May is Mary's Month
Father John J. Lombardi
"May is Mary's month, and I Muse at that and wonder why; Her feasts follow reason, Dated due to season
All things rising, all things sizing Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good, Nature's motherhood. Their magnifying of each its kind With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored/ Magnify the Lord."
Gerard Manley Hopkins
A pilgrim recently asked me, "Why is May Mary's Month?" I tried to give an answer that sounded like-but didn't quite sound like-the extract below, given to me by a Friend of the Grotto, by John S. Stokes, from:
http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/crownmed.html
"The month of May, with its profusion of blooms was adopted by the Church in the eighteenth century as a celebration of the flowering of Mary's maidenly spirituality…With its origins in Isaiah's prophecy of the Virgin birth of the Messiah under the figure of the Blossoming Rod or Root of Jesse, the flower symbolism of Mary was extended by the Church Fathers, and in the liturgy, by applying to her the flower figures of the Sapiential Books-Canticles, Wisdom, Proverbs and Sirach
In the medieval period, the rose was adopted as the flower symbol of the Virgin Birth, as expressed in Dante's phrase, 'The Rose wherein the Divine Word was made flesh,' and depicted in the central rose windows of the great gothic cathedrals-from which came the Christmas carol, 'Lo, How a Rose 'ere Blooming.' Also, in the medieval period, when monasteries were the centers of horticultural and agricultural knowledge, and with the spread of the Fransiscan love of nature, the actual flowers themselves, of the fields, waysides and gardens, came to be seen as symbols of Mary…"
This month of May
Honor the ever-beautiful and fertile Virgin with a Rosary, or at least a decade of the Rosary, each day.
Read some inspiring poetry on, or about, her.
Set up a little Shrine to her outside or inside your house.
Love her!
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