The Holy Mother & The Employments of Heaven – Christmas Meditation Day 3 (Dec 27)

The Holy Mother

By the side of the manger where the Infant lies, His Mother is watching.  Who is she?  

The nativity scene focused on the Blessed Mother holding the Child Jesus.

1.  A poor and humble maiden, but nevertheless the Mother of God.  The Mother of God!  How can this be?  How can the Eternal, Infinite God have a human mother?  Yet so it is; Mary has a privilege which raises her immeasurably above the highest of the seraphim.  It makes her more perfect in her likeness to God than is possible to any other creature.  If, then, we honor the saints and angels, how much more should we honor God’s own Mother! 

2.  Yet Mary has a still greater claim to our homage, a more fruitful source of blessedness even than the divine maternity.  Her unswerving obedience to the inspirations of God is declared by Our Lord Himself to be a still higher privilege. “Yea, rather blessed are they who hear the Word of God and keep it.”  If only we realized the blessedness of unswerving obedience, how different our lot would be!  

3.  What are Mary’s thoughts as she sits watching there?  She has no thought save of God.  She is absorbed in Him.  The hours pass like minutes, they are a sort of anticipation of Paradise.  She sees her God face to face, and though His glory is veiled under the robe of flesh, yet Mary can pierce through it as none else ever could, and can bask in the Divinity which it conceals.

O God, help me to realize now Thy presence when Thou art veiled under the sacramental species.

 

The Employments of Heaven

His servants shall serve Him. (Apoc. xxii. 3.) 

1.  While faith and hope will be at an end in heaven, the virtue of charity will remain.  There is nothing on earth so sweet as love; nothing that fills the heart with such continual joy; nothing that so occupies the soul and causes men to forget all else.  This is the case when the object of our love is a perishable imperfect creature like ourselves.  How much more when the object of our love is the God of infinite beauty, containing in Himself every possible earthly perfection, not only multiplied to an infinite degree, but altogether higher in kind, and therefore a source of greater joy than all possible created beauty!  

2.  A strong love makes the long hours pass away in a stream of unceasing delight; no weariness, no monotony, no desire for anything else.  One thing only checks the perfection pf the happiness of love, and that is the thought that it cannot last forever.  In heaven there will be a stream of delight immeasurably richer, and the joyful consciousness that there is no fear of its ever coming to an end. 

3.  As God is infinite in His perfections, they will necessarily be inexhaustible.  The various phases (if we may use the term) of His divine loveliness will never come to an end.  After a million years there will still be the same inexhaustible treasure of multiform delights to be enjoyed, and after a million years it will not be diminished.  No fear, then, of sameness in heaven, no fear of monotony, it will ever be the same and yet ever new. 

Pray for a greater love of God here on earth.

 


This article, The Holy Mother & The Employments of Heaven – Christmas Meditation Day 3 (Dec 27) is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/devotional/the-catholic-daily/christmastide-meditations/the-holy-mother-the-employments-of-heaven-christmas-meditation-day-3-dec-27/
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