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

But this new message (1) - Consecrate yourself to me - was strange and unsettling. I had not yet, in my Catholic sojourn, encountered the tradition of Marian consecration, so the language itself was alien. What could it mean? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, which exposed the deep-seated unease I still harbored toward Mary - the real Mary, not Mary qua feminist symbol.

For a while, I tried to dismiss the whole experience, write it off as some imaginative fancy. But I couldn’t shake the way the thought has blindsided me out of nowhere, as if interrupting my stream of consciousness, rather than coming from it - and the fact that the voice asked me to adopt a devotional practice that was unknown to me at the time. So, with reluctance and ample doubts, I began to try and understand what was being asked of me.

Marian consecration, from what I could tell, was a practice of consecrating oneself - giving one’s whole person - to Jesus through Mary. It involved taking Mary as a spiritual model and guide in order to grow in devotion to Christ. Some of this made intuitive sense to me. As a mother, I knew that Mary’s love for Christ, and her commitment to him, is uniquely powerful and complete. She knows and loves him more perfectly than any other human could. Even before Christ was born, she shared an intimate, silent communion with him, and she followed him faithfully throughout his life, death, and resurrection. Perhaps, then, I could increase my own faith and love for Christ through her example and guidance.

The question of Mary having a mediating role was a little trickier. Isn’t Christ the sole mediator  between the Father and human beings? I was still plagued by the feeling that  any explicit devotion or attention shown to Mary somehow  detracted from or competed with my love for Christ. And that was my error: seeing those loves as competitives.

[...] Mary is not a mediator in the same way that Christ is a mediator. Mary is not divine; she cannot save us. And yet, she has been selected by God to play a unique role as the God-bearer. She is the human being chosen to bring Christ into the world - and this is a mediating role. Through Mary, the Incarnation is made known to us. Mary, then, is a mediator between Christ and humankind, in a way that is both analogous to from Christ’s mediation to the Father. This notion of a human mediator to Christ is actually not that radical. No one encounters Christ in isolation; the gospel is always transmitted through other people. Even a common phrase in evangelical vernacular - “so-and-so led me to Christ” demonstrates this. And who is better able to lead to Christ than his mother?

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

(1) See A Moment with Mary of July 3, 2022