[written July 13, 2012]

Today I am starting a 33-day spiritual journey called, “Preparation for Total Consecration to Jesus Christ through Mary.” It is a process created by St. Louis de Monfort, a French priest in the late 17^th-early 18^th centuries. I invited the core team of the parish’s “Veritas” men’s group to join me. Basically, it is a set of prayers to do in steps leading to an Act of Total Consecration through Mary to Christ usually done on a feast day of Mary.

Statue of St. Louis de Montfort from Montfortpublications.com

I have done this preparation a number of times as it is a way for me to "kick it up a notch" in my daily prayers for a time. For example, Day One's theme is “Do not conform yourself to the spirit of the world” from Romans 12, “…but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

St. Louis sees the Christian life as a participation is the life of Christ. He basically was recognizing the vocation of each Christian as a call to holiness, which is what the Second Vatican Council talked about (but he did it a couple hundred years before.)

To live this life, we are to follow very close to Jesus Christ; we are to imitate Christ by our thoughts, words and actions.

St. Louis sees the key to this in the Incarnation, when the Son became man. Since the Son chose to come to the world through Mary, then the most perfect way to get close to him is through Mary also.

I found the whole relationship to Mary to be quite troubling, especially seeing the “over the top” way (in my estimation) that some people revere Mary. Some of the first things I read about Mary used such a high language about her and her importance that I found myself thinking and sometimes saying, “You are putting Mary in front of Jesus!!!”

I struggled with this quite a bit. It wasn’t until I read St. Louis de Montfort’s book, True Devotion to Mary that I started to understand our proper relationship to the Holy Mother of God. St. Louis clearly states from the beginning of the book – and this is SO important – that Mary is NOT GOD. God is Father, Son and Spirit. Mary is simply a creature. One needs to understand this first before being able to start to grasp Mary’s role.

Second, Mary is important to God only because GOD CHOSE HER. The Trinity decided to use Mary as an instrument in His plan of salvation. The Son was to be born of a woman, and that chosen woman is Mary.

Therefore, any honor we give to Mary gives honor to God, because God created her and chose her for HIS plan.

Also, so important is:  what is Mary’s role? Mary’s whole job is to point us to her Son!! That’s it. Mary’s few words in Scripture have to do with opening up to God’s will as “the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:37), or she is about glorifying God (Luke 1:46-55), once she is upset that Jesus was lost (Luke 2:48-50) and finally at the Wedding in Cana in John chapter 2, Mary nudges her Son into action by telling the waiters, “do whatever he tells you.” Mary never takes the focus on to herself. She focuses on God, God’s will and follows her Son faithful to the very end (the Cross) and became the Mother of the early Church (cf. John, 19:26-27; and Acts  1:14).

Statue of the Pieta from gardenofpraise.com



So this Total Consecration is about surrendering oneself more and more to the will of God and to imitation of Christ’s virtues. St. Louis teaches that we need Mary’s motherly care and guidance to do this well.

Think about the tender connection Jesus and Mary must have had. I think about the scene from the move, the Passion of the Christ, where Jesus, carrying the Cross, falls, and Mary runs up to him to pick him up, as we see flash backs to her picking him up and cradling him when he feel and skinned his knees as a child (it gives me tears and chills thinking of this reality.)

There are 4 stages to the Preparation: 12 days of Renouncing the World’s values which are self-centered, then after emptying oneself, being filled up with Christ over three one week periods: growing in knowledge of one’s self (how broken we are), knowledge of Mary (her motherly care for us and example), and knowledge of Jesus Christ (our Lord and Savior who we are to follow closely.)

For me, this 33 day journey has been very powerful. I usually do this leading up to December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. But I felt the need to ramp up my prayer this summer, especially as I deal with the death of my dad back in May.

May Christ’s mom lead us to a very intimate relationship with her beloved Son!