Adapted from Sr. Marie Gabrielle’s talk, “A Thousand Times Happy”
The desire to know God’s will — to know what our Heavenly Father and Mother want of us so that we may fulfill it, no matter what it is, no matter what it costs — that desire is a grace, and that grace has a name. It is called Holy Abandonment. If there were ever a secret to sanctity, it is this. And all the saints knew it.
The German Dominican mystic Johannes Tauler said, “A short moment [in these dispositions of abandonment] would be more useful for us than forty years following practices of our own choice” (Three Ages of the Interior Life, 391). I will go even further and say that devotion to Mary is only beneficial to us in that it disposes us more quickly and more sweetly to this abandonment and assures our perseverance therein. When St. Louis Marie claimed that the essence of true devotion to Mary consists in a spirit of interior dependence (cf. Secret of Mary, no. 44), he was talking about Holy Abandonment. “A spirit of interior dependence” — what does that mean? In a general sense, it means our saying, “I cannot know God’s will without you showing me, Blessed Mother; I am not strong enough to do His will without you helping me.” Specifically, though, this dependence consists following the counsel of St. Maximilian who said, “Run to Mary as a little child to its best, beloved Mother, if only by invoking the holy name of Mary with your lips or heart in all the difficulties of life” (Aim Higher, 77).
Are you starting to see the big picture? The love of this beautiful Woman is the surest means of overcoming the last and possibly most hideous of that multi-headed hydra of Fear we have been dismembering (I mean, “discussing”) in this mini-series of articles, namely, the Fear of Abandonment. I do not mean the fear of being abandoned; I mean the fear of abandoning ourselves to God’s Providence. There is a big difference, obviously.
It is a strange thought but an inescapable reality that many of us would much sooner say to God my will not Thine be done, rather than the actual words Christ prayed in the Garden. When we are bitten by the monster I am calling the Fear of Abandonment, the result is a sort of blood poisoning that goes under the highly technical, somewhat archaic, difficult to pronounce, and definitely unpopular name of selfishness. Victims of this bite have been known to succumb to a sort of delirium and may even say such delusional things as, “It’s okay, God, I’ve got this.” They may admit that God has amazing graces and blessings and victories waiting for them on the path He wishes them to follow, but they politely decline by words such as, “Thanks, but, I’m all set.”
Now, it could be argued that selfishness — the condition of holding on to the power to make our own decisions and carve out our own destinies — is part of our fallen human condition and we are all afflicted with it to some extent. True enough. This being the case, Catholics, we should start by at least wanting to be cured of our selves.
This is where it gets interesting.
St. Thomas says that there is such a thing as a wholesome fear that can prompt us to take prudent measures for our own spiritual self-preservation, and this realization that we are our own worst enemy, this is the ultimate case in point, in my opinion. We should fear of our own capacity to thwart God’s salvific plan for us. We should fear ourselves and our own selfishness.
We talk about God sending people to hell, but it is far more accurate to say that actually He does not. All the souls in Hell right now are there because they chose to be there. They wanted to be there. They would rather be there than in Heaven, forced to send an eternity with a Being whom they hate. I know it is mind-boggling, but that is reality. God gave us free will in order that, in choosing to love Him, it would be our choice and He could delight forever in our delight at His delight that we made the right choice. Without this free will, human nature ceases to be what God created it to be. And so, God, Who made our nature and saw that it was good, bound Himself, as it were, to respect our free will and let us make our own choices even if those choices make us eternally miserable. We damn ourselves, Ladies and Gentlemen. No one else can do it for us.
What a terrifying power.
Therefore, happy, a thousand times happy, are we if turn to Our Lady and cry out to Her, “Blessed Mother, I do not want that power. Take from me my ability to choose sin. I consecrate my freedom to you that you may save me from my own selfishness.”
She will hear you. She will save you. Do you know how? By making you yield to grace in all things. Remember, grace is everything. It is God’s life in us. So long as we have it, we cannot be lost. So long as we do not, we cannot be saved. Grace is everything, and She — our Mother — is the Keeper, the Dispenser of all grace. It is Hers to give to whom She wills, when She wills, as much as She wills. But when She gives it, it is on us to receive it. This idea of yielding to grace as the remedy for the Fear of Abandonment is so, so important.
Did you know that St. Maximilian Kolbe came extremely close to not becoming a Franciscan? He and his older brother Francis had been in the minor seminary for three years when, hearing news of recruits being needed for the movement to liberate of Poland, he thought that surely joining such an effort under the banner of Our Lady of Częstochowa must be God’s will for him. He convinced his brother and the two of them were on their way to notify the Father Provincial of their decision to leave when the novitiate doorbell rang in the parlor. It was their mother. Her visit was unexpected, and her eyes were brimming with joy. She had called just to tell them how happy she was that, with her youngest son ready to enter seminary, and her two older sons already safe in the Franciscan Order, her heart was simply overflowing with gratitude. All her children belonged to God. What more could a mother ask? Her words, her joy, stopped the would-be freedom fighter in his tracks, and saved his vocation. Can you imagine what things would have been different if St. Maximilian had not yielded to and cooperated with that grace when it was offered to him? You might think, “Yeah, too bad for that poor bloke in Auschwitz.” Yes, well, you might just as truly say, too bad for the whole nation of Japan. There was an awful lot more to St. Maximilian’s life than just his heroic death.
I bring up this anecdote because it is the perfect illustration of how much good can hang on one single grace, (in St. Maximilian’s case, the grace to persevere in his vocation). And if he were standing right here, he would tell you most emphatically that to find Mary is to find the grace to yield to that grace. It is through Her intercession that we are able to abandon ourselves utterly, to let go of our own preferences and plans and, yes, fears, so as to be come the saints — even the great saints — that God created us to be. Saints that are happy; even a thousand times happy.
