Draw Near to Christ through Our Lady and the Saints

How is it possible to grow close to God, even very close? What’s the best way to climb the steep stairway of perfection? St. Thérèse of Lisieux has some wonderful advice for us on these questions in her autobiography, The Story of a Soul:

We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. I have sought to find in Holy Scripture some suggestion as to what this lift might be which I so much desired, and I read these words uttered by the Eternal Wisdom Itself: “Whosoever is a little one, let him come to Me.” Then I drew near to God, feeling sure that I had discovered what I sought; but wishing to know further what He would do to the little one, I continued my search and this is what I found: “You shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees; as one whom the mother caresses, so will I comfort you.”¹

St. Thérèse wanted to find a shortcut to God rather than climb directly up the steep stairway. What stands out for me in St. Thérèse’s advice is the personal nature of the help that God provides his little ones. We are not pointed toward a manual or a program, but, in a way, to a mother. It is intriguing that Pope Benedict XVI in Mary: The Church at the Source rated the personal nature of Mary’s role in the Church very highly. In this book he commented: “In theology it is not the person that is reducible to the thing, but the thing to the person.” He identified a need for the whole Church to rediscover a more personal way of appreciating God’s work of salvation. Indeed, he went as far as to say, “Only the Marian dimension secures the place of affectivity in faith and thus ensures a fully human correspondence to the reality of the incarnate Logos.”

Helping us through seven stages of growth

It is true that God can carry us and caress us in many ways, but St. Thérèse’s own experience was that God did this for her in significant part through Our Lady, through the Mother of God. In this article, I want to draw on the experience of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Teresa of Avila, and other saints to explore the intimate way in which God uses the Blessed Virgin Mary to lift us up to himself. Looking to Our Lady and the saints constitutes a personal rather than an abstract way of appreciating God’s work of salvation.

In her book The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila provided a description of seven stages of growth in the spiritual life. St. Teresa likened the soul to a castle within which there are a series of rooms or mansions, mansions that lie ever deeper within. When one reaches the seventh and final set of mansions, St. Teresa was clear that one has indeed been brought into the very presence of God, that one’s soul has been lifted right up to God himself. The King lives in the innermost room.

This article looks at how the saints received help from Our Lady to grow through each of these seven stages of prayer. After all, the text of Lk 2:51–52 connects Jesus’ own increase in wisdom and stature with his living in Nazareth with his mother Mary, and with Joseph, and his obedience to them. Christ himself had a mother who supported his own growth as a boy into maturity.

Can you pray without meditating?

St. Teresa commented in The Interior Castle that prayer and meditation constitute the door to the first interior mansions. For St. Teresa, prayer, if it is to be prayer at all, “must be accompanied by meditation.” Many saints learned to meditate by praying the Rosary, by pondering on mysteries such as those of the Annunciation, the Nativity of Christ, the Presentation in the Temple, the Finding in the Temple, and so on; while they said the words of the prayers that make up the Rosary. It became common to meditate upon mysteries from the life of Christ and his Blessed Mother while praying the Rosary from the fifteenth century onward.

St. Thérèse became attached to the Rosary as a young girl. She recounted in her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, that after making her First Confession she asked the priest to bless her Rosary:

It was evening, and as soon as I got to a street-lamp I stopped and took the newly blessed Rosary out of my pocket, turning it over and over. “What are you looking at, Thérèse, dear?” asked Pauline. “I am seeing what a blessed Rosary looks like.” This childish answer amused my sisters very much.

St. Teresa of Avila, meanwhile, was aware of the role that Our Lady played in her own growth in prayer as a young girl. St. Teresa indicated in her Life that, when she was six or seven years old, it was devotion to Our Lady that in part responsible for good desires being awakened in her heart. She observed: “I tried to be alone when I said my prayers, and there were many such, in particular the Rosary, to which my mother had a great devotion, and this made us devoted to them too.”

Praying the Rosary teaches one to meditate, helping us to grow into the very first stage of prayer. There is even a sense for some of the saints that Mary personally encouraged them to say this prayer. When Our Lady appeared to the three shepherds of Fatima on June 13th, 1917, Lúcia asked her a question, “What do you want of me?” Our Lady responded, “I wish you to come here on the 13th of next month, to pray the Rosary every day, and to learn to read.”

It is fascinating that Our Lady herself engaged in meditation during her life on earth. She herself pondered on the events of the Annunciation, the Nativity of her Son, the Presentation and the Finding in the Temple. The Gospel of Luke repeatedly indicates that Mary treasured up events that related to her Son (see Lk 2:19 and Lk 2:51). St. Jerome, indeed, explicitly linked this treasuring up to meditation: “She meditated in her own heart because she was holy and had read the Sacred Scriptures.”² Mary’s example has underpinned the value that the Church has accorded to meditation from its very beginnings.

