“The greater is the work I want to do in a soul, the littler I choose her. I like childlike freshness and beauty very much;…”
(Click here for website)
On a spring morning, in a remote village in the Galilee something unpredictable and unthinkable is about to happen.
Suddenly a deep silence envelops the room where Mary is immersed in prayer. Everything seems to stop in an eternal moment. God breaks into Her life. An angel appears to Her. No, it’s not a dream. What is unspeakable becomes tangible, a transcendent reality, overcoming what we can imagine and experience according to the categories of what is natural and sensitive, becomes lived history.
The coming of the Lord in our lives always happens in unusual ways. He rarely manifests Himself in an extraordinary way. God prefers to meet us in simplicity, where we spend our daily life, with our joys and hopes, our anguishes and misunderstandings. Our limits, our sins, the hardness of our heart make us unable to discern the manifestation of the Lord. We must learn to recognize God as alive and present in the many “angels” that He puts on our path, in the many witnesses and prophets who listen, live and proclaim His Word, who go through the paths of our existence. Very often we are distracted by the sparkle of human wisdom, by the comfort of our certainties, the reassuring warmth of our good intentions, even by the habit of listening to His Word: we know it very well, by heart, to the point that we become impervious and insensitive to it. We do not let ourselves be touched, questioned. Our faith is academic. The Lord, on the other hand, seeks us and wants to transform us, to show us a new, different path on which we can direct our future.
God always chooses ways that are far from human logic, to carry out His plan of redemption. He wants man to cooperate with Him, but He does not address the rich and powerful man, those who enjoy prestige and consideration in society. He Chooses what in the world is foolish, to confuse the wise, what is considered as nothing, as was the status of women in the cultural context of the time of Mary, whose social position was comparable to little more than a servant. A virgin in addition, a woman unscathed and without any stain, uncorrupted.
Well, in Mary’s virginity there is something deeper and more significant than the simple, though essential consideration of her physical condition. Mary’s virginity is synonymous with an inner purity and image of a complete availability to listen, welcome and incarnate the Word of God. To do this. it is essential to prepare a worthy dwelling for the Lord. We should free ourselves from what is an obstacle for us, we should join God in an incessant prayer that becomes a lived life, so that He can be all that fills us, and satisfies us with Him
In a long and fascinating passage from the Diary of Luisa, on November 10, 1923, Jesus spoke in an extraordinary way of the smallness of Mary. He also spoke of the smallness that Luisa should have to welcome the gift of living in the Divine Will.
Among all generations, the Virgin Mary is the littlest, because Her will never entered into Her as acting, but always the Eternal Will; and this not only kept Her little, beautiful, fresh, as She had come out of God, but made Her the greatest of all. Only because of Her littleness was She lifted up to the height of Mother of the One who formed Her. So, all the good of man is in doing the Divine Will; all the evil is in doing his own. Therefore, in order to come to redeem man, God chose Mary because She was little, and God used Her as channel in order to let all the goods and fruits of Redemption descend upon mankind
So that the Divine Will might be known, and Heaven might be opened to let the Divine Will descend upon earth and reign on it as It does in Heaven, God had to choose another little one among all generations. Since this is the greatest work God wants to do – to restore man in his origin, from which he came, to open to him that Divine Will which he rejected, to open His arms to him to receive him once again into the womb of the Divine Will – God’s infinite wisdom calls the littlest one out of nothing. It was just that she be little: if God placed a little one at the head of Redemption, He had to place another little one at the head of the Fiat Voluntas Tua on earth as it is in Heaven.
Between two little ones God was to enclose the purpose of the creation of man – God was to realize His designs upon him: through one, He was to redeem him, wash him of his ugliness with Jesus’ Blood, and give him forgiveness; through the other one, God was to make him return to his beginning, to his origin, to the lost nobility, to the bonds of the Divine Will broken by him, admitting him once again to the smile of the Eternal Will, kissing each other and live one within the other. This alone was the purpose of the creation of man, and what God established no one will be able to oppose.
Centuries upon centuries will go by – just as in Redemption, so also in this; but man will return into God’s arms as he was created by Him. But in order to do this, first God has to choose the one who must be the first to live life in the Eternal Will, bind in her all the relations of Creation, and live with her with no split of wills; rather, with her will and His as one.
The Divine Will preserves her fresh and beautiful; she forms God’s smile and amusement, and God does with her whatever He wants. Enjoying her littleness and her happy destiny, she will cry for her brothers and will occupy herself with nothing else but compensating God, for all and for each one, of all the wrongs they do to God by withdrawing from His Will. The tears of one who lives in the Divine Will will be powerful; more so, since she wants nothing but what God Himself wants; and after the first channel of Redemption, through her God will open the second one of the Fiat Voluntas Tua on earth as it is in Heaven.
On hearing this, Luisa was disconcerted and asked who this second creature was. Jesus answered that it was her, His little one because of her smallness and to make it clearer, Jesus showed her all generations, as though divided into two wings – one on the right and the other on the left of the throne of God. At the head of one wing there was the August Queen Mama, from whom descended all the goods of Redemption.
Luisa remained attracted by the beauty of Mary’s marvelous, prodigious littleness: little and powerful, little and great, little and Queen; little, with everyone hanging upon Her littleness, while She disposes of everything, rules over all, and only because She is little, She enfolds the Word within Her littleness, making Him descend from Heaven to earth, to let Him die for love of men. At the head of the other wing one could see another little one, -she was the one whom Jesus had called His little daughter of the Divine Will.
And Jesus, placing Himself in the middle of these two wings between the two little ones who were at the head of them, with one hand took Luisa’s hand, and with the other that of the Queen Mama, and He joined them together, saying that they were His little daughters. He asked them to hold each other’s hand before God’s Throne, and to embrace the Eternal Divine Majesty in their little arms. To them alone, because they are little, is it given to embrace the Eternal One, the Infinite One, and to enter into Him. And if the first little one snatched Redemption from the Love of the Eternal One, so may the second, her hand held by the first, be helped by Her to snatch from the Eternal Love the Fiat Voluntas Tua on earth as it in Heaven.
Luisa had no words to be able to express herself. She remained more humiliated and confused, and almost like a fussy little girl, she wanted Jesus in order to tell Him of her fears, of her doubts. And she prayed that He would cast all these things away from her, as she feared that the mere thought of them was a subtle pride, and that He would give her the grace to really love Him and to do His Most Holy Will in everything. Then, Jesus, interrupting her thoughts, made Himself seen inside of her, and said that she should not be afraid, He was the One who would do everything in her; she would do nothing but follow Him faithfully, as she was right that she was too little and could do nothing, but Jesus would do everything in her!
don Marco