“What are you doing
here? Are you going to have dinner with us? Do you want to play Magnet Man?” “What
are you doing here? Do you want to…”
My friends’
three-year-old asked me these questions repeatedly when I visited last night .
They’re used to it,
but I laughed. The kid never stopped talking and he sure wasn’t listening
to the answers – it entertained him to ask if I wanted to play
Magnet Man in the midst of our playing Magnet Man, his self-made game to which
I still don’t understand the ever-changing rules.
After dinner, I attended
a one-man play of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life. He also asked a question continually:
“Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?”
Fr. Kolbe devoted his life
to Mary and wondered how is was that the Blessed Mother bore the Savior of the
world in her womb – that through her yes she became the universal symbol of
reverence for life.
Kolbe followed each of
these queries by asking Mary what she wanted him to do. At the end of his
life, St. Maximilian offered his life at Auschwitz in place of another prisoner
who was scheduled to die.
I wondered, how did
St. Maximilian have courage to die for that man? How did he have such total
trust in Mary’s intercession?
Kolbe received
miracles throughout his life when he prayed to Mary. He also lived through
darkness and survived. St. Maximilian marked doubt and sickness in his life as moments
that strengthened and prepared him for his final mission; he alluded to this in
a letter to new Franciscans in his order:
“You must be prepared
for periods of darkness, anxiety, doubts, fears, of temptations that are
sometimes very, very insistent, of sufferings of the body and, what is a
hundredfold more painful, of the soul. For if there were nothing to bear, for
what would you go to heaven? If there were no trials, there would be no
struggle. Without a struggle, victory would be impossible, and without victory,
there is no crown, no reward…So be prepared from now on for everything.”
--Letter to newly invested brothers in Grodno 1927
Mary offered Kolbe in
a vision when he was 12 a white crown for purity or a red crown for martyrdom.
He chose both. He chose to glorify God long before he knew his passion. Mary
did the same thing.
Mary was presented in
the Temple at the tender age of 3.
After spending time
with a 3-year-old last night, I know how pure and close these children are to God. (My friends' son offered delighted gratitude to his father for the leftover steak we were eating: “Thank you, Daddy for making this steak on the grill! Thank you,
Daddy…”)
When she was about the
age at which Kolbe chose his crowns, Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord and
my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”
Perhaps Mary’s face
was radiant during her Magnificat. But she said yes again with circles beneath her
eyes as Jesus learned to sleep at night. And she said yes again at the
crucifixion when her face was marked with hard lines of unimaginable sorrow.
Three women I know remind me of Mary’s sufferings – they endured infertility,
depression, spousal disharmony. But they continue to stay faithful to their
marriages, and their faces carry lines of joy and sorrow as they daily say yes
to God.
“Who are you,
Immaculate Conception?” What does it mean to magnify the Lord?
Perhaps there is a
difference between asking a question repeatedly without listening to the
response and asking a question repeatedly to go deeper into the answer.
St. Maximilian asked
his question in order to unite his will more fully to God’s through the woman
who did it perfectly. Mary died a simple Jewish housewife. Christ magnified his
Father on the cross. And St. Maximilian followed these examples – he glorified
God by becoming small. And dead.
Do I have the courage
to face a 3-year-old’s question: “What are you doing here?”
Only through the light
of a deeper question: “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?”
You died to make room for the Incarnation. You are the universal symbol of reverence for life.
“Who are you, O
Immaculate Conception?”
I will have to ask you
again and again.
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