Seeing God in the events of life

St. Teresa of Avila identified the capacity to recognize when God is at work in one’s life as a distinctive mark of those entering the second mansions of the interior castle. It is a sign that one’s spiritual life has grown in its interior depth when you begin to hear the Lord speaking to you through the things that happen to you, whether suffering or joy is at stake. Mother Teresa provides an excellent example of this. Every night, before she retired for sleep, Mother Teresa identified five gifts that God had given her that day, and five occasions when God had asked her to give of herself to others. In this, she followed Our Lady’s example of pondering on the events of life and treasuring them in her heart. Mother Teresa received truly astounding graces from conducting such an examination of conscience each night.

One of the great underpinnings of Marian devotion, furthermore, is to acknowledge the graces that God gave to Mary. In calling Mary “blessed,” we learn to recognize how God worked in her life, and we open ourselves up to God taking the initiative in our own lives. It became common after the Council of Ephesus during homilies preached in Greek for the preacher to list the privileges and graces that Mary received, directly addressing Our Lady as an integral aspect of the process. Indeed, this constitutes a distinctive literary form, a chairetismoi, after the Greek word for “hail” or “rejoice.” If Mary seemed to encourage this form of address in Lk 1: 48 (“all generations will call me blessed”), this is directly designed to lead to God showing mercy on those who fear him from generation to generation (Lk 1: 49). Homilies that draw on this distinctive literary form may have gone out of favor in recent decades, but at what cost?

Another feature of the second mansions that St. Teresa mentioned, one that she said was of “utmost importance,” is for souls to associate themselves with others who are leading a spiritual life, including those who “have traveled farther into the castle.” It is no surprise that we hear that many of the saints joined Marian associations. For instance, at eleven years old St. Thérèse of Lisieux joined the Association of Mary, praying the Rosary every week with fellow members. Pope Saint John Paul II, meanwhile, was involved in the school branch of a Marian association when he was 16–18 years old. He then went on to lead small group of other young people as part of the Living Rosary movement during the Second World War. In this way, devotion to Our Lady plays a role in drawing Christians together, thereby supporting their growth in prayer.

Mary was always found in the company of others. The list of her companions includes those given over to contemplation, such as the Beloved Disciple, and, of course, the angel Gabriel. Growth in the spiritual life always closely follows upon Marian lines, in a way that is truly personal.

It is practices such as examining one’s conscience and joining together with others that lead to growth in prayer, and to the humility that underpins that growth. There is great value to be had in encouraging others to undertake these practices, and in pursuing them ourselves. Perhaps you would have scope to find a new way to draw people together to pray the Rosary regularly?

Pray, pray very much

St. Teresa of Avila wrote that those who reach the third mansions, among other things, “love penance and spend hours in meditation.” The Rosary is a prayer that takes some time to pray, making it excellent for the purpose of paving the way for entry into these mansions. Why stop at praying just one set of the mysteries of the Rosary each day? Ven. Lúcia once recalled one of her experiences at Fátima:

One day, we were playing on the stone slabs of the well down at the bottom of the garden belonging to my parents, which we called the Arneiro. Suddenly, we saw beside us the same figure, or rather Angel, as it seemed to me. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Pray, pray very much! The most holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary have designs of mercy on you. Offer prayers and sacrifices constantly to the Most High.”

It is not so hard to imagine Our Lady giving an instruction to the angel of the Arneiro, impressing upon the angel the importance of encouraging the three young shepherds to spend more time in prayer.

Padre Pio was another saint who prayed the Rosary endlessly. He said that some days he prayed the mysteries of the Rosary on forty occasions, while on other days fifty times. He was keen to emphasize that it is important to pay attention to the mysteries themselves — “They change at every decade.” It can help to keep a Rosary in your pocket, so that you can pray it when you have an opportunity.

And Our Lady herself was given over to prayer. The Greek word proskarterountes that is used to describe how Mary joined in prayer with the disciples and her family prior to the day of Pentecost is particularly well translated as “continued steadfastly”: “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren” (Ac 1:14). Our Lady sustained the members of the Early Church in their prayer together for the descent of the Holy Spirit.

Do we think that we can do without the personal intervention of Our Lady to support us in our own prayers to God? St. Maximilian Kolbe once reminded a German official after a period of internment that “the Most Holy Virgin Mary is not a fairy tale or a legend, but a living being who loves each one of us.”

I cannot pray

Something shifts in the character of what is entailed in prayer when it comes to the fourth mansions. In these mansions it is not just the length of time for which one prays that matters. St. Teresa indicates that at this stage one experiences a sense of recollection during prayer, in which an awareness of God is established within the depths of one’s soul. Such prayer is characterized by a sense of silence and absorption, rather than by any active attempt to try to understand, reason, or vary the focus of one’s attention. There is a passage in The Story of a Soul where St. Thérèse gives an indication of the nature of this sort of prayer:

With me prayer is an uplifting of the heart; a glance towards heaven; a cry of gratitude and love, uttered equally in sorrow and in joy. In a word, it is something noble, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites it to God. Sometimes when I am in such a state of spiritual dryness that not a single good thought occurs to me, I say very slowly the “Our Father” or the “Hail Mary,” and these prayers suffice to take me out of myself, and wonderfully refresh me.

