Lectio divina
Hail
Hail, full of grace.
(Lk 1,28)
February 11, 1858: near Massabielle, a rocky ravine on the outskirts of Lourdes, along the Gave River, Bemardetta Soubirous, a humble 14-year-old girl, sees a "beautiful Lady": «I saw around a cave that the branches of a bush were shaking strongly as if by a strong wind, when all around there was quiet.
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Full of Grace
At the same time, a cloud of luminous gold came out of the rocky cavity and a white Lady, young and beautiful, whose equal I had never seen, came to stand on the opening, above the bush. She looked at me. She greeted me with a slight bow... She smiled at me very gracefully and invited me closer. I continued in my fear although so different from the usual ones, so much so that I would have always remained there to admire her. While I prayed I observed her as much as I could. She had the appearance of a young girl of sixteen, seventeen. The white dress reached to her feet and tight at the neck. The blue ribbon of her hips fell in front, also to her feet. A white veil covered her head leaving a few hairs visible and fell behind her shoulders, along her arms almost to the end of her dress... The Lady, alive and surrounded by light, finished the Rosary and greeted me smiling".
He will meet her 18 times in that year. She will live until death, which will come to her at 35 years of age, with the nostalgia of seeing her unforgettable face again.
On March 25, the Lady, "more beautiful than ever", will reveal her name in the local dialect to the almost illiterate visionary: "I am the Immaculate Conception".
Mary is the "woman clothed with the sun" (Rev 12:1) radiant with beauty, the sublime daughter of Zion, the ark of the covenant penetrated by God himself, the "full of grace" (Lk 1:28), a wonderful letter written by the finger of the living God and delivered to men.
(cf. 2 Cor 3:2-3).
«The living letter of God who is Mary, begins with a word so vast that it contains within itself, like a seed, her entire life. It is the word grace. Entering to her, the angel said: "Hail full of grace", and again: "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found grace".
(Lk 1:28.30).
The angel, in greeting her, does not call Mary by name, but simply calls her "full of grace" or "filled with grace" (kecharitomene); he does not say: "Hail, Mary", but says: "Hail, full of grace".
In grace is Mary's deepest identity. Mary is the one who is "dear" to God ("dear", as "charity" derives from the same root as charis, which means grace!)... Mary is thus the living, concrete proclamation that at the beginning of everything, in the relationship between God and creatures, there is grace. Grace is the ground and the place where the creature can meet its Creator".
(R. Cantalamessa,)
The Church calls the Madonna "tota pulchra" with the words of the Song of Songs: "How beautiful you are, my friend, how beautiful you are.
You are all beautiful, my friend, in you no stain".
(Song of Songs 4,1.7).
Mary is full of divine favor, of the presence of God, the Lord is with her more than in any other creature (cf. Lk 1, 28). God has not only given her his favor, but all of himself in his Son.
She shines with that beauty that we call holiness. Through the divine grace, uncontaminated that fills her, the Holy Virgin places herself above all angelic and earthly creatures. In the Latin Church she is invoked with the title of "Immaculate", in the Orthodox Church with the title of "All Holy" (Panaghia), to express in her the absence of every sin, even original sin, and positively to underline in her person the presence of all virtues in an extraordinary splendor.
Preserved from every stain of sin, she remains eternally a clear mirror of the beauty of God. Mary is "younger than sin, younger than the race from which she came" (G. Bemanos, Diary of a Country Priest). For this reason, her beauty is perennial, extraordinary, unknown to the world, absolutely new.
With her presence of grace she presents herself as an image of novelty, a point of reference and at the same time a sign of contradiction for these confused times, madly thirsty for beauty and so strangely marked by the negative aspects of sin. Our age wants beauty, it pursues it frantically in every way and... rightly so. Man is made by God for beauty: it is a need rooted in his nature. But for what beauty? Superficial, apparent beauty; or interior, profound beauty? «Nowadays, body care is no longer in view of an aesthetic enjoyment, as in ancient Greece, or a pleasure reserved for a few, as in ancient Rome. It has become a mass phenomenon.
What is not done today for the well-being of the body! One could even speak of a sort of obsession with the body. I walk down the streets and I feel myself being looked at by large posters and targeted advertisements that promise me "well-being"; in pharmacies, products of all kinds to improve tone, performance, to restore youth; in newsstands, specialized magazines for health, good shape, figure, fitness. The number of gyms, beauty centers, rooms and "oases" for relaxation and deep meditation is constantly increasing; in sports shops, jogging accessories, the latest model suits, expensive outfits for the most diverse gymnastic exercises. Because all this is good for you".
(C. M. Martini).
And yet, paradoxically, never before in our era that exalts corporeality to the point of paroxysm, has such a humiliating degradation of the body itself been reached!
"As much as multitudes of contemporaries are obsessively concerned with their health, they end up actually despising the dignity and value of the body: they silence its needs with petty paid pleasures and eliminate its suffering through tranquilizers and drugs available on an industrial scale. The alternative seems to be only one: either we enslave ourselves to the body, sinking into the grossest greed, or we consider it an enemy in times of pain. Man's relationship with his body has gradually become dehumanized, and the planning mania of our era seems to give reason to Paul Valery's quip: "It seems that intelligence is the faculty of the soul least capable of understanding the body" ».
