Adapted from Sr. Marie Gabrielle’s talk, “A Thousand Times Happy”
The most famous missionary of all time after St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier, arrived in Japan as you would expect him to: poor, humble, meek, unassuming. And they ignored him. He gave it some thought, some prayer, no doubt — and he changed tactics. Already the papal nuncio to the Far East, he dressed himself up in fancy clothes, got himself a whole retinue of attendants, a private litter, loaded himself up with presents for the local governor, and called again. This time doors opened wide for him and everyone listened respectfully. The lesson for us here is not “when in Japan, do as the Japanese do”; it is that when something is not working, we might need to try something else. We might need to change our approach, even our outlook. Yikes. Admit we are wrong? Scary thought.
The wound inflicted by the Fear of Having to Change is a serious one. It is called Superficiality. We do not want to admit that we — our methods, our ideas — are problematic or ineffective, and so we do not bother to think about how to improve them. We live our lives on the surface doing the same thing over and over again, and bearing with the frustration of getting the same pathetic results because somehow that is preferable to taking the time to sit down and think, “Blessed Mother, what should I be doing differently?”
The superficial person is spiritually comatose. That is bad. There is no such thing as a superficial saint — because there is no such thing as superficial love. You might as well talk about cold fire. But, alas, there are lots and lots of superficial Catholics out there. St. Thomas says that he is not even good who does not desire to be better. But better means change, and change is hard. It requires effort, the very thought of which is intimidating.
So what is the solution? It is this: We have to appreciate Mary’s power. Seriously. The cure for our superficiality is the deep, consoling realization that God does not expect us to fix ourselves by ourselves. Mary is here to help us.
News flash: your Heavenly Mother also happens to be the Queen of the Universe, and Her power is commensurate with Her love. It has to be. For God to have given Her a superhuman — actually a quasi-divine! — capacity to love Her children, and not to have given Her equal power to be able to aid them in their necessities, feed, clothe, teach, and, yes, change us, would be unthinkable. It would be like God giving sentient power to a tree but not the power of locomotion so that it could run when it hears the chainsaw being revved up. We talk about the “harmony of attributes” in nature, and we should realize that, like so many philosophical truths, it has a supernatural counterpart. If Mary is able to love us with a quasi-infinite intensity — and She is — then She has to be able to help us with a quasi-infinite efficacy — and She is.
St. John Eudes says that in order that Mary might govern God’s empire with equity and justice, He has filled Her with a light so bright and penetrating that She knows everything that takes place in the universe, and that She is the only one among all creatures that has such power and bounty that She can assist those who call upon Her as promptly as though She were present in the place where She is invoked (cf. The Wondrous Childhood of the Mother of God, 184–85).
And, by the way, if She can help us to change for the better, She can also help our loved ones. She may or may not use us to effect change in them, and we have to be okay with that. Or She might ask us to switch tactics in order that She can use us. And, like St. Francis Xavier, we have to be okay with that, too.
Traditionalists, we all know, are great at creating moral imperatives — sometimes false ones. “You can’t use a microwave, it’s a sin. You can’t watch TV, it’s a sin. You can’t listen to that music, go to those parties, wear that outfit, eat at McDonald’s — it’s a sin, it’s a sin, it’s a sin.” Now, some of those imperatives may be right; it is not a joke, after all, that we are surrounded by enemy landmines. Really. They are everywhere. And they are designed to blow up the hedges that guard our Faith; they are designed to disrupt the harmony of our families, to appeal to our baser passions, to break down our sensitivity to violence and impurity. It is a wholesome and right reaction that when we see such dangers we are solicitous to warn other people about them. But if we are serious about being conduits of grace for others so that they can make the changes they need to make in their lives, our focus should be on ourselves first. We need to be regularly asking ourselves the Lucia question: “Mary, what do you want of me?”
In short, we need, with Mary’s help, to not be afraid of having to change.
