To Jesus, Through Mary?

I could honestly use some help with my Marian devotion. Simple explanations? I've read a book of articles written by Balthasar and Ratzinger about Mary as the Source of the Church and I just received some books on the Rosary (Balthasar's Threefold Garland and St. Louis de Montfort's The Secret of the Rosary) as well as a book by St. Louis de Montfort, True Devotion to Mary. But I just don't understand the "to Jesus, through Mary" thing. And St. Louis de Montfort's language sometimes pulls amens from me and at other times his language about Mary makes me squirm. I'm still only beginning Montfort's True Devotion to Mary so perhaps I simply need to give him the time to better explain. But I feel dense here. Like he keeps talking and his words are just bouncing off of stone walls (i.e. my head).

The thing is, I love the Rosary and I love the place that Mary has in our Church - I suppose my trouble is with St. Louis's understanding of Mary's place in our Church and lives. I'm not saying he's wrong or even that he has a different understanding than the the teaching of the Church. I just don't comprehend it yet - I don't get it. So pray for me. I think I'll be discussing the matter with my priest as well, but any suggestions or explanations you could provide, I'd appreciate. Perhaps I've been too general here to garner any specific response.

Maybe I could put it this way best: I understand the hows and whys of Marian doctrine, but cannot wrap my head/heart around Marian devotion. Maybe that seems schizophrenic, maybe it is. Maybe it's simply hardness of heart. Maybe it's some vestigial Evangelical theology in my brain. I don't know. But that's kind of where I am right now. Any help?

Update: My terminology is most likely skunked on this issue, but I'm just trying to figure out what's going on in my head and heart and Church. I understand Marian devotion - as much as that I pray the Rosary and other Marian prayers and continue to grow in love of our holy Mother. What I struggle with is the idea of, as St. Louis de Montfort, that seems to make Mary a necessary mediator to Jesus. I can understand a love for Mary and a desire to be close with her, but I don't understand the seeming stern necessity that Montfort makes of devotion to Mary.

And either I don't understand Montfort or I don't understand the Church, but Montfort seems to reinforce the typical misunderstandings of Protestants concerning Marian devotion - not to the extent of worship - but a Marian devotion, fervor, that seems absent to me in the writings and concerns of the early Fathers.

Totus Tuus makes some sense to me, but Montfort does not. Does that make any sense to anyone familiar with these things? Can anyone help me with sorting this out?

Update on the Update: I think I'm beginning to see the light on some of this, thanks to the introduction to and writing of Balthasar in The Threefold Garland. I can understand it more easily through the lens of an icon like the "Panagia" (icon shown) and how the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics speak of the Theotokos. I'm not sure I still understand the expression of "to Jesus, through Mary," but I might be beginning to grasp the mind and heart behind it. The Rosary itself is a kind of "panagia" in words, in prayer.

Come Home

HT: Internet Monk

On Suffering

In the last years of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's life, arthritis crippled his hands, making it extremely painful to hold a paintbrush, let alone create something beautiful with it. He continued to paint, however, by strapping a brush to his hand. When asked why he submitted his body to such suffering and frustration, he said, "The pain passes, but the beauty remains."

Books

I just finished Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Tremendous book. I don't know what to say beyond that, however. This is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, even though the Modern Library doesn't list it as such. That's OK, of course, "Opinions are like assholes: everyone has one" (so says my dad).

Currently I'm reading Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. This book has to be a slow read for me, because of its intensity and subject matter. It makes me stand back and question how much I really love God. And wonder at how much I love myself. It also makes me chuckle at the controversy I heard concerning the book and this great woman. So let me just say it now: If Blessed Mother Teresa tweren't a Christian, then you and I got no hope. Fortunately for you and I, we got hope. And our hope is in the great mercy of God that is poured out on us, even in the darkest holes of India. As Fr. Cantalamessa recently said of St. Francis, I would also say of Blessed Mother Teresa (paraphrased): We do not cultivate St. Francis's or Blessed Mother Teresa's charism by looking at them, but by looking at Christ through their eyes. Who did he see when he looked upon our Lord? Who did she see? What would happen to our world if we began to see Jesus in the same way?

Maybe more on these books later.

Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Catalog

We've seen crocuses and narcissus come and go here in North Carolina. The hyacinth and tulips too. The yellow forsythia have gone for now and the bradford pears have greened. The apple blossoms, sadly, are gone. The dogwood and redbud - those champions of spring - are fading into anonymity on the side of the road and the edges of our lawns. Still now we can point and recognize and say - that's a dogwood, there's a redbud. But soon my sons and daughters will finger the leaves and trace tortured bark and ask what these trees are, and I will scratch my head and shrug. Summer's amnesia. My memory is floral.

My azaleas, bigger than Toyotas, are teaching me this year, this moment, what an azalea was meant to be. They are dressed in vestments of joy and I must cross myself whenever I pass by them - heavy pink blooms with barely a hint of the green rhododendron leaves beneath.

The crepe myrtles are budding tiny red leaves, tuning up for their mid- to late-summer symphony. The Nikko Blue has two great babies waiting for replanting, leaves are green and fresh and she whispers patience and hope.

