DAILY MEDITATION (TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15)
MEDITATION OF THE DAY
Learning to Become a Living Yes
The words of the angel are for Mary the revelation of the infinite love with which God has deigned to love her. The Virgin surrenders herself to it. Her desire is to open her soul to God in proportion to the immensity of this love. Be it done to me according to your word! Yes, let me be his Mother! Let me be loved and formed as it pleases him, he who, always infinite, deigns to love me as his child. Be it done to me! It is to this act of faith and trust which surrenders to the action of God’s love, that our Mother wishes to lead us.
God loves us with a Father’s love. He wishes to call us his children here on earth through the virtues and holiness expressed in the image of his Son; afterwards, through the endless happiness that we will share with him. At each moment, through interior graces and exterior circumstances, his tenderness beats against our tepid and negligent souls like a relentless torrent…. May a true Fiat at last rise from our souls and open our hearts in continual confidence to the action of his merciful providence! Fiat is not a word, nor a purely intellectual affirmation, but a surge of the will, a love which surrenders itself in a confidence without reserve. Be it done to me! Yes, let me become truly a child of God!
If our souls are thus deepened by humility and expanded by faith in his love, God will shower his grace upon us. He will realize in us his ambitions as a Father, and in the words of Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, his Son will find in us “another humanity.”… “My measure will be your measure,” said the Lord to Saint Catherine of Siena. Our measure of humility and confidence is the measure of his grace. Mary will respond to his offer with the measure of a Mother. In like manner, can we not offer him the response of a true child to a father’s love?… Let us then return to our nothingness and surrender ourselves to the immense action of eternal love.… Charity is, as Saint Paul says, Amen to God (2 Cor 1:20); it is expressed perfectly in this. Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will (Mt 11:26). Our Lady of true submission, who learns this virtue from her Son, teaches it in turn to us. It is her wish to make of each of her children a living “yes” to the will of God in their lives.
Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, o.p.
Father Perrin († 2002) was a French Dominican priest and the founder of the secular institute Caritas Christi. / From Mary: Mother of Christ and of Christians, Sr. Jean David Finley, o.p., Tr. © 1978 by The Fathers and Brothers of the Society of St. Paul, ST PAULS/Alba House, Staten Island, NY. www.stpauls.us. Used with permission.
