Having just celebrated “Father’s Day” being then an inopportune time to write on this topic,…
Hail Holy Queen.
The prayer Hail Holy Queen which we pray after the Rosary is a most ancient prayer and beautiful. We declare that Mary the Mother of Jesus is “Holy” is “Queen” “Mother of all “Mercy” (Jesus).
She is a “hope.” We cry to Mary because before Mary’s “Fiat” and the beginning of the work of our Redemption we were indeed “poor banished children of “Eve” (hawah-mother of all living) and in some ways we still are because we can no longer meet our creator face to face as “Eve” did in the garden. Today we meet our God and creator only with the eyes of faith. The Sin of Origins (of our first parents) deprived for us the experience of visual and “face to face” intimacy” (He walked with Adam in the cool of the garden) with Him. As we live on this earth (Garden of Eden?) and it is His joy and ours that we do so, we are deprived of the same intimacy of our “Father” as you and I have the visible and tangible intimacy with our own fathers. As you and I have an intimacy with your/my children.
We sigh and are sad because of this barrier that prohibits us from embracing our Heavenly Father as we embrace our own living children.
“This Valley of Tears” is the earth and our life as we live them.
My own life is strewn with tears and all human beings in one way or another experience much sorrow and loss and the tears shed often feel like we could fill a whole valley with our tears (poetically). So collectively the tears of the human beings in our daily lives fill a whole valley and form a river and fill and top up the ocean.
“Turn then most gracious advocate thine eyes of Mercy towards us” A new title for Our Blessed Mother. Remember Jesus on the Cross gave her to us as “our Mother” so we can turn to “our Mother” as we turn to our human mother for advocacy, for comfort, support, for intimate needs, so we turn to our heavenly mother for comfort for our soul’s needs, to help us to carry that heavy cross like my own deeply regretted two decisions which changed the trajectory of my life.
“And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb….Jesus”
And in this exile/banishment from the embrace and vision of my own true Father, we ask, “Mum, when we come to the end of this journey, would you take me by the hand and introduce me to your Son who gave you to me and who bought for me this new and intimate relationship with Our Father/my Father?”
I believe wholly completely and totally that I receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of my Lord Jesus when I receive the Eucharist and as I said in the past if I close my eyes I can see the beauty of the light of my Lord Jesus of the Transfiguration. But it is only through the imagination and not the visual.
We are meant to be perfect as Our heavenly father is perfect, but the reality is that we are not and whilst we remain on this earth we can and do fail the ideal. None of us is sinless. We all sin and fall far short of the glory of God. However, for this and for the reason of His great love for us, He has left for us the remedy for this our inclination towards failing the ideal.
Yes Jesus has conquered the Sin of World, but this knowledge has to be taken on board, acquired and made one’s own and again the reality is that we are human beings who are frail and like St Paul says, I want to do good things but I fail.
The prayer “Hail Holy Queen” has written within it a most marvellous catechesis and if it could be “delivered” it would open the eyes of the soul. Within this catechesis, is the story of God, creation, sin, redemption and return to Our Father.
To the best of our knowledge we seek Christ in His integrity, unbroken just as His mother and Father gave Him to us. This is what the journey is all about. Finding the whole and complete Christ in His divine essence.
That we should love our enemy is a given. That we get hurt with our enemy’s arrows, is also a given and in our labour to forgive is when we grow deeper in the dimension of the Cross and in this the finding Christ in His integrity.