It’s a good question: What is the point of consecrating yourself to Mary when you already have the fundamental consecration you need, your baptism?
All year long, people consecrate themselves to Mary using Father Michael Gaitley’s 33 Days to Morning Glory. But November is a popular time to begin the process that ends on the big Marian feast days of winter. See all the start dates and the links you need here. So now is a good time to ask: Why consecrate yourself to Mary at all?
Here are four reasons, for starters.
First: You can’t have a relationship with Jesus alone because Jesus is not alone.
I love what Tory Baucum wrote about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. No, they are not models of morality or politics. But it is beautiful that their very public relationship has not just been about Taylor and Travis: It has been about Taylor and the Kelce family and Travis and the Swift family.
Authentic human relationships embrace the fact that we are not just individuals, but individuals embedded in a community, starting with the fundamental human community, the family.
It’s the same with Jesus. To love him, you have to love his family too: His mother, Mary, and his brothers and sisters, the saints.
Second: Jesus made his mother ours at the very moment when he launched Christian discipleship.
As he died on the cross, Jesus made Mary the mother of all disciples, through our representative, “the disciple whom he loved.”
The early Church venerated her as such, as we see in Chapter 12 of Revelation, which depicts her as our mother. St. Augustine (354-430 AD) said she was “clearly the mother of the members of Christ,” and some 1,600 years later, the Catechism is still spelling out how. Because “she is our mother in the order of grace,” says the Catechism, “the Church’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin is intrinsic to Christian worship.”
All of it explains how we should love our Blessed Mother: the way we love our mom. The best mothers know their children better than we know ourselves. They call us to the highest vision of ourselves: The one they see but we don’t. Mary is like this, pointing us toward the needs of others, telling us to obey her son, taking us directly to him when we doubt him, leading us to the tabernacle when we have lost him, and gathering her family in prayer.
Third: Mary knew she was a queen from the very beginning.
We tend to think of Mary’s queenship as a kind of pious flourish by the Church, a medieval way of saying “You’re awesome!” We forget that Mary was the first human to know that she was a queen.
Kings’ mothers were queens in the Old Testament, for the simple fact that kings had more than one wife in the ancient world. The mother of David’s son, Solomon, was clearly a queen and the mother of the Messianic Son of David was too.
When the angel told Mary: “You will conceive and give birth to a son … The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end,” she knew exactly what that meant for her — and she said so.
In her Magnificat hymn she says God “regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed,” and “he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree.”
The fact that the woman who is our mother is also our queen is another reason to have a relationship with her. In fact …
Fourth: Her queenship makes Mary Satan’s feared enemy.
Rejecting Satan is a key aspect of the Chrisitan life, starting at our baptism and continuing with every Our Father, Christ’s model for Christian prayer that ends with a petition rejecting Satan.
At the dawn of mankind, according to Genesis Chapter 3, God foresaw nonstop enmity between Satan and Eve’s “offspring.” In Revelation 12 we learn that this means us: “Satan went off to make war on the rest of her offspring.”
The battle continues to this day, but Mary is the “Ever-Stunning Blow to the Demons!” in the Akathist hymn from 625 AD, and the one “to whose protection the faithful fly in all their dangers and needs” according to the Second Vatican Council.
In short, you can’t leave Mary out because of who Jesus is, who Mary is, and who you are.
Just as you can’t have a relationship with a lonely Jesus, with no mother, because he doesn’t exist — you also can’t relate to him as a lonely Christian, with no mother, because that doesn’t exist.
And once you learn more about her, you won’t even want to!
And today we celebrate...