which Our Lord leads us, in His footsteps, to the glory of the Resurrection. And there is no denying that sometimes these Crosses are not passing struggles but can be extremely difficult and long lasting: it is then that Our Lord is giving to us, even when we cannot feel us, the grace to be particularly close to Him, to be shoulder to shoulder with Him in bearing the suffering that will lead not only to our salvation but also to the salvation of many souls.
Whatever the Will of God may be in our lives, we can be confident that Our Lady is constantly present to help us accept it, love it and embrace it: and She knows that it does not lead TO the Cross, but through the Cross to glory, when our eyes shall see the salvation which has been prepared