By Carol Younger
Recently, my husband and I attended a First Saturday Mass at our parish. Afterward, we strolled over to the hall for a potluck breakfast with parishioners. Breakfast was good, and the Rosary devotions following were very good. But meditating during the Rosary was the best!
Two statues of Mary stood on an ordinary table, in an ordinary parish hall, with ordinary blue and white carnations in ordinary vases, flanked by very ordinary candles along with an ordinary small crucifix— all placed where I could see it all.
I asked myself, “Who would put two statues of Mary side by side
while we pray the Rosary?” I never answered that question as the voice in my head bombarded me. “These two images are bookends on Mary’s life of Yes.
Mary said yes, without knowing what a request to bear God’s Son, entailed. Like all human lives, hers was a mix of sorrow and joy. Her daily activity involved easy and challenging tasks and prayer. Penance was hers throughout life: family poverty, exile in Egpyt, following her Son’s public life, witnessing His rejection, Passion, and Death, nurturing the early Church.
These same things are all part of our Lent: daily easy and hard tasks, some poverty of food and drink, some mortification, following Jesus in the Scripture readings of liturgies, nurturing our families. But that’s just the first statue of Mary in the parish hall.
Please take a good look at that second statue: Mary’s Assumption into heaven as Queen of Angels (and us). The reward for a Lent well lived in this life is the reward of living with Jesus in heaven.
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