Annual Retreat - Rule of St Benedict, Cistercian Community Contemplative Life

The concluding Retreat Conference of our Annual Retreat was directed to Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

A opening quotation from St. Benedict lead directly through Lectio Divina into the depths of Mary.
 RB. Prologue

L I S T E N  carefully, my child,
to your master's precepts,
and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
your loving father's advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to Him 

The powerful  reflection is summed up beautifully in some words from Caryll Houseland. Added pages ....

Annual Retreat - Final Conference on
Blessed Virgin Mary

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COMMENT - Responses below, at end.

Caryll Houselander ‘The Reed of God’ Part Two pp.40-45. 1948 ET HOMO FACTUS EST HUMANLY speaking, the time of Advent must have been the happiest time in Our Lady's life. The world about her must have been informed with more than its habitual loveliness, for she was gathering it all to the making of her son. But sometimes a pang of grief must have shot through her; for example, when the young wheat grew and she saw it pierce the earth with little swords. Perhaps the first sword to pierce her heart was a blade of green wheat. For was not her precious burden a grain of wheat sown in a field? Was He not bread? The world's bread that must be broken? Everything must have spoken to her of Him, as if the beauty of the world was one more prophecy. To children it seems perfectly natural that God's thoughts should become snow and water and stars; and creation itself is simply His meditation on Christ. The seed in the earth is the unborn child. The snow on the field is the Virgin Mother's purity. The bloom on the black thorn, flowering through the land, His birth. The falling of the red rose leaves foretells His passion, the wheat is bound in sheaves because He ,was bound, it is threshed because He was scourged. The fruit is red on the bough because He was crucified; because He rose from the dead, spring returns to us again. If such is the beauty of the world to ordinary children, what must it have been to the Mother of God, when her whole being was folded upon the unborn Christ within her? He was completely her own, utterly dependent upon her: she was His food and warmth and rest, His shelter from the world, His shade in the Sun. She was the shrine of the Sacrament, the four walls and the roof of His home. Yet she must have longed to hold Him between her hands and to look into His human face and to see in it, in the face of God, a family likeness to herself! Think of that! But perhaps you cannot, unless you happen to be a young priest newly ordained, waiting for the moment when you will hold in your hands the first Host that you have consecrated at your first Mass. It must have been a season of joy, and she must have longed for His birth, but at the same time she knew that every step that she took, took her little son nearer to the grave. Each work of her hands prepared His hands a little more for the nails; each breath that she drew counted one more to His last. In giving life to Him she was giving Him death. All other children born must inevitably die; death belongs to fallen nature; the mother's gift to the child is life. But Christ is life; death did not belong to Him. In fact, unless Mary would give Him death, He could not die. Unless she would give Him the capacity for suffering, He could not suffer. He could only feel cold and hunger and thirst if she gave Him her vulnerability to cold and hunger and thirst. He could not know the indifference of friends or treachery or the bitterness of being betrayed unless she gave Him a human mind and a human heart. That is what it meant to Mary to give human nature to God. He was invulnerable; He asked her for a body to be wounded. He was joy itself; He asked her to give Him tears. He was God; He asked her to make Him man. He asked for hands and feet to be nailed. He asked for flesh to be scourged. He asked for blood to be shed. He asked for a heart to be broken. The stable at Bethlehem was the first Calvary. The wooden manger was the first Cross. The swaddling bands were the first burial bands. The Passion had begun. Christ was man. This, too, was the first separation. This was her son, but now He was outside of Her: He had a separate heart: He looked at the world with the blind blue eyes of a baby, but they were His own eyes. The description of His birth in the Gospel does not say that she held Him in her arms but that she "wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger." As if her first act was to lay Him on the Cross. She knew that this little son of hers was God's Son and that God had not given Him to her for herself alone but for the whole world. This is one of the greatest of all the things that we must learn from our contemplation of Our Lady. Few mothers realize that their children are part of a whole and that the whole is the family of God, to whom every child born owes all the love and service of a brother or sister. Many mothers try to shield their children from the common life, to give them a sheltered upbringing, so to shield them from all risk of sickness or pain or poverty that they are shielded from vitality and the vast experience of living.   (Read) . . .