Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.
Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.
Our Lady expresses her unconditional and unlimited obedience to God at the Annunciation when our Lord becomes her child.
Annunciation, the first mystery of the Most Holy Rosary,
is a mystery upon which we can meditate with profit the whole of our lives
because it expresses the fundamental dispositions of faith, without which it is impossible to please God,
the fundamental dispositions of prayer, by which we obtain supernatural grace and without which we cannot be saved,
and the fundamental disposition of obedience, which is the measure, true measure, of love,
as our Lord says.
The Lord says, if you love me, keep my commandments.
Faith, prayer, and obedience.
I was reading the other day a passage from St. Maximilian on prayer,
and he reminds us that prayer before anything else is not a multiplication of words.
It's not even the prayer itself.
It's not the expression of our dispositions.
But rather, it is the lifting of our heart and mind to God, as St. Augustine would say.
And it is an act of the will.
It is the binding of our will to God.
And if you think about the other things that St. Maximilian says, he expresses himself in this manner very often.
For example, when he talks about the consecration to the Blessed Mother, he says that it essentially belongs to the will.
And it's constituted by an act of the will.
It's not necessarily our attention to our Blessed Mother, although that is a very good thing,
that we turn our heart and our mind directly to Our Lady and pray to her throughout the day.
That's a wonderful thing, but the essence of the consecration does not belong to that.
It certainly does not belong to the acts of devotion, such as decorating Our Lady's altar or, you know, crowning her with flowers.
It's an act of the will.
And in daily life, that is lived, practically speaking, through obedience, as he would tell us.
That we do the will of Our Blessed Mother when we do the will of our superiors.
And through the acts of charity, when we have our freedom at our disposal, we can make our own choices.
But then, at that moment, we should be inspired by charity and the works of charity.
And the works of mercy.
This is why St. Maximilian says that we should make use of every legitimate means according to our means and our disposal
in order to live the consecration and promote it among others.
But coming back to prayer, it is also an act of the will.
And in one particular passage on prayer, he says it's essentially obedience.
That the person who obeys has the spirit of prayer.
The person who does not obey does not have the spirit of prayer.
Because in the end, our union with God, our union with Our Blessed Mother,
is dependent upon that act of will by which we bind ourselves to God's will.
And the whole of our prayer is directed toward that union and that binding.
And so, that's why also St. Maximilian says,
sometimes it doesn't even consist so much in the things that we say
or in the particular moments of prayer, however important they are.
And they're extraordinarily important.
But the spirit of prayer, which also St. Francis talks about in the Rule,
is dependent really on the spirit of obedience.
And this is what we see converging in this very brief dialogue
between the angel and Our Blessed Mother at the Annunciation.
Our Lady enters into prayer.
She hears the Word of God.
She receives it in her heart.
She embraces it with her heart and her mind.
And then she says yes to God.
And if we were to do that every day,
if we were to be open to God's Word,
as it's manifested not only to us through the teaching of the Church,
but through the will of our superiors,
and our state in life,
and the duties of our state in life,
and then to accept it into our minds and our hearts,
and lift that up to God in an act of obedience,
we would have the spirit of prayer.
And hopefully we do.
But St. Maximilian makes it very, very clear
that that is the true spirit of prayer.
And it's not to be found in altered states of consciousness
or in pious feelings.
You know, feelings or warm, fuzzy feelings.
But in this radical, unlimited commitment to the will of God
as it's manifested to us in our state in life,
through the very practical demands of obedience and our duty.
We need to lift these things up to God.
And then we know we are praying well.
We need to have a strong will,
because everything hinges on the will.
And we need to be determined and persevering in our resolutions
to lift our hearts and our minds and our lives to God.
But we need to be doing the will of God and not our own will.
And it's our will more than anything else that needs to be broken.
It is our will more than anything else that needs to be mortified.
To be mortified and sacrificed and given up to God.
To the extent that we do that,
is to the extent that we will be pleasing to God
and will become saints and give Him glory.
To the extent that we remain self-willed
and determined by our own choices,
is to the extent that we will fail to do that.
No matter what else we might think is going on in our spiritual life,
no matter how pious or high-minded we might think we are acting,
self-will is destructive to our spiritual and our religious lives.
It is obedience which is the spirit of prayer.
So let us ask our Blessed Lady to give us the will,
the desire and the inspiration to really give ourselves up
completely to God's plan,
as our Blessed Mother did,
so that we can be open to the grace that God wants to give us
in the mystery of Christmas,
in the mystery of the Holy Sacrifice, the Mass,
and in the mystery of grace as it comes to us each day
as we have an opportunity to do our duty,
to be obedient and to live the spirit of prayer.
Let us pray.
.