TOTUS TUUS, MARIA !

WINTER MEDITATION

Brief reflection inspired by the Mistress of all souls

Winter is the dark season. The days keep getting shorter and seem to be languishing for a resurrection. Even the sun no longer manages to convince us of its strength. As always God reminds us of the power of the Light in spite of the wintry darkness. In this mystery-laden part of reality which, as long as we are on this earth, we are not yet allowed to see in its fullness, winter is filled with, and carried by, two miracles of spiritual Light: Mary’s Immaculate Conception and the Birth of the Light of the world, both of which constitute the necessary elements of God’s answer to the darkness of the original sin. The Birth of the Light of the world could also be linked up with yet another Mystery: the Divine Motherhood of Mary. All of these give evidence of the fact God is well and truly and without any restriction looking after the human souls, so much so that He is constantly trying to make Divinity and human nature join hands. Some of these encounters do determine the course of the history of salvation...

Mary was to become the Mother of the Redeemer. The latter’s Divinity could only be contained in a stainless Tabernacle. No human being is by nature able to satisfy this condition. Nevertheless the Messiah had to be born of a woman so as to be able to experience being human as of the very first stages thereof, lest Redemption be incomplete. Therefore God clothed Mary in the most sacred gold of the Immaculate Conception, which turned Her into a living Tabernacle, a powerful fortress against the darkness, a Great Sign of Promise for all souls. When the soul of the Divine Mother-to-be was granted the Immaculate Conception the regions of hell were split by flashes of lightning symbolizing the fact the power of the darkness over the souls would henceforth no longer be undivided.

Mary’s Immaculate Conception was to usher in a new era for mankind. Satan was shown a human soul who not only possessed the uncorrupted sanctity characteristic of the soul prior to the original sin, but who, on top of this, proved to be more powerful than any temptation and deception: Mary allowed Her free will to merge so thoroughly with the Will of God that She wanted exactly the same things as God Himself wants and detested exactly the things God detests. Thus Satan found in Her a soul who in the deepest sense of the word represents 'being the image of God'. In this unstained soul Satan found the human soul’s ultimate destination in a fully accomplished state. Need it surprise us then, that Satan has always taken such great exception to 'the Woman' and will keep taking exception to Her forever? In Her his humiliation was forever complete, and by virtue of God’s Will She is going to make this humiliation visible to all creation in the hour in which Her foot, which has been playing with him from the outset, will press him down once and for all. In that state he will never again separate any souls from God.

This perfectly holy soul, this living and everlasting explosion of Divine Light, would now be the soil in which the Divine wheat stalk Jesus Christ was to grow so as to be able to offer to the Divine Plan of Salvation a body which He would so totally sacrifice that it would pronounce the death sentence over the realm of the darkness. This is how God prepared the Birth of the Light of the world in a human womb. Behold the sign which God, in so doing, gave to the evil one to demonstrate His intention never to forsake the souls in spite of their disobedience.

All of this God prepared for the souls as a beginning of the greatest Mystery of Love, and He did so right in the darkest time of the year. The development of God’s Plan of Salvation is based totally on an interaction between God and the souls. God works through souls, and all that is able to advance the accomplishment of the souls’ total salvation is to come about through the commitment and dedication of souls who are willing to lead lives of virtue and total consecration to God. The soul will not be able to model her life in the Light as long as she fails to make proper use of every sign of Light God is willing to show her.

The secret of a perfectly fruitful life lies in the rock-solid faith in the Works of Redemption wrought by the Christ. However, it is impossible to recognize these Works and simultaneously disregard the foundation of these Works, which was chosen by God Himself: Mary, the Immaculate Conception. The Heavenly Mistress likes to refer to the metaphor by which She once compared Jesus with the sun and Herself with the beams of the sun, and She asked whether it is at all possible to believe in the existence and the action of the sun and at the same time deny the existence and the action of its beams.

In winter the days get noticeably shorter, the light gets scarce. Yet in her heart the Christian soul bears this marvelous germ of Divine Light, which right in early winter expresses the very core of her being a Christian: the coming of the Light, of which the soul is already reminded in the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, and which in the most holy night of the Birth of Jesus makes her aware of the fact the soul is born for the true Light, is to carry it inside of her just the way Mary carried it, and which she is to keep giving birth to inside of her over and over again, not because it would in the meantime die or lose its effects but because all things Divine are to be merged with the human will time and time again, in order to remain fully effective inside the soul.

In this constant interaction with God and with the constant profession in favour of God’s Works the winter of unfruitfulness and the coldness of the hearts as well as the darkness of the constant temptation and deception are vanquished within the soul. All of this presupposes the soul to harbour due Love and the will to serve the Works of God. Love is then the warmth of the heart, whereas the will to serve the Works of God conveys the Light of the promise of a new spring into the soul.

The soul who will travel through winter in an active desire for the birth of the Light, also within herself, and actively aspiring to unlock her soil for the gifts of the grace of a new life in the imminent spring, will more easily receive the favour of penetrating step by step into the secrets of Light and darkness. She will also learn to understand the deeper purpose of life as a constant battle against the darkness within one’s own soul and against the threats by the darkness.

It is exactly this understanding which, within certain souls, enhances the ability to truly love God and His Works. In the soul who manages to love sincerely, i.e. unselfishly, winter gets no chance to ever really set in. In her soil the seeds of the grace God prepares for her never freeze; they are constantly brought to maturity and firmly settle inside the soul that achieves a permanent bloom. This way the Christ gets the opportunity to be born within the soul over and over again. God is Love, only Love leads towards God, and only in the loving soul God is able to work His wonders. That is what He wants to accomplish in each and every one of us also this winter.

Myriam, January 2013 (date of the original meditation in the Dutch source language)