“I am the soul who magnifies the Lord” (I)

This was December 8, 2015, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It is a holy day of obligation for Catholics, when attendance at Mass is required, so I made sure to go that evening. I lingered for a few moments afterwards; one corner of the sanctuary was extravagantly decorated in a colorful scene depicting the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Mexican Indian peasant , Juan Diego, in 1531 - an encounter that precipitated a sweeping wave of conversions, almost 10 million, in the Americas over the following decade. I looked at the display for a while, thinking about the Immaculate Conception, mulling it over, wanting to understand. I prayed a prayer I’d been praying for months, since last March: Jesus, show me your mother.

As I was walking out, I heard a voice saying something to me. Not an audible voice - more like a thought proceeding into my mind from the outside, speaking to me in the interior of my heart. Yet, it was unmistakable, and it made me stop short and listen.

Consecrate yourself to me.

This wasn’t the first time I heard that voice. It spoke to me once before, during Mass on another Marian feast day, the Assumption, on August 15. I had been praying that same prayer, asking Christ to introduce me to his mother, to help me know and understand the appropriate place she should inhabit in my spiritual life. And during that Mass, I heard: I am the soul who magnifies the Lord. This was a somewhat familiar phrase: the first line of the Magnificat - magnificat anima mea Dominum - is literally “my soul magnifies the Lord.” But the metaphor suddenly seemed new to me; I went home, wrote it down, and pondered its meaning.

Mary gives us a picture of a human soul so completely united to God that she becomes translucent; she shows us not herself, but God within her, the word becoming flesh for our sake. In her person, she displays the essence of the Christian life - a creature who gives herself in complete trust to her Creator. Her humility and receptivity to God magnifies the scale of his redemptive work - the vast expanse he traverses to draw near us, to pitch his tent among us. Mary, full of grace, exhibits a restoration of the imago Dei, the divine image etched upon the human creature.

Abigail Rine Favale, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion - Cascade Books, 2018, pp 163-165