Chat & Photos 


Devotion to Mary for Today's World

Feb 19 2002, Pippa Abston, Huntsville, Alabama

What a wonderful site!  I don't have any photo to send - we are
still in the planning stages of our garden.  This site will be
very helpful - thank you for making it so thorough.

Late last fall, my husband broke up some ground for me in the
corner of our small yard and promised to help me with whatever I
wanted to plant.  For Christmas, he and my children (10 and 12)
gave me a beautiful book called "Spiritual Gardening" - the
Saint's Garden chapter was fascinating.  I had never heard of this
before and just had a very strong feeling that we needed a Mary
Garden.

My husband and I are both converts to the Catholic Church, 13
years ago - I confess that I have been a little slow to understand
the great importance of Our Mother!  This was not part of my
upbringing - and quite honestly, it doesn't seem to be a big focus
of RCIA.  But in the last several months, through grace, I have
begun praying the rosary daily.

I did not talk about this to anyone except my husband.  Our choir
always gives a gift from the "kitty" to choir members on their
birthday - imagine my amazement when they gave me a beautiful
miniature sunflower picture frame and a meditation on the
sunflower as one of Mary's flowers!  I was speechless and moved to
tears.

Thanks again for your site.


Feb 28 2002, John Stokes, Mary's Gardens

Thank you for your valued message of 19 Feb.

Your planned Mary Garden sounds lovely, and I would appreciate
receiving a photo for the web site chat and photo room when it is
planted and in color.

I don't think I've seen the book, "Spiritual Gardening", so can
you give me the author's name and publication date, so I can look
it up?  Does it make specific mention of the Flowers of Our Lady
and Mary Gardens?  Are you familiar with Vincenzina Krymow's
"Mary's Flowers, Gardens, Legends and  Meditations"?

Your story of the sunflower surprise is delightful.  In the Mary
Garden I know of the sunflower from our research as "Marigold of
Peru", and would be interested in learning the Marian meditation
you mention.  In our kitchen we have sets of beautiful "Pimpernel"
brand sunflower serving trays, in two sizes.

You mention that, as a convert, you are in the process of learning
a deeper devotion to Mary, and that you are praying the Rosary
daily.  The Rosary is indeed the primary means of deepening our
devotion to Mary.  Through our repeated meditation on its fifteen
Mysteries of Mary's relations to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
we experience an ever-deepening illumination of the many aspects
of her singular union and close cooperation with the Divine
Persons, and thus pray to her for her intercession with them with
ever-deepening conviction that this is the way God wishes us to
pray for the divine response to our daily spiritual intenions.

Meditation on the symbolism of the Flowers of Our Lady - evidently
introduced at the same time as the Rosary, around the 12th century
- can be said to be an  extension of meditation on the Mysteries
of the Rosary, quickened as these flowers were encountered in the
roadsides and countrysides through the day, and now as we behold
them, and care for them in Mary Gardens today.

Shortly after my own conversion, over 50 years ago, and my
receiving of basic Catechism instruction on Mary, one of the first
things I came across about her, further, was an article, "Lillie
Tower", about Her Flowers in the Woods Hole Mary Garden.  These
flowers had an immediate appeal for me, and it was through seeking
to understand their symbolism from their names: meditating on them
as I beheld them in photos and gardens, and then growing them
myself, that I learned more about Mary and became deeply devoted to
her.

I didn't then realize that in the medieval period before the time
of general literacy and books, this was one of the ways the
predominantly rural Catholics learned of Mary - through her flower
symbols growing around them, and their associated legends, as
taught by itinerate preachers, wandering minstrels, etc.  Hence
the thousand medieval flower symbols of Mary we have found in our
research.

In the course of this, and and through reading about her in books,
I came also to understand the theological basis underlying our
intuitive simple, loving devotion and prayer to Mary as the Mother
of Jesus and our Spiritual Mother also.

I came to see how Mary's place in the Church and world is derived
from her mirroring and "magnification" of God, of the three of
Divine Persons, of the purpose of Creation, of the divine
Incarnation and redemptive sacrifice of Christ, and of Christ's
Risen and Ascended sending of the Holy Spirit for our
sanctification and our guidance in building God's earthly
Peaceable Kingdom as the culmination of Creation.

In this, I understood that the Church dogmatically defines the
truths of Mary from the deposit of faith because belief in them
serves as a confirmation that we believe in the full truths of the
Trinity, Creation, Incarnation and Salvation.

Finally, I came to understood that imitation of Mary's virtues,
and recourse to her intercesssion in praying to God, are central
and "necessary" for the fullest bestowal and our fullest reception
of the divine grace to guide our building of God's earthly
Peaceable Kingdom, in culmination of the Divine Plan for the world
- for which we pray in the "Our Father".

As I came to see it, our understanding of Mary's place in the
Church and world comes first of all from our faith that God -
Father, Son and Holy Spirit - created the world and universe in
love to show forth and share the divine goodness and action with
us humans, created to this end in the divine image and likeness,
male and female; and that we, in loving spiritual communion and
cooperation with God and one another, are to fill the earth and
co-creatively discover and develop its potentials - with
culmination in the building and coming of the earthly Peaceable
Kingdom of truth, justice, love and freedom.

