We celebrate the Feast of Mary the Mother of
God on January 1, 2015, a Holy Day Of Obligation for every one of us!
Mary is a model of that new life in
Christ that all of us wish for ourselves in the new year. There we see that
Mary was prepared to do something to realize this goal. What did she do? We
read that the shepherds, when they went to adore the Child Jesus in the manger,
told all that the angels had said to them. "But Mary treasured all
these words and pondered them in her heart" (Luke 2:19). Again after
the boy Jesus was found in the Temple, we are told that "His mother
treasured all these things in her heart" (Luke 2:51). Mary was a woman
who valued the word of God, who treasured it and made time to meditate and
ponder it. It is true that the holiness of Mary is attributed to the grace of
God, but this should not make us forget that she needed to make an effort in
order to cooperate with the grace of God. She pondered the word of God in order
to discern what God was saying to her at every stage in her life as the
handmaid of God.
The two examples above of Mary pondering the
word of God, namely, after the visit of the shepherds and after the finding in
the temple, show that Mary found the word of God both in divine revelation (the
angels' words to the shepherds) and in her own experiences (her encounter with
her son in the temple). Similarly God speaks to us today through divine
revelation (e.g. the Bible, the teaching and preaching of the Church) as well
as through our personal experiences, if only we make time to reflect on them as
Mary did.
Whatever the situation in which we find
ourselves - a hardship, a moment of joy, a disappointment, a decision to make -
God has a solution, an answer that is right for us. We tell God about it in
prayer but we also listen to what God has to tell us about it.
