Today we celebrate the birthday of our Heavenly Mother, Our Lady, the Mother of Jesus.
This is a great day of celebration and joy, a day of beauty, a day of love, a day of sentiment, a day of intimacy, really.
You know, when you think of a birthday of your own mother, earthly mother, there's those sentiments of thankfulness and gratitude and joy.
And we want to do everything we can for our mother and make it a special day for her.
Take her out to, you know, balloons.
And cake and ice cream and all this family gathering together to all celebrate the great gift of our mother, to celebrate.
And everyone comes together.
And we all, children of Our Lady, all of us in the whole world, even the souls in heaven, all celebrate the birthday of our common Heavenly Mother who has done so much for us.
And how grateful we are, how full of gratitude and full of love.
And that just wells up in our heart.
It's a day of sentiment, a day of gratitude for Our Lady, a day of intimacy to our mother who is so personal to us.
It's not, we're not sharing her where we have her for all our own.
She's ours.
She's ours individually.
And we are thankful for what she has individually suffered for us and did for us when she was here on earth and what she continues to do.
For all.
For all eternity in our days here on earth until the end of our life.
And then for all eternity, she will lavish, she has lavished so many graces and goodness to us.
So many of the mercies of Jesus Christ.
And she holds out hope to us.
She is our hope.
And we possess her.
We have her.
We cannot lose her.
And we're just full of that gratitude that perhaps no other feast of Our Lady.
Gives to us and that, that intimacy, that intimacy with her.
And it's a day, it's a very special day of celebration for this gift that God has given to us.
This greatest gift after our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Eucharist is our, our heavenly mother.
And we cherish this gift as a greatest treasure that we hold close and dear to our heart.
And, and of course, we don't want to just make it a day of sentiment.
It is a day of.
We want to well up with sentiments of joy and thankfulness and love for Our Lady.
But we want to go beyond sentiment to, you know, giving of ourselves.
It's a day to give to Our Lady and not, not, not so much a day of taking.
But a day of giving of ourselves to her and our consecration to her.
Renewing that consecration and making it more meaningful and more deep.
And strengthening our commitment to our service of Our Lady, of our giving of our whole selves to her.
Especially in our religious consecration.
And those of us Franciscans of the Immaculate who have taken a vow of total consecration to her.
How it's, how we want to renew that.
And we, we restate our total commitment to live that out fully and totally and, and really.
And.
With that true, true meaning for Our Lady.
And I think nothing says it better than the, the praises that St. Maximilian gives of Our Lady.
And the consecration that we Franciscans of the Immaculate pray every day.
How we want to just give everything to Our Lady.
To exalt her.
To glorify her.
To praise her.
To the, to the, to the skies.
To the ends of the earth.
To do everything.
To shout.
To shout our, our joy and thanksgiving and, and love for Our Lady.
And these are the words of St. Maximilian.
Allow me to praise you, O Most Holy Virgin, with my personal commitment and sacrifice.
Allow me to live, work, suffer, be consumed and die for you.
Just for you.
Allow me to bring the whole world to you.
Allow me to contribute to your ever greater exaltation.
To your greatest possible exaltation.
Allow me to give you such glory that no one else
has ever given you up to now.
Allow others to surpass me in zeal for your exaltation.
And me to surpass them.
So that by means of such noble rivalry, your glory may increase ever more profoundly,
ever more rapidly, ever more intensely, as he who has exalted you,
so indescribably above all of the beings himself desires.
We can imagine St. Maximilian writing this perhaps on the day of the birthday of Our Lady where,
you know, the desire to just give everything to Our Lady is ours,
is in our hearts on this day.
So we give her our praise and our love and our joy and our prayers,
special prayers to her, but also our resolutions of reform
and ourselves to her, to make ourselves better,
better children of Our Lady, not to offend Our Lady, but especially on this day to just
to make it a special day of gift to to Our Lady, to be on our best behavior today
in particular, but but throughout throughout after after today,
we want to to be on our best behavior more and more every day.
And these these days of this feast day of Our Lady is a special boost
to us in our in our living out of our consecration, our love for Our Lady,
our commitment to her and she she in
and gives herself to us and she gives us hope and consolation and
and joy and encouragement on our path to virtue,
imitating the virtues of our Heavenly Mother each day of our life.
her.
.