God has an immense secret, which is summed up in one name: Mary. This is the secret through which the Lord chose to accomplish His most wondrous works.
Our Lady is the magnificent gateway through which all the love of the Trinity poured forth upon creation. Through her, the Eternal Word, in whom dwells “all the fulness of the Godhead” (Col 2:9), became Man, raising her, by the privilege of Divine Motherhood, to the plane of the hypostatic union in a relative capacity, far above the Angels and grace. She was in God’s mind from before the ages, in a single thought together with Jesus Christ, for the Son made Man was inconceivable without the mystery of the Virgin Mother.
In view of the Blessed Virgin, God created all beings. The stars and the sea, the splendid fire of the cherubim or the countless sands of the deserts, the flight of the eagle and the greatest acts of heroism: all these, in some way, sing of the greatness of her, the matrix of the order of the universe. Men and Angels will therefore be judged according to how closely they resemble Mary; She is the Book of Life.
But the Mother of Jesus is also the axis of History. Already at the very beginning of the work of six days, the test for the Angels consisted in bowing down in adoration before God made Man, born of a pure human creature: Mary (cf. Francisco Suárez, SJ. De angelis. L.V, c.6). Most exalted spirits, superior in nature, were to obey a mere mortal. The proud angels rebelled and were cast out of Paradise. And thus, even before existing in time, Our Lady was the sword that “separated the light from the darkness” (Gn 1:4) at the dawn of creation.
Behold the secret of God. Behold Mary.
But if this is the secret of the Eternal One, what is the secret of His Daughter, Mother and Spouse? What made her the beloved in whom the Almighty, as it were, “exhausted” His creative power (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiæ. I, q.25, a.6, ad 4), instating her as the most perfect and unsurpassed of mere creatures?
We find part of the answer to this question in the definition Our Lady gave of herself: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord” (Lk 1:38). Such an apex of splendour could only exist in a soul that preserved the apex of humility and servitude.
And herein lies our secret, which, like God’s, is also called Mary. Only in this posture of humility and loving slavery can we contemplate the Queen of the Universe in her true greatness. Let us not be content with narrow horizons! Let us open ourselves to the Secret of Mary, which will gradually reveal itself to our spirit throughout the pages of this edition.
“Happy,” exclaims St. Louis Grignion de Montfort, “indeed sublimely happy, is the person to whom the Holy Spirit reveals the secret of Mary” (The Secret of Mary, no. 20)! ◊
