Mary, our Mother by Love

Mary is our Mother — not by the flesh, but by love. That is, she is our Mother by love alone. So someone observes that she glories in being the mother of love. She is all love for us, her adopted children.

The first reason for Mary’s great love for human beings is that she loves God so much. She loved him more in the first moment of her existence than all the saints and angels every loved him or will love him.

Just as there is not one among all the blessed who loves God as Mary does, so there is no one, after God, who loves us as much as this most loving Mother does. Furthermore, if we heaped together all the love that mothers have for their children, all the love of husbands and wives, all the love of all the angels and saints for their clients, it could never equal Mary’s love for even a single soul.

Mary, to obtain the life of grace for us … offered her beloved Jesus to an ignominious death, and watched him die before her eyes in cruel and unexampled torments.

It is written of the Eternal Father, that God so loved the world as to give his only-begotten Son (Jn 3:16), so also we can say of Mary, that she so loved the world as to give her only-begotten Son.

So with St. Anselm I will cry: “Let my heart languish and my soul melt away and be consumed with love of you, my beloved Savior Jesus and my dear Mother Mary! But because I cannot love you unless you give me grace, then give me grace, O Jesus and Mary — by your merits, not mine — to love you as you deserve to be loved. O God, lover of humankind, you loved sinful human beings to the point of death. Will you deny your love and your Mother’s to anyone who begs for it?”

— Excerpted from The Glories of Mary by St. Alphonsus Liguori

And Happy Mother’s Day!