Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
In the dispensations of divine providence,
God permitted our blessed Lord and Savior to be lost for three days
and allowed his mother and his foster father, St. Joseph,
to grieve and to worry and to search to find Jesus.
And when they found him,
our Lord began to reveal to them a mystery,
which they did not understand.
And some of the new biblical scholarship,
really a kind of false,
false,
scholarship,
Gnosticism,
explains our Lord's exchange with his mother in the temple
as an exchange between someone who didn't really know he was God
and his mother, who obviously, if he didn't know, she didn't know either.
And so our lady was surprised to find Jesus in the temple,
according to this narrative.
And didn't understand why he was referring to it as his father's house.
This particular narrative of the finding in the temple
tends to favor, of course, the Protestant rejection of the Blessed Virgin
and even militates against the belief in the divinity of Christ.
A far more faith-filled Catholic and pious interpretation,
which is attributed to the Fathers of the Church,
the great and holy interpreters of sacred scripture,
would start with the fact that the Blessed Mother knew who Jesus was.
He knew who he was, obviously.
So our lady, because of the dialogue with the angel at the Annunciation,
because of her great wisdom and holiness,
because of her immaculate conception,
because of her purity of heart,
because she is the seed of wisdom,
also knew who Jesus was
and was not particularly surprised to find him at the temple
or to hear him refer to the temple as his father's house.
But none of what our Lord and our lady said to each other
made it clear to her, St. Joseph,
exactly why.
Why our Lord had done what he had done.
Why he had disappeared for three days.
He had done it deliberately.
He had left, gone back to Jerusalem or stayed within Jerusalem
and allowed his parents to leave without him
and apparently didn't try to find them.
He was busy about his father's affairs.
He was in his father's house and he was teaching,
as though it was what he was supposed to do,
which of course it was.
And so when our lady asked him this perfectly legitimate question
as to why he had disappeared,
he gave her an answer which was exactly the correct answer,
but it wasn't immediately apparent how it was to explain our Lord's behavior.
Did you not know I must be in my father's house?
So, we have to ask ourselves this question.
Did you not know I must be in my father's house?
So, we have to ask ourselves this question.
So, his parents, Our Lady and Saint Joseph,
didn't know what he meant.
They didn't understand.
Even Our Lady, seat of wisdom, immaculate conception,
holier than all the angels and the saints put together,
full of faith, didn't understand.
But she was open to the truth, of course, and ready to embrace it.
But she was open to the truth, of course, and ready to embrace it.
And so, at the end of this particular passage,
we are told by Saint Luke,
who would have interviewed the Blessed Mother,
so it was the Blessed Mother that told the Evangelist Saint Luke
about the finding in the temple.
It says, and his mother kept all these things in her heart.
So she deposited the event, the enigma of his having disappeared.
She deposited it into her heart.
She deposited it into her heart.
The event and also our Lord's words, his answer.
Did you not know I must be in my father's house?
And this is the way of the pilgrim,
the way of the one who is on the road.
One of the ways in which the fathers of the church described man
is to call him homo viator, man on the way.
We are on the road.
We are on a pilgrimage in this veil of tears.
We are going from this life to the next.
And it's not always easy to get where we need to go.
Our Lord says we know where we are going and we know the way,
he says to Philip.
But in our weakness and because of the temptations we experience,
we are not always confident of the road that our Lord has put
our feet upon.
And so in the face of suffering and uncertain futures,
in the face of challenges to our expectations of the way things ought to be
or the way we think we would like them to be,
we don't understand.
And that is both a suffering and a
purification.
We'd like to have everything all laid out for us.
We'd like to know in detail what God's will for us is.
When we are searching for our vocation, we would like to hear the bells go off when we
find it.
But God doesn't always operate in that way, precisely because in order to grow and make
progress in the spiritual life, we need to really think.
To think as the Blessed Mother thought,
we need to deposit in our hearts the truth of
Christ and the difficulties that we encounter
in our life.
In prayer, we need to lift all of that up to God and
seek the understanding that only God can give.
There is a definition.
of theology in the academic sense, but it also can be used more broadly because theology simply
means the knowledge of God. One of the definitions of theology, I think St. Anselm called it faith
seeking understanding. If we want to understand, we need to have faith. The way the world operates is
that it wants to understand first before it believes. So we want to have everything laid
out for us and proved to us and made clear to us that it's going to work out the way we expect,
and then we'll say yes, maybe. But when God confronts us with his truth,
he is asking us, first of all, not to believe in something.
It's not in the first place to believe in a doctrine or in a moral code, although it
certainly includes it. It's not in the first place to believe in a doctrine or in a moral code,
but it certainly includes that. It's first of all to believe in him, to believe that he tells us
the truth, that he won't deceive us. And we have to say yes. And we don't always understand.
But it's not always necessary for us to understand either, as it wasn't necessary for Our Lady to
understand at the moment that Our Lord spoke to her in the temple how it was that he had come
to stay behind in Jerusalem.
