Our Lady: Patroness of Preachers
It was God’s will that Christ should come into the world through Mary’s prayerful ‘yes’. So today it is God’s will to come afresh into our world through Mary’s prayers.
Unsurprisingly, then, the Order has a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Patroness of Preachers. Mary is integrally bound up in the message of Good News and the hope that we proclaim. Through Mary, Jesus received his humanity by which he could manifest his divine glory in human history; through her Son, Mary receives her essential identity as virgin and mother. By God’s will, Jesus and Mary are bound together: by Mary, God took for himself a mother; by Mary’s kinswoman Elizabeth, God provided for the other human support that the young Jesus would need to fulfil his ministry, a friend. So we could make no sense of Mary’s life story without Jesus, and this is something that ought to be true of Dominican life as well.
As “full of grace”, Mary, who points to Christ with every fibre of her being, is an icon for the preacher to imitate. Like the preacher, she straddles the contemplative and the active, pondering the mysteries she witnesses in her heart whilst serving Christ and the nascent community that gathers around him. No sooner has the Angel Gabriel left Mary than she sets off on the arduous journey to visit Elizabeth, carrying the incarnate Word within her. It is at Mary’s prompting that Christ, somewhat reluctantly it seems, performs his first miracle at Cana: Mary’s prayers launch Christ’s public ministry. But between the finding of the infant Jesus in the temple and the inauguration of the public ministry lies the ‘hidden life’ of Christ who we are told grew in wisdom and stature among men. For Mary we can imagine the daily trudge of a poor mother trying to make ends meet, the hours of hidden service, trusting that somehow the perplexing mysteries that had been revealed to her would one day make sense.