I've planted another rosebush and pruned the old one down. Ripped up weeds and pruned and pruned. But there are still weeds in need of pulling, and bushes and trees in need of pruning.

Gerbera line the front steps and balloons of fuschia are brilliantly popping into purple blooms over the porch.

But then, "Leaf subsides to leaf." They all dim and die. That's part of their lesson. The gospel is there, too, and they live it annually, perennially. Resurrection, they sing. They trumpet it. And as they preach, I am changed; and though they die, I am changed. They convert me. In another millennium or two, I shall be a saint.

That Yellow-Haired Child

Yesterday, shopping in Wal-Mart, the yellow-haired child pointed at a bag of pads (yes, those kind of pads) and started singing, "One little, two little, three little bottom straps, four little, five little, six little bottom straps. ..."

Rosaries

I have an old Rosary that used to belong to my dad. It breaks a lot. I love praying with it, but even last night as I took it to bed, somehow one of the hoops pulled free and I had to set it aside until the morning when I could get out my needle-nose pliers to fix it.

I also have an Orthodox prayer rope that, as I requested it to be made, has beads between every ten knots - a 50-knot prayer rope that also serves nicely as a Rosary (without the introductory beads). I use it to pray the Rosary or the Jesus Prayer or any prayer, such as lectio, where I repeat the prayer. I hesitate to say "count" because it's not counting so much as tracking where I am, especially with a devotion such as the Rosary.

Anyway, all that information to say that I use the prayer rope most of the time - it's what it is with me now, and since it's knotted wool, it's sturdy as I'd like. My question is, do they make Rosaries that are of sterner stuff? I'm looking for something I can carry about with me 24/7, but has more the feel of a Rosary. Quite honestly, I'm perfectly content with my Orthodox prayer rope, retrofitted for my Marian devotion. But I do like the way the Rosary hangs upon my fingers. Sometimes I simply prefer the heft of it. Any suggestions?

Churchy Stuff

Life is full. I miss blogging, but I often feel as if I don't have the time unless I steal it from another place. I feel as if I'm taking something from my family when I walk up the stairs to my little half-storey office and sit down at the computer. At least when I watch TV, I watch it with others - perhaps we're only a group of isolated people in front of the TV, but it still feels more communal to me than the computer. Presence is important. Being present is not everything, but it is something more than absence.

That being said, I woke early this morning and would like to share a few items.

Cate was baptized, in a somewhat private affair, on February 28. The other children were baptized quite publicly, during Sunday Mass, but this was a quiet affair on a Saturday morning. It was lovely, as are all baptisms. And tears, though not shed, were heavy in my eyes. As I get older, I get weepier - rather, I am more easily brought to tears. All the same, sacraments and tears seem ready companions, for how can one be brought into the presence of such grace, the presence of God, without tears? It is at such times that joy or sorrow or repentance or comfort or peace swells into salty sacramentals. Glory to Jesus Christ!

Anna will be receiving the sacrament of Reconciliation (Conversion, Confession, Forgiveness, Penance) tomorrow morning. The children will be singing two songs and doing some readings and meditations before going before Christ to receive peace and pardon. It is a wonderful introduction to their life in Christ, and a sacrament that needs a better exemplar in their father. I hope to make Penance a more regularly sought grace in my own life. This sacrament is too often misunderstood by me, too often pushed away. I imagine because I need it so desperately.

We went to a St. Patrick's Day feast at our parish last weekend (Guinness stew - yum!) and simply had a ball. The kids did some Irish dancing, and I can't remember the last time all of us had so much fun. I was flushed with joy, drunk. During one of their dances, Fr. Al got up and was swinging from partner to partner by his elbow and when he got to Will, the raccoon couldn't do it - the thought of dancing with Father sent him into hysterics. What joy! What fun! It's good being Catholic. It reminded me of the Simpsons clip, if I can be so irreverent, of Homer and Bart's conversion to Catholicism and Marge's vision of heaven - of what Catholic heaven is like. What a great memory (the dinner); what wonderful fellowship.

Bono 's NAACP Speech

Brideshead, Revisited

This week I finished the BBC miniseries (1981?) Brideshead Revisited and was thankful for the recommendations to watch it. It's amazingly faithful to the novel and brought home the genius of Waugh again to me. And it made me further think about the differences between Waugh and Hollywood's Brideshead. The difference, it seems to me, is one that orbits about the idea of romance. You see, Brideshead Revisited is a romance, but of an entirely undecipherable kind to Hollywood - it is a love story in which Julia chooses God over Charles. It is a love story that rightly portrays God as one who refuses to lose Julia or Sebastian and Lord Marchmain, or even dear Charles Ryder. And, pitiably, all Hollywood can achieve is to try to portray a cold religion that interrupts and ruins and makes miserable the love between Julia and Charles. But Waugh's love story is vertical. (And it oddly reminds me of the ending of C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces.) It is the burning flame near the tabernacle within the chapel at Brideshead that consumes the vanity of Hollywood's version, that burns quiet and faithful until all our vanities are consumed - until we burn as it burns.