Clad In Double Garments

July 16th: Our Lady Queen and Splendor of Carmel

 

38. Dear God, how everything we do comes to so very little! But let us adopt this devotion and place everything in Mary's hands. When we have given her all we possibly can, emptying ourselves completely to do her honour, she far surpasses our generosity and gives us very much for very little. She enriches us with her own merits and virtues. She places our gift on the golden dish of her charity and clothes us, as Rebecca clothed Jacob, in the beautiful garments of her first-born and only Son, Jesus Christ, which are his merits, and which are at her disposal. Thus, as her servants and slaves, stripping ourselves of everything to do her honour, we are clad by her in double garments - namely, the garments, adornments, perfumes, merits and virtues of Jesus and Mary. These are imparted to the soul of the slave who has emptied himself and is resolved to remain in that state.

THE SECRET OF MARY ~ St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort

The Great Secret

The great secret for leading [a] free, pure and already almost superhuman Christian life ... is not so much to consider the vanity of this world, the fragility and baseness of this present life, our own personal misery and passions, all those evils into which, without the help of grace, we should so easily fall, and our faults and sins, which we ought, however, to hate and deplore. All that is useful, all that is indispensable; everyone who is wise will remember and think of it at certain hours; but it is not always the hour for thinking of it, and it is not, at all events, what is the most efficacious for us.

What is most efficacious, here as everywhere, the most decisive, the most triumphant, is, as far as one can, and habitually, to look upwards; it is to consider God and Jesus; the perfections of God, His rights, His attributes, His appeals, His provocations, His patient waiting, His designs, His promises; the mysteries of Jesus and the divine graces flowing from what he said, did, ordained and suffered. It is ever to remember that He is personally the point of departure and the Chief of the Christian life; that the great virtue of baptism is to incorporate us in Him, to give us His life, to make us of His race, and to pour forth His Spirit within us, that is to say a light and a strength whereby we are enabled, and so remain, not only to avoid sin, as St John expressly says, but moreover to judge all things, to discern our way and to follow it, and ascending from light to light, from liberty to liberty, to reach the inward state of him who said: “I live, now not I; but Christ lives in me.”

~ Mgr Charles Gay in Elevations upon the Life and Doctrine of our Lord Jesus Christ [quoted in Blessed Dom Columba Marmion, O.S.B., Christ in His Mysteries]