“[F]or he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed.” // Luke 1:48
Recently, I was sharing with a friend about a complicated and messy situation in my life, full of contradictions. It feels like I should have known better, yet I’d probably do it just the same if faced with the same circumstances again. There is little reason to expect a positive resolution, yet I can’t see how I could give up hope. It is less important than other things I have going on in my life, but it’s the thing I think about the most.
She asked if I have been praying about it, and I told her yes, as long as asking-God-to-conform-my-will-to-His-while-simultaneously-really-just-wanting-God-to-do-what-I-say counts as “praying” (note: I think it does).
My friend passed on some advice she had received. She told me to take the whole big mess of feelings and complications and contradictions and hurt and hope and regret and embarrassment and upset and give it to Mary. She said Mary will take all the tangles, all the thorns, arrange them like flowers in a bouquet, and present them to God for me. She told me: give it to Mary, because Mary makes all things beautiful for God, and God makes all things beautiful for her.
Today, on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the advice to give it to Mary feels even more true than on the day I received it. Even her passing was made beautiful by her and for her.
Mary is our hope in all things, but especially in contradiction, as we see expressed in this hymn from the Byzantine Liturgy for the Dormition (the Eastern Catholic name for the Assumption):
In giving birth you kept your virginity;
in your Dormition you did not leave the world, O Mother of God,
but were joined to the source of Life.
You conceived the living God and, by your prayers,
will deliver our souls from death. (Catechism of the Catholic Church § 966)
Do you have a mess of contradictions that needs sorting out? Ask Mary to make it beautiful for you.
Kendra Tierney Norton is grateful to be a wife, mother, and stepmother. She lives in the wilds of unincorporated Los Angeles County in a big old fixer-upper house with her husband and a varying number of their combined fourteen children, plus one fish, two cats, and twenty chickens. She likes to say that her goal is keeping Catholicism weird. To that end, she is the author of books including the Catholic All Year Compendium: Liturgical Living for Real Life with Ignatius Press and O Come, Emmanuel: Advent Reflections on the Jesse Tree for Families with Emmaus Road Publishing, the creator of the TV series Catholic All Year At Home on FORMED, and the CEO of Catholic All Year, an apostolate dedicated to helping parents live out their Catholic faith and pass it along to their children.
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