January 1, Mary Mother of God

A happy and holy New Year to you! We pray that this is a year of God's blessings for you and your loved ones, and that our world is filled with His peace and healing. Today, on the feast of Mary Mother of God, we'd like to share with you some words about Our Lady from the Cistercian abbot Blessed Guerric of Igny (c. 1070/80-1157):

One and unique was Mary’s child, the only Son of his Father in heaven and the only Son of his mother on earth. Mary alone was virgin-mother, and it is her glory to have borne the Father’s only Son. But now she embraces that only Son of hers in all his members. She is not ashamed to be called the mother of all those in whom she recognizes that Christ her Son has been or is on the point of being formed. 

Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard van Honthorst (1622)

...Like the Church of which she is the model, Mary is the mother of all who are born again to new life. She is the mother of him who is the Life by which all things live; when she bore him, she gave new birth in a sense to all who were to live by his life.

Recognising that by virtue of this mystery she is the mother of all Christians, Christ’s blessed mother also shows herself a mother to them by her care and loving kindness. She never grows hard toward her children, as though they were not her own. The womb that once gave birth is not dried up; it continues to bring forth the fruit of her tender compassion. Christ, the blessed fruit of that womb, left his mother still fraught with inexhaustible love, a love that once came forth from her but remains always within her, inundating her with his gifts.