Cor Mariae
“Mary, give me your Heart: so beautiful, so pure . . . your Heart so full of love and humility that I may be able to receive Jesus in the Bread of Life and love Him as you love Him.”
These were the beautiful words of Mother Teresa, the Saint whose radical love for Christ filled her with a burning desire to satisfy His infinite thirst on the cross. In this simple prayer, the beloved Saint of Calcutta illuminates her profound desire to imitate the love of the Immaculate Heart of our Lady, the heart that so tenderly loved Christ.
And when one looks upon Mary’s heart, one sees the Heart that shared so deeply in intimacy with the Heart of Christ. It is this heart that most purely consoled Christ in his agony and suffering.
The Sacred intimacy between Mary and her Divine Son is first illuminated in her communion with Christ in pregnancy. In her reception of Christ in her womb, Mary surrendered her very being, her heart and her desires, out of tender and burning love for Christ. Because of this offering of her life to God, Mary experienced a sacred communion, a sharing of life, with Christ Himself, from the beginning of His ministry on earth.
And because of Mary’s complete offering to God, it was in her womb that Christ found solace and rest. Although Christ, in his ministry, discussed that the “Son of Man has no place to lay his head,” no place on earth to find solace and a home during his ministry, he found this rest in Mary’s womb and heart, in those places where he was so deeply beloved and cherished.
And when Christ was born into the world, the world full of many who would despise Him and His Sacred Heart that burned out of love for them, his mother was His first adorer. As she looked upon His small face, the face of her greatest love, her life was a manifestation of the words, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God."
Possibly the greatest moment that illuminates the beauty of Mary’s deep intimacy with Christ is during His passion, that time in which Mary’s overwhelming love for her son led her own heart to be pierced in suffering.
Saint Faustina, meditating on the mystical relation of Divine intimacy and suffering, exclaimed, “Oh my God, how sweet it is to suffer for You, suffer in the most secret recesses of the heart, in the greatest hiddenness, to burn like a sacrifice noticed by no one, pure as crystal.”
No one reflects these words more strongly than Mary. As she stood by Christ’s feet, her heart silently broke, for she saw Him who loved so profoundly, and yet, was abandoned by many. She saw the one that she had nurtured in her womb, bleeding and dying in front of those who turned away from His thirst to love and to forgive.
Although Mary was unable to take away His suffering on the Cross, it is Mary’s pure, profound love that consoled Christ in his agony. In a message of Christ to Faustina, Christ revealed that it was the faithful, devout souls who brought him consolation in the passion, a “drop of consolation in the midst of an ocean of bitterness.” Thus, although Mary was unable to physically embrace Christ in his suffering, he was consoled and found rest in her love for him, again finding rest in that heart in which he found his first earthly solace.
It is this sacred intimacy that Mary desires her children to experience. She longs to lead her children to the foot of the cross, to the Sacred Heart that so deeply desires to Love and to be loved, who desires to find rest and consolation in the hearts of His beloved.