Earlier this month I had a conversation with some other women in my parish about various devotions that one might take up. I had been bemoaning how I can never make it through a novena without forgetting, and how I lack the courage to try going to daily Mass with the children, and that sort of thing. And then I was reminded of the Five First Saturdays for reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary -- a devotion I hadn't really thought about in several years -- and I realized that I had absolutely no excuse not to at least try to make the FFS devotion, right now at exactly this point in my life.
Because (a) Saturday mornings are a time when I can usually rely on Mark to care for the kids,
(b) I live within easy driving distance of a parish that actually has a Saturday morning daily Mass (even though, fyi, a Saturday night vigil Mass is sufficient for the devotion)
(c) it's only five, how hard can that be, and
(d) maybe my situation will change soon and it'll suddenly get harder to make it to Mass on Saturday, who knows?
So I resolved to give it a shot on the very next first Saturday. Which is today!
OK, so here I am, up and ready to head off to Mass. And you know what I know now that I didn't realize until only a few hours ago?
It's the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary!
Cool!
Now I really have no excuse.
Here's something I wrote on the same feast last year:
I think when we speak of a "heart" that can ponder, a "heart" that can love, we are speaking of something natural, embodied, enfleshed. Often we speak of the flesh as being opposed to things of the spirit. The flesh, our bodies, tempt us to turn away from spiritual goods and crave selfish things. But haven't you noticed that our bodies tempt us to love as well? We have natural inclinations (for example) to care for our offspring, hormones that surge to reward us for nursing our babies, that overflow into strength and aggression to help us defend them from harm. Could that be the heart that loves -- the biochemical, physical mechanisms that urge us to lay down our lives for the ones we are attached to, that urge us to attach to each other in the first place?
A body that tempts us to love: could this be the "heart" we mean?
If so... this is a kind of love unknown to the angels -- a kind of love unknown to the universe before the advent of the human race. God MADE this kind of love, the love of the human heart; He did not possess it according to God's eternal nature. Father, Son, Holy Spirit had no heart, no body with which to love as bodies love.
At least not until the Incarnation.
It is interesting to think that upon the Incarnation the Son of God received for the first time a nature through which He could be tempted by Satan in the desert. Through that nature He could also, for the first time, be tempted by the flesh to love. God's love is perfect and always was perfect; and yet in creating human beings He created a kind of love that He did not possess, and that He only made his own upon His conception. Think of the baby relaxing into his mother's arms; of the frightened toddler fleeing to the safety of his father's side; the grown man in justified anger, driving corruption from his Father's house; oxytocin, cortisol, testosterone; the heart, the body tempted to act in love.
Odd, but true: that even though the Son of God, being eternal, pre-dates the Mother of God, in a sense is His mother's own creator; but Mary's heart pre-dates the Sacred Heart. All that it is truly came from her. And so to take a pious formula -- to "flee to the shelter of the Immaculate Heart of Mary" is to say, Shelter me where you sheltered the Lord; form my heart in the womb where the Sacred Heart learned to beat.
Have a blessed Feast (and, in the USA, a safe and fun holiday weekend.)
That is so cool. I loved your meditation on "a heart that tempts us to love" last year. I'm glad you reposted it.
Posted by: MelanieB | 02 July 2011 at 02:36 PM