Mary's Hidden Words

Mary spoke very little.  The silence in which she concealed herself reveals the Son’s word all the better. She lets Him speak, and yet in His Word hers is also hidden.

Mary and her Son walk side by side in such a way that there is always room for both; there is never any need for one or the other to step aside.

Because the only thing I can do is love, I turn my eyes to you sinners, and all I can think of is the birth of my Son, for which I thank you. At the same time I do not see my path or suffering, but only His future path. If it were not for your sin, I would not have had to say my fiat, and so I would have been left without Him. For His sake, then I can look away from Him and look gratefully upon you. And by doing that I can give Him wholly to you, and so, to the Father, so that the Word might be fulfilled.

He came in order to forgive as savior and judge, to give the gift of His grace, to walk the path of suffering, and to take your sins upon Himself. But I can only love, dwell in Him; and because I have received the divine Son through you sinners, on your account, I can love you in God, even as the sinners you are.

Through you I love Him, and through Him I love you.

Lumina/New Lumina,  pp.50-51    Adrienne Von Speyr,  Ignatius Press

New Wine, old wineskins

         "...The first Christians were well aware that everything happening in them and among them - the new and exceptional compared with the lives they had led before, the revolutionary compared with the lives so many others around them were leading - was not the fruit of their adherence, of their intelligence, or of their will, but a gift of the spirit, a gift from on high, a mysterious energy with which they were invested."   Luigi Giussani, Why the Church?  p.89

Just like what makes us Christians so different from everybody else around us today, right? Of course not. The newness of the Christ event doesn't come through to so many of us Christians today because we are old wine skins,  and Christ is always  New Wine. With our set ways of thinking and feeling inside secure Comfort Zones we reduce Him to sentiments, ideas, rules, and acceptable norms that cannot contain Him. And if perchance, by a miracle of grace, He does slip inside, how furious we get when He bursts the wine skin apart. 

Luigi Guissani: Quotations

The Holy Spirit  "...the Spirit of Pentecost is the gift par excellence, because it is through the Spirit that we are drawn into the mystery of Christ and understand the experience of that person who fully explains and resolves our reality."