It wasn't necessary. What was necessary was for Our Lady to listen to what he said and to keep that
in her heart and have it there deposited for the moment in which Our Lord would make things more
clear to her. It's like Lucia at Fatima. We celebrate First Saturday every month in fulfillment
of Our Lady's request at Fatima. Sister Lucia,
received the visions of Our Blessed Lady with her two cousins in 1917 and shortly after that
entered the convent. And from time to time she was requested by the Holy See and her superiors
to write about what had happened. And so she wrote her memoirs.
She talked about her life and the lives of Francisco and Jacinta. And she recorded the
narrative of the apparitions and the first Saturday apparitions later on in Tui, Spain.
But she remained largely silent on what it all meant to her until in the year 2000 she was
requested by John Paul. And then she was requested by the Holy See. And so she was requested by the
Cardinal Ratzinger to write about what she understood. And so she had, what was it, 83 years
to think about what Our Lady had told her and what had happened to her at Fatima.
And so in obedience to the church, she sat down and she wrote what was in her heart,
what she believed Our Lady wanted us,
to understand and what she wanted us to do and what the messages meant.
This is the final memoir of Lucia, which is called Calls of the Message of Fatima,
which is in print. And I highly recommend that you read Lucia's account of her own understanding.
Certainly when she was, what was it, nine or ten years old, she didn't fully understand the
import of Our Lady's words. She knew that Our Lady,
had come for an important reason, but she was only nine years old.
But Our Lady told her that God had chosen her and that she was to remain behind on this earth while
Francisco and Jacinta were going to heaven because Our Lady wanted her to learn to read and write so
that she would be able to hand on her message, which she did behind the grill, you know, of a
convent, a contemplative convent. And so she was able to hand on her message, which she did behind the grill, you know, of a convent, a contemplative convent.
And so she was able to hand on her message, which she did behind the grill, you know, of a convent, a contemplative convent.
and then, kind of wonder, at least I kind of wonder
if considering the fact that she was for the most part silent,
you know, she really didn't have a lot of contact with lay people or with anyone really.
She was a contemplative nun and she only wrote a very discreet amount of
material, you know,
two or three hundred pages over the course of those 83 years.
And it wasn't until the year 2000 that she finally wrote
what she understood the message is to be about kind of wonder if maybe that last book was
really what our lady was talking about when she told her that she was to remain behind and
and pass on her message but the point here is that she had 83 years to do it a long time
to come to understand what it was that our lady wanted of her and and that you know
effort on the part of lucia and the part of each and every one of us
is fraught with difficulty but it is where we find the grace of god and so as we try to fulfill
our lady's requests at fatima and offer a sacrifice that is pleasing to god as we offer
you know these communions and reparation for sins committed against our lady's immaculate heart
we can also um lift up the
to god those crosses that we carry and that bring you know this sort of
anxiety into our souls about the future or about you know what we're to do with
problems or temptations or our sinfulness we need to lift this up to god and and know that
he's working in our hearts and in our souls and and that the the journey you know our way
along the road of our pilgrimage
is supposed to be the way it is it's not easy it is difficult and we need to lift up our hearts and
know that god has promised us paradise that in the end the immaculate heart will triumph
our lord was merciful this is the thing our lord was merciful to the blessed mother
when he disappeared
for three days. Any mother who has ever even momentarily lost her child can appreciate the
terror that one might experience as Our Lady experienced the loss of Jesus, not just for a
few moments, but for three days. And yet, this was a mercy from God, because in the end Our Lady
would understand that God was preparing her for Our Lord's suffering and death, and that
she would need to be vigilant and to wait for three days for Our Lord to return to His Father's
house, the temple of His body, after His death on the cross.
And that's how Our Lady became, in a sense, it's how Our Lady was prepared to stand at the foot of
the cross and be vigilant, and then to lay Our Lord's body in the tomb and wait for the resurrection
without even needing to go to the tomb to verify that it was empty. Our Lady didn't need to do that.
Because she believed what Our Lord had told her, because she had kept all these things in her
heart, and she had remained faithful to Him under the cross. She had accepted in her heart all of
those difficulties, all of those swords. You know, this is the, what is it, the third sword
in Our Lady's pierced heart. Of the seven swords, this is the third one. And this third sword,
prepared Our Lady for the fifth one, you know, when Our Lord would suffer and die upon the cross.
So we lift up our hearts today to Our Blessed Mother, to her sorrowful and immaculate heart,
and ask her to make our communions pure and pleasing to God, and make them capable truly of
making reparation for the sins committed against her immaculate heart. The sins of rejection,
the sins of sin, the sins of sin, the sins of sin, the sins of sin, the sins of sin, the sins of sin,
the sins of neglect, the sins of blasphemy against her heart. We ask that we might share
a bit, a small part, have a small part in her sorrows, so that we can also have a small part,
a large part, in her joys, and in her glory, and ultimately in the triumph of her immaculate heart.
Amen.
Amen.