(G. Torello, Dalle mura di Gerico)
If we look around a bit we discover how health and the pursuit of a beautiful figure have really taken on the proportions of a cult with its typical devotions, its asceticism, its sacrifices. We do anything to have a beautiful, healthy, enviable body. To appear we spend a lot of money, we waste a lot of time, we waste a lot of imagination. For a fragment of beauty we even run risks and sometimes we trample on values. «on television, in newspapers, in the cinema people are all young, between twenty and thirty years old, thin and beautiful. There is no old man, as if everyone had disappeared from circulation. The message, in short, is that everyone must be perfect like dolls, and for the others there is no interest... Everyone is beautiful, everyone is happy... and instead we find great unhappiness in everyone because no one can afford to be themselves. Young people are obsessed with imposed models, and always remain dissatisfied because they never manage to reach them, even when they give up food.
The truth is that the current body culture is concerned with persuading us that our body, just as it is, is unacceptable. The body, to be presentable, must be clean, perfumed, colored, dressed in a certain way, and there are no exceptions to the imposed rules. The goal, of course, is to create demand for certain products, a goal that is pursued not only with advertising, but also with cinema, television and other forms of communication. The problem is that this strategy pushes everyone to hate themselves, to reject their own reality, to chase non-existent and in any case unattainable models, because those who propose them will continue to change them at a constant pace, in order to fuel ever more frustration and the demand for new products.
All this ends up leading to a great general impoverishment. The soul is now totally ignored, erased by the tyranny of the image. The most singular thing is that this theoretical triumph of the body is not a triumph of reality, because the images we are inspired by are artificial. The illusion of these models created in photographic studios and on computers, and the illusion of appearance are now more important than being.
The image is the disease of this century, and has allowed the affirmation of a superficial culture based on appearance, in which the body, stripped of artistic values but virtualized, is an essential component. To get out of it, perhaps we must wait for the advent of a new era".
(C. Fiore, Etica per giovani).
We are desperately searching for the "image" and when we find ourselves unable to reach it, we sink into disappointment; the frustration that is generated inside tears the soul apart, throwing it into the pit of dissatisfaction. As if everything began and ended with the body, as if we were nothing but the body! Sirach rightly points out: "Health and strength are better than all gold, a robust body than great wealth. There is no wealth better than the health of the body and there is no happiness above the joy of the heart".
(Sir 30, 15-16).
important health, body care, physical beauty, but without neglecting the deep needs of the heart.
Why is it that man, so eager to appear beautiful on the outside, often feels ugly on the inside, dirty, distant from himself, incapable of accepting himself, devoid of joy?
We have lost sight of the essential: we have neglected the deepest dimension of beauty, we have found ourselves with broken pieces in our hands.
With the two blind men of Jericho, we too cry out: "Lord, let our eyes be opened!" (Mt 20:33).
Enough with misunderstandings, contradictions, illusions!
We need to discover the dimension of a beauty that goes beyond what the eyes see, that we cannot trace with the most sophisticated observation instruments but that we can feel flowing from our heart: a beauty that comes from within, where God is present in us and of which Mary of Nazareth is the perfect incarnation; a beauty that does not disappoint because it belongs to another dimension, it is not "just flesh", it is "more than flesh".
The Fathers of the Church have applied to Mary and with her to the Church, since the beginning, the verse of the Psalm which, in the text known to them, said: "All the beauty of the king's daughter comes from within (ab intus)".
(cf. Ps 45, 14).
True, incomparable, profound beauty is that of grace, which shines outward and radiates into the world to elevate it, purify it, renew it.
B. Pascal formulated the principle of the three orders or magnitudes that exist in creation: the order of bodies, the order of intelligence and the order of sanctity and grace. Between the order or magnitude of bodies, such as wealth, beauty and physical vigor and the superior magnitude of intelligence, there is an infinite difference. But an "infinitely more infinite" difference exists between the order of intelligence and that of grace (Thoughts).
The magnitude of grace rises above all others, as far as heaven is from earth. To despise grace, or to foolishly believe that one can do without it, means to condemn oneself to incompleteness, to remain at the first or second level of humanity, without even suspecting that there is another infinitely superior one.
For this incomparable greatness, after Jesus Christ, the Madonna excels above all creatures and is for all believers who welcome her into their intimacy (cf. Jn 19:27) "pledge of sure hope", Mary is the woman of beauty because she is full of grace, the creature who has allowed herself to be permeated and transformed by grace, to the point of shining completely, to the point of fully making visible the gift received. The Virgin of Nazareth, inserted more than any other creature in the mystery of Christ, belongs to this dimension of beauty, the dimension of grace, of the life of God poured into our hearts.
She, full of God, immaculate, full of beauty and innocence, educates the conscience of her children to refinement, to delicacy, to the truest purity; since the sky is not reflected in the murky waters and in the swamp; and unfortunately we are all experts in the deafness and dullness that mercilessly dominate those who often and willingly come to terms with more or less venial sin.
For us, Mary is desire, expectation, nostalgia for the beauty of God. She, "whiter than snow", will certainly create in those who love her a very lively sense of God and consequently a sincere horror for every form of sin,
"Lord, I will see you and you will see me in your beauty,
in this I will see myself in you and you will see yourself in me.
It will happen that I seem you and you, in your beauty, seem me, that my beauty is yours and yours is mine.
And I will be you and you will be me in your beauty.
Because your own beauty will be mine
and then we will see each other in your beauty"
(St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle).