At another point she said, “And I cannot pray. I can only look at Our Blessed Lady and say: ‘Jesus!’” Our Lady was very much part of St. Thérèse’s experience of contemplative prayer, allowing her to be caught by Christ. While something of a veil lies over the specific ways in which Our Lady helps one to grow into the fourth mansions and the mansions that lie even deeper within, St. Thérèse of Lisieux very much welcomed Our Lady’s assistance. God, after all, increasingly takes the initiative in prayer as one’s spiritual life matures.

My soul rejoices in the Lord

The fifth mansions are marked out by what St. Teresa called the prayer of union, in which the body and the distractions that come with it seem remote from the soul. There is an incident that St. Teresa related in her in Life, when she received a particular grace through Our Lady:

I thought I saw myself being clothed in a garment of great whiteness and brightness. At first I could not see who was clothing me, but later I saw Our Lady on my right hand and my father Saint Joseph on my left, and it was they who were putting that garment upon me. I was given to understand that I was now cleansed of my sins. When the clothing was ended, and I was experiencing the greatest joy and bliss, I thought that Our Lady suddenly took me by the hands and told me that I was giving her great pleasure by serving the glorious Saint Joseph and that I might be sure that all I was trying to do about the convent would be accomplished and that both the Lord and they two would be greatly served in it.

While St. Teresa does not specifically identify the stage of prayer during which this experience occurred, the clothing represents an occasion of union with God. Our Lady is portrayed as taking the initiative to draw St. Teresa closer to God.

In The Life of Union with Mary, Fr. Emile Noubert wrote of the gift that God makes when a soul experiences a profound interior sense of the presence of both Christ and of his mother. A person is united with someone else when an intense love is present between them. St. Thérèse quite evidently experienced this depth of intensity in her relationship with Our Lady. Shortly before her death, Thérèse said that she felt the angels had hidden all light from her. Her sisters asked her whether the angels had hidden the Blessed Virgin as well. She replied, “No, the Blessed Virgin will never be hidden from me, for I love her too much.”³ Indeed, St. Maximilian Kolbe once wrote, “Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.”

The last two mansions of the castle

According to St. Teresa, the sixth mansions are characterized by a time of trial and of awakenings where God moves the soul to its utter depths. The saints habitually turned particularly to Our Lady for assistance in living through trials. For instance, St. Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes, once told a friend that she was ever tortured by interior distress. It seems that she was afraid that she had failed to live up to all the graces that had been granted to her. Even so, she found consolation in the words that Our Lady had spoken to her in the grotto during the first apparition: “I do not promise to make you happy in this world, but in the next.”

St. Thérèse similarly turned to Our Lady in the intensity of her suffering. She once acknowledged to one of her sisters shortly before she died, “Oh, if they knew what I suffer! Last night, I could not endure it anymore; I asked the Blessed Virgin to take my head in her hands so that I could support it.”⁴ Even if we have not reached the sixth mansions, Our Lady can help us to accept the suffering that comes our way. All that is needed is that we turn to her in our hearts, and ask her for help. The intensity of suffering in these mansions means that help is needed on an ongoing basis.

St. Teresa suggested in The Interior Castle that one can be tempted to think that all that matters is that one becomes wholly absorbed in love. She warned against this view, indicating quite explicitly that meditation upon the life of the Virgin Mary remains core to any progression into the final two mansions, especially when we remember how closely Our Lady is associated with the humanity of her Son:

Some souls imagine they cannot meditate even on the Passion, still less on the most blessed Virgin or on the saints, the memory of whose lives greatly benefits and strengthens us. . . . How much less should we willfully endeavor to abstain from thinking of our only good and remedy, the most sacred Humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ? I cannot believe that any one really does this; they misunderstand their own minds and so harm both themselves and others. Of this at least I can assure them: they will never thus enter the last two mansions of the castle.

If the memory of the lives of the Blessed Virgin and the saints “greatly benefits and strengthens us,” then such memory is closely associated with progression into the final two mansions.

Prayer in fundamental terms is about whose company we keep; it is entirely personal in nature. Indeed, in further explaining the consequences for souls who abandon their meditation upon the Passion, St. Teresa wrote, “Our good Jesus and His most blessed Mother are too good company to be left.” Given this, perhaps it is not so surprising that for many of the saints, the final two mansions are marked out by an awareness of one’s union with God that is continuous. A priest once asked Padre Pio if the Blessed Virgin ever visited him in his cell. His response was to say, “You should ask rather if she is ever absent from my cell.”

Conclusion: Flying with wings

The saints testify to the reality that Our Lady has a role in making possible growth in prayer and holiness. This is the conclusion I came to in my recent book Behold Your Mother: Learning to Love Mary With the Saints (Catholic Truth Society, London, UK), a book that looks closely at how the saints related to their beloved mother. The book quotes the words that the poet Dante put into the mouth of St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the Divine Comedy: “Lady, thou art so great and so powerful, that whoever desires grace yet does not turn to thee, would have his desire fly without wings.” St. Thérèse of Lisieux knew this only too well. In the intensity of her love for Our Lady, she flew straight to God.