Scripture:
Hosea 8:4-7, 11-13
Matthew 9:32-38
Reflection:
Mary, Mother of Holy Hope
Samuel Hazo, who works professionally in advertising, ends an insightful article contrasting advertising’s goal with poetry. ‘Advertising is a means to a desired end, but poetry is an end in itself that supports no system, capitalistic or otherwise. It is in fact our true speech that makes us wonder why we all too rarely see the obvious until someone expresses it simply. Poetry creates for us what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion;” it safeguards not our sales but our souls’.
(Notre Dame Magazine, p.47, Winter 2022-2023).
We possess a gold mine of memories and the ability to bring them to light. Add to those memories our imagination. As we creativity play with them, mixing and matching we may end up with poems!
Today, the family of the Passionist Community founded by St. Paul of the Cross
celebrates the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Divine Hope. The roots of this devotion are traced to the preaching of an early Passionist, Thomas Struzzieri, C.P. To those in the villages and towns throughout Italy who came to hear him preach, he showed the picture of Our Mother of Holy Hope as a beautiful reminder of Mary’s assistance in our spiritual needs.
Blessed Dominic Barberi. C.P., a theologian who while working England would have the grace of welcoming John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church, describes Mary’s roles as Mother of Hope:
Hope is that virtue that anchors the ship of our soul in the stormy sea of this troubled world…Though endowed with extraordinary graces and unstained by original sin, Mary never counted on any resource of her own. Rather, she knew God is the author of every good thing. She confided in God, fleeing from persecution from her own country. She hoped in God even when she saw her divine Son die on the Cross abandoned by his disciples. She stayed firm in what seemed disaster…She encouraged the weak, lifted up the fallen and urged the strong to ever greater trust…Even now, enthroned in glory, she reaches with a mother’s hand to those who go to her. She is always mother of holy hope.
It is with poetry that today’s liturgy teaches us: (‘Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, p. 55, Catholic Book Pub. Vol. 1, 1988). Mary, the Mother of Christ, is venerated today because she placed all her trust in the Lord whose coming she awaited, and in faith conceived, (preface). Assumed into heaven she becomes the hope of God’s people, the loving embrace of those who have no hope, and shows her love to those who seek her help. (Entrance Antiphon). Mary is the beacon of unfailing hope for the children of Adam, a New Eve who gathers the children of Adam until the Day of the Lord dawns in glory, (opening prayer and preface).
Mary the root, Christ the mystic vine;
Mary the wheat, Christ the Living Bread;
Mary the stem Christ the Rose blood red;
Mary the font, Christ the Cleansing Flood;
Mary the cup, Christ the Saving Blood.
Fr. William Murphy, CP, is a member of Immaculate Conception Community in Jamaica, New York.