The Old Testament was a kind of X-ray preview of the spiritual good things to come, a preview written by God in the actual history and personalities and symbols of the life of the Israelites. This is why we have both the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Bible, and this is why the Liturgy and the Fathers of the Church jump back and forth from one to the other. The New Covenant fulfills the Old which was intended to foreshadow the New and in some measure to lead to it.
It would have been surprising if the Golden House of God [Solomon’s Temple] in the old Jerusalem were not an X-ray preview of something far better in the New. And God, who had wanted a great and magnificent shrine built by Solomon for an imperfect law written on cold stone and signed by His people in olden days, wanted another shrine for what would cause His union with His people in these latter days, a shrine for the burning law of fire, of love, of Christ.
A house of gold was needed, a new and better one. An ark of the covenant was needed, a new and better one. And it had to enshrine the very cause of man’s eternal life, our glory and our joy.
This rich new Temple was a Temple of the Holy Spirit who overshadowed it. And it was much more reverently built and much more beautifully adorned than the work of Solomon in all his glory.
The lovely Temple in which the cause of our redemption was enshrined was a young girl called Mary. And she was very young and very beautiful with great simplicity and very frail. And the angel Gabriel came in to see Her with a message from the Lord. Now all the angels in the Bible knew the courtesy of calling people by their names. But when the angel saw the loveliness of Mary he forgot Her name and called Her what he saw, “Hail, full of grace.” . . .
One of the very few phrases God said at the moment of man’s redemption was: “Behold your Mother.” And the beloved disciple, John, took her unto his own, as every beloved disciple must. I wonder just how much St. John’s consecration to Our Lady accounts for his profound understanding of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I wonder how far that consecration to Mary was responsible for his ability in old age to write the most sublime contemplative gospel. And I wonder how fair it was responsible for changing him from one the “sons of thunder” into the beloved old man preaching nothing but the strength of love and simplicity. . . .
If you want a picture of something that cannot be pictured, if you want a picture of how we go to Jesus through Mary, you can imagine it like this: You are kneeling before Him, telling Him of your love and desires and needs, and He is looking at you with those eyes that melt the very soul with their love and compassion. And while you are praying like this, Our Lady comes in very quietly, and She stands behind you without distracting you. And She puts her lovely hands on your shoulders and perhaps gently pushes you a little closer to Her Son. And as Our Lord sees His Mother there, and sees Her claiming you as Her own and supporting you, and that you belong to one another, His eyes light up even more, and He could not refuse you anything you asked, even if He wanted to
God loved us so much that He found expressing this love in His words through Patriarchs and Prophets quite inadequate, and He had to come in Person and speak with His own lips. And as if He found that inadequate to express His love, He had to demonstrate it by His Passion and the Cross. If He loved US like that, how must He love His Mother Herself? It cannot be expressed in words, not even in the inspired words of the Canticle of Solomon. He loves everything about Her. He loves every gesture and mannerism. He loves Her way of seeing and expressing and arranging things. He is terribly proud of Her. Everything that reminds Him of Her fills Him with delight. . . .
[And so] Our Lord does not only want us to be holy and have grace. He wants to give us the grace-filled gestures and mannerisms, as it were, of Mary. Grace comes through Her hands; it comes to us molded or colored by Our Lady’s character and personality. It has a Marian coloring. She clothes us with it. The Holy Spirit has Our Lady’s cooperation in our souls molding them into the likeness of Christ. Our Lord resembles His Mother very much in many ways. God’s grace, in making us children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ, makes us children of Mary too. She molds us into Christ. . . .
From all this, and many other thoughts the Saints and Fathers of the Church bring to our minds, it is clear that our attitude to Mary, our devotion to Her, cannot be the same as that we have for any other Saint. If our eyes are open and we want to live consciously by the grace of God and in the way that grace comes to us, we must have a relationship with Mary that can only be described as a very special consecration. . . .
. . . there is only one True Devotion to Our Lady, and there is only one act of proper consecration to Her. It consists in giving Her everything that we are free to give Her. It entails giving Her the right to do what She wants with everything about us and everything we possess: our possessions, our prayers, our intentions, our life for God. If it is lawful and virtuous for those who are called to give a fairly comprehensive surrender of themselves to God through religious superiors, certainly the shortest, safest and most fruitful way to reach union with God if we are so called is by consecrating ourselves completely to the Mother of God, given to us as our Mother at the foot of the Cross.
. . . If we do make the radical, complete consecration to Her that is the only adequate response to Her Motherhood, we have to regard all that we have and do as Hers. That money we spend, those thoughts we had, that use of our eyes and hands and heart, that thing we are so fond of that our neighbor wants to borrow, does Our Lady want him to have it? . . .
. . . The greatest argument one can put to those who think a total surrender to Our Lady is excessive or decreases one’s union with Her Son is to get them to try it and see. If it were possible to give too much to Her, Our Lady would not take it. We receive the Holy Child of Mary from Her hands and in them, or we do not receive Him at all. There is only one Mystical Body of Christ, and Our Lady is not just one member of it; She is the Mother of the whole Christ.