Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. Poem by Fr. Edward O.P.

Dear Fr. Edward,

Thank you, with the poem glorious reflection on the imagery of
OL of Perpetual Succour and contemplative 'attention given to the eternal
living perichoresis of the whole Triad
with its total cosmic enfolding and timeless upholding'.

Prayer has to rest in these verses.

I am happy that you are restored back to your 'sanctuary'.

Yours,

Donald

Our Lady of Perpetual Succour+Pray for us
Small Icon made by Whitland Cistercian Sisters, Wales.

Email to Donald

Fw: Poem; Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.  

From Fr. Edward O.P.  

On Saturday, 28 June 2014, Edward ...> wrote:

Dear Father Donald,

I took a chance on sending the poem in a way direct from Google Drive. 

Thank you for telling me. The poem is copied below.

Please make a copy for H...

Blessings from

fr Edward O.P.

Our Lady of Perpetual Succour 2014

The repainting proposed the painting’s integrity,

but the old state with its traces of numerous incidents through history

showed her, with her Child, emerging from conquered vicissitudes

with only the surface much disturbed;

yet emerging so strongly from beneath and through

the wound-scars on the ill-treated patena.

The call for restoration was world-wide.

Blessed Pio Nono remembered praying before the ikon

over many years from his youth:

from him came its promotion to universal worthiness and its final naming.

The type is Byzantine hodegetria: a theotokos of the Passion,

yet evidently prophetic with two Archangels:

on the left Michael holding the reed-stuck sponge

and soldier’s rough wine as thirst-slaker.

Matching on the right, Gabriel carrries a three-bar Cross, then used by Popes.

Scaled small because both prophetic

and with Mary painted as greater, by destiny

she and her Son to be eternally triumphant.

She cloak-clad, blue for perpetual Virginity,

over a tunic of martyral red.

She steadily supports by her throne-arms her Child, his left-shoe

dropping off with picture-stilled animation,

and caught within the ikon’s lower framing.

So near to divinity she has left her heavenly plane,

communicating by sight and presence alone

with all those who call on or walk up to her for Succour.

This shadow of the heavenly reality will have found and caught up

all of her clients for her Child through those all-seeing eyes!

Those prophetic Archangels salute her and her Child

as Coredemptrix with the Crucified Divine Redeemer himself.

Her eyes turned to her clients: not speaking.

After succouring her Son with most sensitive love and virginal milk

she has turned herself to the “them” in which  we ourselves are included,

to extend her Succouring to us, overflowing our pleading as her Son   

is re-begotten in each one of us, surrounding us as air invisible,

life-giving and -sustaining: as total well-being of body and soul.

But his eyes are differently converged: not on her clients,

his whole attention given to the eternal living perichoresis of the whole Triad

with its total cosmic enfolding and timeless upholding.

So is the divine resolving all into the transcendental simplicity of Itself.

And the Mother participates this in her Son

in an action single-in-manifold.

He as Man-Child has drawn long on her succouring breasts

and is thoroughly refreshed;

now in the Divinity of his single Self He looks at what will follow

and what has preceded, seeing the linkages as simplicities-in-unity.

She passes from him to his all-oned Mystical Body.

We are in this Body the clients of her Succouring

in an act in itself eternal, no longer finishing or waiting.

But terrestrial-wise always some are waiting with a pious wish

to be taken into her Virginal-Mother remaining-place (v.Jn 14,2: ‘mansion’).

She refills breasts, with heart and mind, ready for total succouring,

to give of her purest, long-standing, perpetual helpfulness.

Her Christ-succouring like all heavenly mysteries becomes eternalised in act.

We wait our turn as others wait their turn,

to be timelessly, repeatedly succoured with love and power,

that we may also succour others from its over-plus:

all-restoring as Mediatricial from her inexhaustible totality.

She waits on us as her Son, his body being filled with the single Divinity,

in constant generation terrestrial-wise.

Yet still as Person participating and participated by Father

as Generator of his Divinity,

and Holy Spirit as generator of his Humanity through Virginal Mary.

Let full believers be assured that the power of Mary can

cancel out the quattrocento failure at Florence to remake the Church as one,

and the cinquecento novelties of the reformation

whose wounds remain as a restraint on the deployment of its full energies.

Even the deeper and older alienation of Judaism from its destined fulfilment.

Fr. Edward O.P.

27-28 June 2014

Stykkisholmur

Iceland