Lest You Remain

Topic XII : IN FOLLOWING CHRISTWITH MARY The Word of the Lord (Mk 3:31-35) Jesus and His Family. His mother and his brothers arrived. Standing out- side they sent word to him and called him. A crowd seated around him told him, “Your mother and your brothers [and your sisters] are outside asking for you.” But he said to them in reply, “Who are my mother and [my] brothers?” and looking around at those seated in the circle he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. [For] whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” Church’s Documents (John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter to All Consecrated Persons Belonging to Religious Communities and Secular Institutes on the Occasion of the Marian Year [May 22, 1988] Ad omnes peersonas consecratas ) While from a human point of view a person’s consecration can be compared to “losing one’s life”, it is also the most direct way of “finding” it. For Christ says: “He who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 10:39). These words certainly express the radical nature of the Gospel. At the same time we cannot fail to notice how much they apply to the human being, and what a unique anthropological dimension they have. What is more fundamental for a human being—man or woman—than precisely this: finding oneself, finding oneself in Christ, since Christ is the “whole fullness” (cf. Col 2:9)? These thoughts concerning the consecration of the person through the profes- sion of the evangelical counsels keep us constantly within the sphere of the Paschal Mystery. Together with Mary, let us seek to be sharers in this death which brought forth fruits of “new life” in the Resurrection: a death like this on the Cross was infa- mous, and it was the death of her own Son! But precisely there, at the foot of the Cross, “where she stood, not without a divine plan”, (4) did not Mary realize in a new way everything that she had already heard on the day of the Annunciation? Precisely there, precisely through “the sword which pierced her soul” (cf. Lk 2:35), through an incomparable “kenosis of faith”, (5) did not Mary perceive completely the full truth about her motherhood? Precisely there, did she not definitively identify herself with that truth, “rediscovering her soul”, the soul which, in the experience of Golgotha, she had to “lose” in the most painful way for the sake of Christ and the Gospel? It is precisely into this complete “rediscovery” of the truth about her divine motherhood which became Mary’s “part” from the moment of the Annunciation Program of Vigils 63