Franciscan Media

Mary can help you to find and attach to a solid, loving mother figure on the natural level. If you ask her, she will guide you to them. Perhaps she is a mentor, older friend, or consecrated religious. We can find that motherly love in many people. No matter what you lack from your childhood, it can be recovered with the Blessed Virgin’s help. Mary is the answer. 

As the initial rush of love becomes something deeper and more lasting, it becomes easy to take the other person for granted, losing our spirit of understanding and our will to serve with love. Every day we need to seek God’s guidance in our lives. Every day we must pray for the wisdom and strength to overcome temptation and make the right decisions. Every day we must recommit ourselves to love.

We all live in danger of believing the lie that we are not enough like God as we are and that something other than God will give us what we need to feel full and free. But we also live ever compelled back to God by our Eden instincts, remembering who we once were when we lived naked and unashamed. So we are ever fighting to come out of hiding and stand before our God when he comes after us, looking for us even in our sin and shame.

Our Lady said that the rosary can stop wars, and can bring world peace. We have to do what she said, and live good lives. There’s no other plan from heaven that’s so specific, for what we’re going through now. The Blessed Mother spelled it out. Prayer, penance, the First Saturdays’ devotion—and live a good, holy life. That’s the answer.

It is useless to talk when things speak for themselves in such an eloquent manner. There is a clear and precise way of finding God, and we have so much need of him. There are moments in everyone’s life when the need becomes acute; it is when our pride is overcome by suffering and humiliation that we finally look for God. Where can we find him? The way is clear: Where there is charity, there is love; where there is love, there is God. 

We as human persons are made with infinite desires that only God can fulfill. But because we’re fallen, we tend to live at the level of our superficial desires—desires for comfort, fun, fame, wealth, pleasure, success. These desires are not bad, but the rosary helps us be more aware of the soul’s deepest desires, which are for God. As Saint Catherine of Siena taught, the greatest gift we can give to God in prayer is not the finite work of saying the words but our “infinitely desirous love” for God that is expressed in those words and that is being drawn out of our souls in prayer.