How Mary's Queenship Acts on Us
She is always, in her
relations with him and her relations with us, the Mother of Jesus.
If one cannot be without acting what can be the activity
of Mary, so profoundly ordered to Jesus, if not to express him as the Word of
her heart, and to draw all to him by bringing him to birth in all those who are
to live by him?
That Mary should give us Jesus and should obtain for us
all that makes him live in us, that is what we mean by calling her Mediatrix of
All Graces: which means nothing but this - that she is always, in her relations
with him and her relations with us, the Mother of Jesus. Just as her being has
Christ for its centre, so has her action. Her influence is wherever the Saviour
is to come to dwell, wherever there shines any reflection of his life. That is
to say she is universal - according to her own mode, which is to efface herself
in Jesus. So that her unique aim is to produce in us a union ever more
immediate and personal with Jesus.
We know from experience that as genius is purer and
virtue more perfect, they tend the more to quicken our true personality by
communicating to us something of their own intimacy with the light. The
infinite transparence of the Virgin can have no other effect than to develop
such a transparence in us, that the brightness of the Word may flood in upon us
wholly.
She is not our last end, but she is the sacrament by
which our last end sets energising in us its luminous magnetism. She renders
our being ever more present to God, ever more interior to the life of Jesus, as
we are more filially receptive to her material influence.
But she does not intervene in that supreme communion in
which the soul, face to face with its Lord - in the night of this life or the
morning of the beatific vision - hears the unique word which stirs in it the
unique response by which is consummated the ineffable union that God contracted
with it in the mysterious espousals of baptism.
She is not the Source but the "aqueduct"
through which the Source flows to us; she is not Wisdom but the Seat of Wisdom;
she is not Life but the enclosed garden in which the river of Life springs up.
In her, as in the Church, it is always Jesus we meet....
Just as the great cathedrals, under the name of Our Lady,
are tabernacles of the Host, so Mary gleams in the Church as his Monstrance.
Father Zundel (d. 1975)
was a Swiss mystic, poet, philosopher, liturgist, and author.
was a Swiss mystic, poet, philosopher, liturgist, and author.