The Most Devout Virgin
THE MOST DEVOUT VIRGIN
To be devout is to be devoted. We know what is meant by a devoted wife or daughter. It is one whose thoughts center in the person so deeply loved, so tenderly cherished. She follows him about with her eyes; she is ever seeking some means of serving him; and, if her services are very small in their character, that only shows how intimate they are, and how incessant. And especially if the object of her love be weak, or in pain, or near to die, still more intensely does she live in his life, and know nothing but him.
This intense devotion towards our Lord, forgetting self in love for Him, is instanced in St. Paul, who says, “I know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” And again, “I live, [yet] now not I, but Christ lives in me; and [the life] that I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself for me.”
But great as was St. Paul’s devotion to our Lord, much greater was that of the Blessed Virgin; because she was His Mother, and because she had Him and all His sufferings actually before her eyes, and because she had the long intimacy of thirty years with Him, and because she was from her special sanctity so ineffably near to Him in spirit. When, then, He was mocked, bruised, scourged, and nailed to the Cross, she felt as keenly as if every indignity and torture inflicted on Him was struck at herself. She could have cried out in agony at every pang of His.
To be devout is also to be a martyr. She was a martyr without the rude dishonor that accompanied the sufferings of martyrs. The martyrs were seized, haled about, thrust into prison with the vilest criminals, and assailed with the most blasphemous and foulest speeches that Satan could inspire. Our Lord was buffeted, stripped, scourged, mocked, dragged about, and then stretched, nailed, lifted up on a high cross, to the gaze of a brutal multitude.
But He, who bore the sinner’s shame for sinners, spared His mother, who was sinless, the supreme indignity. Not in the body, but in the soul, she suffered. In His Agony she was agonized; in His passion she suffered a like-passion; she was crucified with Him; the spear that pierced His chest pierced through her spirit. Yet there were no visible signs of this intimate martyrdom; she stood up, still, collected, motionless, solitary, under the Cross of her Son, surrounded by Angels, and shrouded in her virginal sanctity from the notice of all who were taking part in His crucifixion.
–Meditations on the Litany of Loretto for the Month of May