Dear Souls and Hearts Community Members,
Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception to you all! This is the day we celebrate our Lady, our Mother, the Immaculate. She is is spiritual mother, our primary mother. And I have special devotion to her as the mother of all of our Souls and Hearts members, especially in that she heals mother wounds, the inevitable emotional and relational injuries that happen to us over time in our fallen world from our imperfect mother figures.
On Mary, our Spiritual Mother
One of my favorite authors, Fr. Emile Neubert, in his little treatise My Ideal: Jesus, Son of Mary, wrote these eye-opening lines about how Mary is our spiritual mother, our primary mother (pp.12-14):
Do you understand now that Mary, by making you a participant in the life of God, is really your mother in the supernatural order, just as the one who gave you human life is really your mother in the natural order?
Mary is even more truly your mother.
She is more truly your mother, first, because of the way in which she has given you life.
For your birth, she paid incomparably more than your earthly mother. That she might bring you forth to life, she offered the Eternal Father the unutterable sufferings and the very life of One who was infinitely dear to her than her own life.
She continues during the whole course of your existence to busy herself with you, whereas earthly mothers care for their children only until they are adults.…
She loves you – you, all imperfect and ungrateful as you are; she loves you with a love which surpasses in intensity and in purity the motherly love of all the mothers in the world.
Above all, she is more truly her mother because of the nature of the life which he has given to you.
It is not a passing life like a terrestrial one, but a life without end; not a life full of imperfections and anguish like your present existence, but a life incomparably happy; not a created life, human or angelic, but – and understand it well – a participation in uncreated life, in the very life of God, in the life of the Most Blessed Trinity. And that is why this life will be endless and incomparably happy, because it is a sharing in the eternity and in the beatitude of God. What human motherhood could compare with such a Motherhood?