Through Mary's spiritual perfection - of immaculate purity, utter
humility and total openness to, cooperation with, and
instrumentation of God's grace and will - the divine persons of
the Trinity were enabled, through her assent, to fill her with a
fullness of grace through which she was brought into a perfect
union with them of sharing in their goodness and action.  "The
Lord is with you."

Through her acceptance and entering into union with God in the
fullness of divine-human sharing and spiritual communion at the
Annunciation, for the Divine Maternity, God was then enabled to
endow Mary further, from this union, to be the sharing mediatrix
of all divine action of the Trinity in the world - in a sublime,
exemplary personal fulfillment of the purpose of Creation.  Thus,
in addition to her blessed union with God at the Annunciation, as
grace-filled Daughter, Spouse and Mother, Mary likewise was to
became the universal sharer, cooperator, channel, and instrument
of all the divine spiritual action in the world of human
governance, protection, nurturing, counsel, comforting, advocacy,
sanctification, illumination, inspiration, prompting, redemption,
intercession. mediation, and divine union, etc.

Thus, there was and is in Holy and Blessed Mary an unique
accomplishment of the divine sharing which is the purpose of
Creation; and it is therefore through emulation of Mary's virtues
of purity, humility, fullness of grace and assent to God's word;
and through prayerful recourse to her universal divine nurturing,
advocacy, intercession and mediation; that we may best join, with
her in this divine sharing, in accordance with God's will.

It is through this divine sharing, through and with Mary and the
Holy Spirit, that we of the world are to reach out to one another
in the divine love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the
Father, to overcome all the religious, ethnic, national, economic
alienations, injustices and emnities of the world, for the
establishment of God's Peaceable Kingdom of truth, justice, love
and freedom.  It is thus that Mary stated at Fatima, "Ask
(everybody) to plead for peace from the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
for the Lord has confided the peace of the world to Her."

It is clear from history and all the conflicts of the world that
human idealism, and prayers for God's mercy and providence for our
secular needs, have of themselves been inadequate to establish
peace midst the basic alienation and power conflicts of the
strategy, tactics and timing of economics, diplomacy and war,
because these are too discursively and dialectically separative of
people.  What is needed further, in accordance with God's
Creational and Redeeming desire for divine-human sharing, is that
through the spiritual perfection of our responsiveness to God, in
emulation of Mary, and through prayers to God, enhanced through
Mary's intercession and mediation, for the accomplishment of his
will, a critical mass of persons may be enabled to reach out to
all in a sharing of the love of the Divine Persons, which reaches
across all alienations in truth, justice freedom and material
sufficiency.

St. Louis de Montfort teaches in "True Devotion to the Blessed
Virgin Mary", that Mary - in her love for us as our spiritual
mother, and in her cooperative sharing in the divine action -
adorns, embellishes and enhances our prayers to God as she
receives them for and places them in the hands of her Son for
presentation to the Father, so that they are presented most
perfectly attuned to our spiritual needs and to those of the
world, in response to which the Father and Son bestow on us,
through her mediating hands, the grace, light, wisdom and power
most suited to our sanctification and to our work and prayers for
Kingdom.  And each time she exercises these divine prerogatives of
receiving and enhancing our prayers, Mary is afforded by us of the
opportunity to extend still further the fullness of her own
sharing in the divine petitioning and mediating action, in love,
of the Son and the Father.

Her unique personal contribution in all this was and is as Mother:
as our tender, sweet, loving spiritual mother, divinely appointed
by Jesus from the Cross; but especially as the Mother of Jesus -
in Bethlehem and Nazareth; in his ministry; in her co-redemptive
union with him as Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the Cross - and
now in heaven, in her loving motherly desire for the culmination
of her Divine Son's work of Redemption and Kingdom.

For our part on earth, we are to emulate Mary's purity, humility,
and openness and assent to God, that - through Marian-mediated
Spirit promptings, and our own self-initiated spiritual
discernments - we may be most fully and creatively responsive to
and cooperative with God's will and grace, mediated by Mary, for
our sanctification and for the building of God's Kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.  And, through our increasing union with Mary,
we, with others, in turn all participate with her in her union
with and action for God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - in a
fullness of the divine-human sharing of the Communion of Saints.

We emulate Mary's virtues in fidelity to the graces of our baptism,
confirmation and holy communion, as Mary kept fidelity to the graces
of her Immaculate Conception.  In this it is helpful for us to have
as spiritual director and confesssor a priest who is director and
confessor of cloistered religious, and thus attuned to counseling
and hearing the confessions of those seeking spiritual perfection,
so that he can assist us with meditational matters such as
distractions and spiritual dryness as well as perceptively hearing
our confessions and giving us penances and absolution for our sins
and imperfections.

It is our emulation of Mary's virtues, and our prayerful recourse
to her divinely established universal intercession and mediation
with God, that will be the eventual means to God's earthly
Peaceable Kingdom; and it is to these that we are quickened in our
reflection and prayers in praying the Rosary and in beholding Our
Lady's flower symbols as we work and reflect in the garden, and
then go forth in the world.