Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
May the Lord Jesus give you his peace.
We start off with the first reading this morning from the book of the Prophet Daniel,
from the very beginning of the book, about the placing of vessels from the temple of God.
They're being carried off to another land, and those vessels go into the temple treasury of his God,
of a strange God.
And we also are given another treasury in the Gospel reading, which occurred in the temple.
And this treasury, according to Venerable St. Bede in Greek,
is philassine, means to keep.
Oftentimes you see that verb in terms of keeping the law.
And here it's to keep treasure, gauza, this Persian word for treasure.
And it's a place where the riches were kept so that the proper order of the temple might be administered to,
necessary use of the temple.
And it was in the porch or the room off of the court of the women in the temple area.
So it's kind of the...
the setting for where Jesus is, as he looks up and he sees all this going on.
There is also, by St. Bede, an interpretation that this widow,
kind of different spiritual interpretations, and this is one, would be the church.
This poor widow, according to St. Bede, is the simplicity of the church, which
the two small coins which she deposits in the treasury are love of God and love of neighbor.
And he writes,
The church sends her whole living into God's treasury,
because she...
understands that even her very living is not of her own desert,
but of divine grace.
And so,
we're going to
take that and
run with it in the direction of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
because this would seem to be a fairly important
text for Marian consecration in terms of investing treasure
with Our Lady.
Our Lady,
who
is,
in one sense,
the model of the church, exemplar of the church,
most preeminent member of the church.
She spends her whole living as the type of this poor widow into God's treasury,
because she understands that even her very living,
which she lives,
the very font of her existence,
the grace of the Immaculate Conception,
is not of her own desert or merit or personal justice,
but only of the divine grace,
which is the provenient grace of the Immaculate Conception.
In Franciscan thought, St. Bonaventure,
will take up the two small coins that are deposited into this treasury,
and he'll use them to talk about St. Francis,
and that St. Francis, the poor man of Christ,
this is from the Major Life 9,
had nothing other than two small coins,
namely his body and his soul,
in which he could give away in generous charity.
And he offered them continuously,
both through abstinence and the rigor of fasting,
and also through the spirit of desire,
his soul.
And
the offering, of course, is meant to be total.
And with Marian consecration,
we're plugged into
basically the total offering
of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The two coins that are deposited
are also quite interesting,
because they only occur in a couple
places
in Sacred Scripture.
And the one that we hear,
there's a parallel of this text in St. Mark's Gospel,
and we're in St. Luke this morning,
is called a lepton,
or lepton,
and in the context of where we find them,
both these two lepto will make a quadrons,
which is basically a fourth of something,
are usually in the context of,
like we got the poor widow this morning,
there's some,
there's great merit in what she's doing
in the eyes of our Lord.
This is something very praiseworthy,
and, but there's also another context
in which these coins
are more along the lines of
making a lepton,
or a lepton,
or more along the lines of
making due for what one has done wrong.
For example,
in Luke 12,
59,
I truly say to you,
in no way shall you come forth from there,
this prison, until all of which,
and every time,
the last lepton you should repay,
or this last coin that you should repay.
And so there's an element also there
of making satisfaction for things
that we've done wrong.
And there's just a few instances where this occurs,
these themes of basically something that's praiseworthy,
merit,
and also something that is being done in
payment for that
which we have done wrong.
Technically that's called satisfaction.
So these two facets of spiritual wealth
are being reflected in the very
coins that we see in sacred scripture.
Now this
poor widow puts in all her living,
and
it's, in the Greek it says
all her bios,
study biology bios,
about the life.
And in sacred scripture
this bios is all about
temporal life and how short it is,
and it can be lengthened if we spend it
wisely.
But she spent all of it,
all of her living,
all that she had to live on,
in the temple treasury.
There's a couple other places where those
two terms are put together,
this all, and also
this living.
One is Proverbs 31, 12,
which is all about the valiant woman
whereby
we're told this great
and ideal wife.
For she, this valiant woman, employs all her
living for her husband's good.
Everything that she's given
is for the good of her husband.
We also see in the Song of Songs
where the opposite
is the case. If a man should give
all his livelihood for love,
men would
treat it with utter contempt.
And there might be a reason
for that, whether you've got these two polar opposites.
One can give, like this poor
widow, her entire livelihood.
One, or basically the rest of
mankind, cannot give.
And the reason might come from
1 John 2, 16,
because according to
1 John 2, 16, there's a
triple concupiscence, and
there's a lust of the flesh, there's a lust of the
eyes, and there's also a pride
of this kind of life.
It's a triple concupiscence.
So what we can give to the Lord,
is very, very limited
from what it should be,
except for one. And that one is this poor widow
who compared to all others who out of
the riches of which they had the
abundance, which will later
assert will be grace,
she gave her entire livelihood,
and her entire livelihood
is this fullness of grace.
That's everything
for her. And consequently
it's a whole person at the same time.
So,
we're looking at this
passage from St. Luke as a
type of marrying consecration, of how
Our Lady gave her all, and how we
plug into that.
And it's,
it deals around, or moves
around those two
facets of
spiritual wealth, merits
and satisfactions. This is what we heard
last night from the Office of Readings,
which is quite appropriate from St. Leo
the Great. He writes about
where your treasure is, there
also will your heart be.
What is man's treasure but the heaping
up of profits and the fruit of his toil?
For whatever a man sows, this
too will he reap. And each man's
gain matches his toil.
And where delight and enjoyment are found,
there the heart's desire is
attached. So,
this is an examination of conscience always
in terms of what do I delight
in? What do I delight in?
And that shows us where our heart
is. Now there are many kinds of
wealth and a variety of grounds for
rejoicing. Every man's treasure is that which
he desires. If it is based
on earthly ambitions, its
acquisition makes men not blessed but
rather wretched. And he goes on to talk
about the
basically amassing such wealth
and how it can be stored away safely.
And that's very much what we've
done with Marian Consecration that we're
been charged with
of spreading throughout the
world so that people can really be
in this safe bark of Peter
and the treasure that is amassed
is not wasted nor
pillaged. So this day
we turn to Our Lady with great trust as her
children and we ask
that the great gift of Marian Consecration
and the gift that we've been given in the Marian
vow may achieve its full fruition.
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