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Where there is the presence of Jesus, there is the presence of His Mother.
– Fulton J. Sheen
The Catholic devotion to Mary has never come easily to me.
I know Mary is, for some people, the way they discovered and really developed a relationship with Jesus.
But for me, it was the opposite. Jesus is the one who introduced his Mother to me.
I knew Jesus for several years before I developed or even saw a reason to develop a relationship with his Mother. My devotion to Jesus informed my relationship with Mary.
In fact, it becomes clearer to me every day that love for the Word who revealed himself to us as a newborn babe is absolutely inseparable from love for Mary.
No human baby can be separated from his or her human parents. Even if a parent never cares for his or her child, every parent passes on their genetic material to their offspring.
The same is true of Jesus. You may have thought of this before but it is something that comes back to my prayer regularly: Jesus is genetically 100 percent from Mary.
As Ignatius of Antioch once put it in his Epistle to the Trallians, “He who forms all men in the womb, was Himself really in the womb, and made for Himself a body of the seed of the Virgin.”
Jesus must have really resembled his mother!
Jesus was not just deposited into the womb of his mother; he was her true offspring in his humanity. For this reason, in the 5th century, the Council of Ephesus affirmed that we can call Mary “Theotokos,” the Mother of God, because Mary gave birth to Jesus who is one divine person with two natures.
The mystery of salvation can never be separated from Mary, the human mother of Jesus. Continue reading
- Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, FSP, is the author of The Prodigal You Love: Inviting Loved Ones Back to the Church.
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