Ave Maria
Saint Bernard, every time he passed in front of an image of the Virgin Mary, he greeted her saying “God save you, Mary”. When Saint Bernard died and the body passed in front of the aforementioned image, it was the Virgin Mary herself who exclaimed: “God save you, my son Bernardo”.
Blessed are those lips and those places where it is pronounced: “Ave Maria”.
Let’s analyze the words of the Hail Mary in detail below:
God save you, Maria: It is a greeting that cleanses the lips and the heart. These words cannot be pronounced with reflection and feeling, without feeling better, because when the eyes of your spirit are fixed on Mary, you can be more good, purer and more charitable. Friendship with Mary is the cause of perfection because it infuses and transfuses the virtues of such a good Mother in those who humbly ask for them.
Full of grace: Humility, promptness, modesty, prayer… What did you not find exalted in the angelic word to become the first spark of the fire of the Incarnation? Here is what is needed, to attract Jesus, your adherence to Grace, your welcome to Grace, your multiplication of Grace, your aspiration to Grace. The body, to live, needs to breathe air and take breath. The soul to live, must breathe Grace, and the best example is Mary.
The Lord is with you. God is always with the soul in Grace. God does not move away when the tempter approaches, he moves away only when the Tempter is yielded and the soul is corrupted. Whoever is with God is not that he does not see evil, rather he sees it more clearly than many others, but seeing it does not corrupt. The one united with God is saturated with God, and anything other than God remains on the surface and does not disturb the interior.
Blessed are you among all women. This blessing that we sometimes say imperfectly, or that perhaps we do not even say to the One who with her sacrifice began the Redemption, continuously resounds in Heaven, pronounced with infinite love by the Trinity. All Paradise blesses Mary, masterpiece of universal Creation and divine Mercy. Even if all the Father’s work to create the earth from nothing had served only to welcome Mary, the creative work would have had its reason for being, because Mary’s perfection is such that She is a witness not only to wisdom and power, but of the love with which God created the world.
And blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus: We have Jesus because thirty three years before Mary agreed to drink the cup of bitterness. Blessed be the most pure womb that contained the Creator, and to give a norm, know that I, God, do not consider diminishing Myself with infinite and venerable love for my Mother.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. To the Mother of God we make an invocation symmetrical to that of “deliver us from evil”, of the Our Father. We have been given a Mother and a Father. If we ask the Father to free us from Evil, will we not ask the Mother to keep death in sin away from us? We should not be concerned with death in the human meaning, but with Evil and Death in the supernatural meaning.
We have a Mother who is powerful due to her triple condition as Daughter, Wife and Mother of God, and if Christ raises the dead to Grace, Mary, when she is truly loved, prevents death from separating us from her Son in eternity.
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