Mary Contemplative Sister
Meeting: 11 October 2007
Presenter: Jina Mulligan
Leader of Marist Laity, St Patrick’s, Church Hill
Gather us O God,
Body Spirit soul and mind.
Gather us O God,
One in Union now with you.
Jina began her inspiring presentation with the repetition of this simple refrain which is an invitation to wholeness. It reminds us that there is nothing within us that is outside God’s transforming and unifying action, which can lead us to that deep sacred centre of wholeness of being in God. This unity with our own spirit readies us and enables us to unite as one with others. With the use of various artists’ presentations of Mary, Jina led us to
- meditate on Mary’s story - to discover
- What is her reason for being? and
- How do we connect Mary’s story to our reason for being?
As Mary gave her ‘fiat’ “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” – Luke 1.38, she acknowledged God as personal and immanent, as part of her reason for being.
Creator Spirit,
Come to visit the souls of your own
with loftiest grace, fill the hearts
which you have made.
Grant that through you we may love to know the truth
and come to know the Son and may we believe forever in you,
Spirit of them both.
(Veni Creator Spiritus)
Mary is the Mother of Christ, who, as soon as he took the human nature in her virginal womb, joined his mystical Body, which is the Church to himself, as the Head. Therefore, Mary as Mother of Christ is to be considered also as the Mother of all the faithful and pastors, that is, the Church.
(George Tavard – The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary)
The following extract gave us much food for thought and provoked a lively discussion as we connected our own experiences with those of Mary.
…the mother of the itinerant preacher Jesus, terribly worried about his ministry, a middle-aged woman whose agonized grief over the public execution of her firstborn connects her with legions of bereaved women; an elder in the budding community of the Church. She kept faith. We remember her. We connect her story with our own amid the searching narrative of the human race in its history of suffering and hope. We thereby find courage to enact the critical dream of God for the world. The wager I am making at the outset is that interpreting Mary in relation to the Spirit as a graced, concrete historical person amid the company of saints in heaven and on earth, crafts a theology capable of promoting actin on behalf of global justice and liberation, particularly empowering to the flourishing of women, coherent with elements of biblical, classical and concilia teaching and productive of religious sense for our time. (Elizabeth Q. Johnson – Truly Our Sister)
We reflected on our connection with Mary and our reason for being while listening to the beautiful meditative music of the twelfth century mystic St Hildergard of Bingen.
We pray for the fragile ecology of the heart and mind. The sense of meaning so finely assembled and balanced and so easily overturned. The careful, ongoing construction of love is as painful and exhausting as the struggle for truth and easily abandoned. Hard fought and won are the shifting sands of sacred ground, this ecology. Easy to desecrate and difficult to defend, this vulnerable joy, this exposed faith, this precious order, this sanity. We shall be careful, with others and with ourselves. Amen
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