of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
June
9, 2018
Luke
2: 41-51OL of Lourdes, Bethesda, Md.
“His
mother kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2: 51).
St.
Luke tells us that as a sort of summary of our Blessed Mother’s experience of
raising her Son, not without some exasperation, but with much joy, too, we may
assume.
The
Collect of today’s Mass also refers to Mary’s heart, speaking of God’s work
therein, preparing it for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell in it.
When
we speak of “heart” in these contexts, we’re not really talking about the
physical organ that pumps blood thru our body, of course, but about our
interior attitudes, longings, desires—the orientation of our soul. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us,
“Where your treasure is, there also will your heart be” (Matt 6:21).
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French-language holy card (printed in Milan)
dating before 1929, when Don Bosco was beatified.
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Here’s
a story from the lives of the saints, specifically from St. John Bosco’s
biography of his pupil St. Dominic Savio:[1]
Dominic
had such a natural modesty in everything about him that one might think God had
created him with it. However, his
teachers and personal friends knew that his modesty was the result of strenuous
effort helped by divine grace. He had to
do himself no little violence to control his eyes, for he was naturally quick
to observe things. He told a friend,
“When I first made up my mind to master my eyes, I found it tiring. Sometimes I got a bad headache.” And yet he achieved such complete mastery
that those who knew him admitted that they had never seen a single glance of
his which might in any way go beyond his rigid standards of modesty.
“The
eyes are two windows through which we can let anything enter,” he would
say. “We can let an angel or a devil pass
to take control of our hearts.”
One
day, an outsider brought into our playground a magazine containing indecent and
irreligious pictures. A group of
youngsters gathered about to gape at those cartoons which would have brought a
blush to a pagan. Dominic too, thinking
there was something interesting, ran to look.
When he saw what they were gloating over, he stopped short, grabbed the
magazine, and, with a smile of scorn on his lips, tore it into pieces. A hush of surprise settled over the crowd.
“How
stupid can we be? God gives us eyes to
look at his beauties, and you use them to stare at this filth made by corrupt
men to harm your souls. Have you
forgotten all you learned? Our Lord says
we can soil our souls with a single evil glance, and you go ahead and gloat
over these dirty things!”
“We
were only laughing at the drawings,” one said in excuse.
“Sure,
laugh!” answered Dominic. “Laugh
yourselves right into hell! Do you think
you will still be laughing when you land there?”
“But
I don’t see what’s so terribly wrong with these pictures,” objected one.
“Worse
for you,” was Dominic’s answer. “If you
can’t see anything wrong in this filth, it means your eyes are used to it. But that doesn’t excuse you. Poor, poor Job! You were a holy man, stretched out on a bed
of pain, and still you made a pact with your eyes never to look at anything
shameful!”
That
silenced them. No one dared say more or
contradict Dominic.
Pretty
amazing for a boy 13 years old. And a
lesson for our times, which are suffering an epidemic of pornography that’s
becoming ever more acceptable and “normal” even as it’s destroying marriages
and other relationships and peace of heart, and contributing to the coarsening
of the way men and women regard each other.
#Metoo wasn’t born in a vacuum!
Rather
than let impurity or any other vice seize our hearts—our thoughts, desires, and
attitudes—we can strive to imitate our Blessed Mother’s immaculate heart,
completely oriented toward Jesus Christ, so that he may be our treasure, so
that—as “worthy temples of God’s glory,” as the Collect prays—we may live for
him and present to our families, friends, co-workers, and neighbors an image of
Christ in our words and deeds.
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