Real Mercy: Mary, Forgiveness, and Trust

Very simply, if you give yourself completely to Mary, she will give herself ­completely to you.  Everything Mary receives — all her graces, her ­interior disposition toward God — will come to you.  Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus understood this well.  She wrote a poem about Mary, "Why I Love You, O Mary."  In it is this sentence: "The treasure of the mother ­belongs to the child."

There are mothers among you, and I think you know very well that everything a mother possesses is not for her; it's for her children.  And Mary is our mother.  Everything she receives from God, she gives to us.  The more I give myself to Mary, the more she will give herself to me.  Louis de Montfort writes about everything Mary gives us.  She gives us her faith, her trust in God.  She dilates our hearts in a filial trust.  She takes away every fear from us, along with all our suspicions.  She gives us trust and simplicity and a profound faith that enables us to place all of our trust in God.  She also gives us her humility.

In the same poem written by Thérèse, another line says, "Close around you, Mary, I love to stay small."  There is a mystery here.  The closer we are to Mary, the more we accept our own smallness.  When we are faced with ourselves and our smallness, our faults, our wounds, our imperfections, and our failures, we tend to exaggerate our difficulties.  But when we're close to Mary, we so understand the goodness of God that we are able to accept our smallness.  Mary's maternal love helps us to recognize and accept peacefully our limitations and fragility.  This is Mary's great gift to us.  Close to Mary, we love our littleness.  Thérèse says this as well: "The more that you love your smallness and your poverty, the more Jesus will give you grace."