Our Lady, Our Mother
Even as a child, our foundress, Mother Mary of Jesus Crucified, had such a tender love for the Blessed Virgin Mary that she preferred carrying a statue of Our Lady to a baby doll. Over the past seventy-five years, the Blessed Mother has shown her own tender love for our community, aptly named “Our Lady of Grace.” Today, filial devotion to our heavenly mother continues to be “that which…most perfectly conforms, unites and consecrates us to Jesus Christ.”[1]
How is devotion to the Blessed Virgin present in the monastery? The answer involves both sacred time and sacred space. From the Angelus prayer recited in common three times a day, to the recitation of the rosary after Vespers, to the nighttime hymn, Salve Regina, and blessing with holy water, our whole monastic day is punctuated by prayer to the Blessed Mother. Marian devotion also fills the spaces in which we pray. Scarcely a room or a hall is without its image of Our Lady reminding us to turn often to our Mother of Mercy.
Even more importantly, the Blessed Virgin Mary is model of the monastic interior life—that time and “space” within the solitude of each soul that belongs to God alone. Mary is the one who “kept all these things in her heart,” meditating on the mysteries of Christ’s life (Lk 2:51). The best Marian devotion is simply imitation of her contemplation, silence, and faith in the spirit of holy receptivity that in her became profoundly fruitful for the life of the world.
Practically speaking, cultivating the interior life according to the norms of our Constitutions means spending two hours a day in private prayer and in reading scripture (lectio divina). By pondering the scriptures in our hearts as Mary did, we get to know her Son. Union with Him is the end of all devotion and, ultimately, this union means dwelling with Him in the bosom of the Father. The Blessed Mother walks with us and guides us to this goal of eternal life with the Holy Trinity.
Finally, as Dominican nuns we also imitate the Blessed Virgin by fidelity to our religious vows and by carefully observing those things that safeguard our contemplative way of life, such as enclosure and silence. Marian fidelity, in this sense, flows directly from the spousal nature of our vocation. Verbi Sponsa puts it this way: “Cloistered nuns see themselves especially in the Virgin Mary, Bride and Mother, figure of the Church; and sharing the blessedness of those who believe, they echo her ‘Yes’ and her loving adoration of the Word of life, becoming with her the living ‘memory’ of the Church’s spousal love” (VS, 1).
In this 75th jubilee year, may the nuns of the Monastery of Our Lady of Grace follow the model of our own mother foundress by true devotion to our heavenly Mother. And may the holy Mother of God pour out His grace upon us and all who read this.
[1] St. Louis de Montfort, True Devotion to Mary, 120.
The Monastery’s public shrine to Our Lady of Fatima, 1957.
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