Mary Essential to Total Consecration?

 

Why consecration to Mary?

 

Isn’t it enough that we consecrate ourselves to Jesus, thereby renewing our baptismal promises?  To put it another way, is the consecration as taught by Saint Louis de Montfort  made to Jesus or to Mary?  Or to both?

 

The first step in replying to this fundamental question is to clear the air by clarifying the word “consecration.”  As used in spirituality, the term has a double meaning:

 

            1. Consecration understood in the broad sense (devotion-consecration).  Undoubtedly you’ve seen formulas of consecration to one’s Guardian Angel,  to one’s patron saint or to any of the blessed.  For example, we could pray to Saint Michael the Archangel: “Powerful Archangel,  we solemnly consecrate ourselves to you, begging you to be our protector and support in times of temptation.”  Or we could say to Our Lady, “Mary my Mother, I lovingly place myself under your protection and care.”

 

Consecration in this broad sense is nothing more – or less – than an act of sincere devotion (called dulia  if it refers to a saint, hyper-dulia when devotion is given to the Mother of God).  Such a consecration honors the saint while requesting that through his or her protection and intercession we may become constantly more Christlike.

 

2. Consecration in the strict sense (adoration-consecration).  Consecration in its fullest meaning is an act of adoration, given to God alone.  Entailing the absolute, loving, lived-out surrender of all we are and have, it can only have the  Source of All Being – our loving God - as its object.  Recognizing someone or something as THE author and goal of life demands not just respectful devotion but the totality of adoration. Therefore consecrating ourselves in this strict sense to any  human person, including Our Lady, is nothing short of idolatry.

 

Now the consecration proposed by Saint Louis de Montfort is an act of adoration made to Jesus, the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom.   Recall the first words of the formula of consecration written by St Louis-Marie: “O Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom … true God and true man … I adore You profoundly …”  We surrender forever our very being, everything we are, everything we have,  all our joys, worries and concerns to Jesus, our Brother and Our God.  We explicitly and lovingly pledge to live our baptismal life, forever immersed in the Heart of our loving Savior.   

 

Yet how would it be possible to surrender all to Jesus and exclude His Mother?  The moment we tear the Child from Its Mother’s arms, we are forgetting that it is only through her – especially through her total and divinely required yes at the Annunciation – that the Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Eternal Word, takes place.   Mary, then, by God’s design is distinctively intrinsic to an evangelical  understanding of Jesus Himself.

 

It is the genius of Father de Montfort to call for one and only one consecration: to Jesus alive in Mary, or to Jesus as the ultimate goal, to Mary as the means to reach that Goal.  Is that not the way that God has established his never-to-be repealed plan of redemption? 

 

Yes, God could have made other plans.  Of Himself, he has absolutely no need of Mary.  But why should we waste our time trying to figure out what could have been the so-called other plans of God?  There is only one plan that God chose: the Word of God would become man through the divinely-willed, free yes of Mary.  She thereby gives entry into our human family to the King of Glory, the Second Person of the Trinity.  God offers to humankind the Gift of Gifts, the Father’s Eternal Word;  Mary, in the name of all creation, accepts the Gift.  Jesus,  in a clearly unique way, comes to us through Mary.

 

As the Triune God has willed, it is impossible to know Jesus in His fullness unless we see Him in and through Mary. Not only does she conceive the Father’s Word in her womb but even more so, she is forever the voice of creation accepting the new covenant God makes with us in Jesus.  The sound of Abraham’s obedience, the voice of Isaac, Jacob, Moses and of all the renewals of the ancient covenant by the people of God, all echo in Mary’s climactic and eternal fiat to God’s ultimate plan: the sending of His redeemer Son, the one and only Mediator between God and man.

 

Jesus and Mary are inseparable; they are so united that we may call them “one heart.”  It would be easier to separate light from the sun than to separate Jesus and Mary.  It is in recognition of this Gospel truth that St Louis de Montfort preaches total consecration to Jesus alive in Mary.  We surrender everything to her, so that we may be fully poured out into the Heart of Christ.  Mary the path, Jesus the Goal.  We live in her maternal Heart (devotion called hyperdulia) so that we may forever and more intensely be one with the Sacred Heart of Jesus our Lord