I happened across a web page full of quotes and started to ponder over this one:
I don’t want to be rich and famous. I want to be rich and anonymous. — Anonymous
My first thought was sure, I wouldn’t mind the money. Who needs the fame if it means paparazzi hounding you and your name splattered over the tabloids?
Then I thought about Mary, the mother of Jesus. She is such a mystery to me. There is very little written about her in the Bible. Thomas Merton writes about Mary in New Seeds of Contemplation:
All that has been written about the Virgin Mother of God proves to me that hers is the most hidden of sanctities. What people find to say about her sometimes tells us more about their own selves than it does about Our Lady.
During my conversion, Mary was one of those areas that I did not understand. To be honest, I still do not understand much about her, but I found a deep appreciation of her when I read Merton:
The genuine significance of Catholic devotion to Mary is seen in the light of the Incarnation itself. The Church cannot separate the Son and the Mother. Because the Church conceives of the Incarnation as God’s descent into the flesh and into time, and His great gift of Himself to His creatures, she also believes that the one who was closest to Him in this great mystery was the one who participated most perfectly in the gift. When a room is heated by an open fire, surely there is nothing strange in the fact that those who stand closest to the fireplace are the ones who are warmest. And when God comes into the world through the instrumentality of one of His servants, then there is nothing surprising about the fact that His chosen instrument should have the greatest and most intimate share in the divine gift.
Mary, who was empty of all egotism, free from all sin, was as pure as the glass of a very clean window that has no other function than to admit the light of the sun.
Is that a definition of humilty? I’m going to need a lot of Windex just be a window for the Light of the Lord that is the tiniest fraction as clean as Mary.