It's Our Lady who teaches us the love of God, that means concretely the love of Jesus.
Not in the first instance because she is an academician, for she wasn't, but that does
not mean she was ignorant.
We have come to have the prejudice that those who don't have a PhD from Tupiggen, from Oxford,
and from Princeton, just to take three examples, don't know anything.
That is not the case at all.
No one knows the child as the mother.
No one knows Jesus, our Savior, our Lord, our God, as does Our Lady, His Mother.
That is why if we are to know that which is the truth itself and not miss this truth or
that truth, which we know only fully when we know
—
this truth and that truth in relation to the truth,
to the one who said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Our Lady, because she is his mother, is also our teacher.
She is also our mother in the spirit.
That which our Lord refers in the Gospel,
passage taken from St. John, chapter 19.
Woman, behold thy son.
Son, behold thy mother.
Our Lady completed her vocation as mother at the foot of the cross.
To this our Lord refers.
And for this reason, we learn from her,
in the first instance, who Jesus is.
Just as all of us learn the basics about life,
who we are from our mother.
G.K. Chesterton once remarked,
and if you don't learn those things from her, you never will.
You waste the rest of your time in school
until you're old enough to go out and dig graves.
These things we must ponder carefully,
because if we draw close to our Lady, if we love her,
devotion is simply perfect love,
intensely perfect love,
then we will be also devoted to Jesus.
We will love Jesus as she does.
And when we love him in that way,
we will have no difficulty standing at the foot of the cross.
We will have no difficulty preferring,
with profound desire, to share the cross,
rather than to be, even in the slightest way,
separated from him through sin.
So dear brothers and sisters, as we continue our retreat,
our retreat,
and our reflection,
we shall understand it's not a choice between Jesus or Mary.
It's simply a choice of Jesus and Mary.
Because the only way Jesus comes to us is through her.
It's utterly useless to argue,
well, he could have come any number of other ways.
No, he only came this way,
and that's the only way he's ever going to come.
And the only way in which we go to him is through her.
What do we have in common?
We have the same mother.
And with that, we come also to have the same Father as Jesus.
We can ask the Father whatever we wish, in his name.
And so long as it is in his name,
there will always be an answer.
Our Lord taught us how to pray.
At the conclusion of the part of the canon that's called the consecration,
to him, through him, with him, in him.
We give praise to the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
And then, after we have joined our Lord,
embraced the cross with him,
adored him on the cross,
and placed all our hope in him,
we gather with the whole church to praise him,
as Jesus taught us to pray.
If you reflect on each of those petitions of the Lord's Prayer,
hallowed be thy name.
How could we hallow the Father's name more than by offering him
of all the things that he has given us, the choicest, his own Son, and so on.
And then, particularly, the fifth,
give us this day our daily bread.
In olden times, it was translated super substantial to
underscore, but it's not only to our daily bread.
Indeed, we pray for that, too.
The daily bread that comes from the supermarket,
rather than from the Mother's oven.
But this bread comes from the Mother.
It is she who prepared the body and the blood.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And in a few moments,
the prayer will be fulfilled super abundantly.
We will eat of his flesh and drink of his blood.
And we will know the promise that he has given to us.
Who eats worthily of my flesh and drinks worthily of my blood
will not die.
I will raise him up on the last day.
That is the stupendous exaltation
that comes from identifying with our crucified Savior,
striving to be an extension of his holiness,
of his goodness, of his love, of his mercy,
and knowing that all appearances to the contrary,
even when we die, we continue to live.
And one day, we too will know the glory of the resurrection.
Praise be Jesus and Mary.
Amen.