Today the Church celebrates the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The feasts, solemnities, and memorials of the Church year are not holidays the way the secular word understands the term—they are holy days, and they are holy in at least two senses. First, they are holy because they are remembrances of the saving acts of God in the life of Christ and the saints. They give us an opportunity to consecrate time, to set it apart as an offering of thanksgiving and praise to the Most Holy Trinity.
But Christian remembrance is not a mere mental rehearsal of the past. Because Christ is God, it took His actions in His life on earth and His actions in the members of His Mystical Body up into the eternity of God. When we celebrate the remembrance of these saving events, God re-presents to us the effects of these events. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Recalling the mysteries of redemption, [the Church] opens up to the faithful the riches of her Lord’s powers and merits, so that these are in some way made present in every age; the faithful lay hold of them and are filled with saving grace.” (n. 1163)
The feast days of the Church are holy because they, in fact, make us holy. Implied in this statement as well is the idea that we receive graces particular to the mysteries that we celebrate on a particular day. By focusing on the particular mysteries of redemption as they play out through the Church year, the Church “unfolds the whole mystery of Christ.” (ibid.)
If this is all true, what acts of God, what “mysteries of redemption” do we celebrate when remember and honor the Immaculate Heart of Mary? What graces might we expect on such a feast day?
Before we answer these questions, we may want to ask another question: why would the Church give us a feast in remembrance of someone’s heart, even someone as privileged as Our Lady? When the Church speaks of the heart, she is using an ancient and very biblical manner of speaking, what I am tempted to call a “sacred synecdoche.” The heart is never just the mere biological organ for the scriptural and ecclesiastical writers. The heart’s connection to blood makes it representative of all of human life, especially those aspects of life most important to people. Its location in the body connects the heart to all that is innermost in the human person. Thus the heart is sometimes considered the seat of the intellect (“Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart”) and at other times the seat of the will (“For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, etc”).
The Scriptures consider the heart the organ of love, but not romantic love. The love of the heart sacrifices itself for the beloved. “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart…” The heart is a privileged place of encountering the Law of God. “These commandments are to be upon your hearts” (Deut 6:6). It is where we are supposed to meet the Word of God. “Your word have I hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Ps 119:11). In the messianic age, the prophets promised that God would give His people new hearts, which the Christian tradition has always connected to the gift of the Holy Spirit. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” (Rom 5:5). If we are in the state of grace, the heart is where God dwells within us.
Since this is true for every believer, it is true in a preeminent way for Mary. She stored up the Scriptures in her heart, which is why we find so many scriptural echoes in her Magnificat. Mary pondered the saving works of God in her heart, a fact important enough to Luke that he mentions it twice in his gospel. When she stood at the Cross with her Son, her heart was pierced by a sword, as Simeon had prophesied thirty years before.
Our Lady’s heart is full of love like no other human being’s heart has ever been, before or since. She said “Yes!” to the incarnation, demonstrating her great love of God, and her life was a continual repetition of that fiat. She showed her love of neighbor in her concern for her cousin Elizabeth, rushing to her side when she heard about her pregnancy. She showed her love to the unnamed newlyweds in the gospel of John, wanting to save them the embarrassment of running out of wine at the bridal feast.
Because Our Lady is immaculate and because of her unique calling to be the Mother of God, the Holy Spirit filled her heart in a way that no other human being has been filled. Her heart became a temple of the Most Holy Trinity, a perfectly pure and fitting dwelling place for the Son of God. In the striking thought of St Augustine, Mary conceived the Word in her heart before she conceived him in her womb.
This is why we honor the heart of Mary. In her heart, we see the reflection of the love poured out in the Sacred Heart. Love answers love, heart answers heart. As the moon reflects the light of the sun, so her heart reflects the heart of her Son.
St John Eudes, one of the greatest devotees of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, was fond of speaking of the “Most Admirable Heart of Mary.” That’s what we want to do on this memorial, at least in the first instance. We want to wonder, to gaze in astonishment and awe and reverence at Mary’s heart. Let’s never cease to be amazed that a human being like ourselves could respond so fully, so freely to God’s love. Let’s wonder anew at the depth and completeness of Mary’s love. We want to thank God once again for all the many great things He has done for her, in her, and through her, because she so opened her heart to God that He chose to dwell within her.
And when we have made sufficient time to contemplate the heart of Mary, we want to move from admiration to imitation. The collect prayer for feast gives the best indication of what graces we might receive today, should our own hearts be open:
Father,
you prepared the heart of the Virgin Mary
to be a fitting home for your Holy Spirit.
By her prayers
may we become a more worthy temple of your glory.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
Mary’s heart is full of grace, so full of grace that the graces God has given her constantly overflow and spill out onto the rest of us. Let’s open our hearts to those graces, so that like Mary’s heart, our hearts may become the dwelling place of God.
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Yes, “She showed her love to the unnamed newlyweds in the gospel of John, wanting to save them the embarrassment of running out of wine at the bridal feast.”
And carrying the meditation further, Mary invited the servants to very simply “do whatever He tells you.” Isn’t this Mary extending her “fiat” to them and to all of us? She who was without original sin did not doubt; she merely wondered how it could be, and was told that “nothing is impossible for God.” So, water into wine. Same for us who are within earshot and within the Church.