I"ll Sing a Hymn to Mary"

That beautiful hymn 'I'll sing a Hymn to Mary" was sung at my Parish Mass last Sunday.   Of course we sang a modern version if the words, well the congregation did, but when it came to where the original words 'When wicked men blaspheme Thee, I love and Bless thy name",  I with my loud voice drowned the soppy new words and sang these original lyrics.   Was I being triumphalist?  Apparently that was what Catholics did in the bad old days before the good and honest  people took away control of our Church because they had moved on and people like myself were stupid and backward.   "From henceforth all generations shall call me Blessed, for He that is mighty hath done great things to me and Holy is His Name:   This is what Mary said about herself in the Gospel of Luke.  "But she was only a peasant girl" said someone recently in dismissing the veneration of Mary in the Catholic church, a church in which she rules although dismissing nearly all of Catholic teaching.   But let us stay with Mary.   When Jesus instructed us to look upon God as Our Father he was creating a family, otherwise why use the word.  In the baby Jesus Mary was the earthly Mother.  Yes, God had taken a peasant girl and raised her to the such a glory, she was the mother of His Son.    What a wonderful person she must have been.  After the Annunciation could you have blamed her for just sitting and basking in her new status - the Mother of God.   But the greatness of Mary also lay in her humility and off she went to help her cousin.     And the greatness of Mary also lay in her faith in God.  Joseph at first rejected her and how badly she must have felt at this, but she waited and prayed and things worked out.   But Mary's greatness also lay in her complete surrender to the will of God.   One may have expected God, after raising her to this great mission, would have allowed her a reasonably comfortable life, but no, there she was homeless in Bethlehem  worrying about the child who was to be born since there seemed to be no place where she could give birth.   OK, God guided her to an old smelly stable.    What a Woman of Faith!   She was never known to have complained that she was entitled to more because she said 'Yes'.    And what a Blessed Mother she was to Jesus!  She like any mother loved Him with a Mother's love and no one loves a child like His mother does.  Do not let anyone dare to say that they are closer to Jesus than Mary was.   And when we ask for Mary's intercession it is to this closeness, to this special relationship that we appeal.    And when her Son was dying on the Cross, she was there to suffer with Him, and give him the warmth of her love   From the earliest times in the Church her name has been called Blessed.   And as we struggle though life in the family of God, what wonderful consolation we have to know we have a mother to turn to whom Jesus also has 'special' love for, and like any good son delights in the praise of His mother.        

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