Mary offers to share with us her graces, her love, and her mystery, symbolized in the roses adorning her halo. This means she gives us her Son to conceive, bear, nurture, and present. Often, with a little spiritual imagination, we experience the line separating her story from our own to be very thin. St. Paul says we are all members of one body. God’s only Son made it that way. For instance, in many Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, St. Gabriel is kneeling before the humble handmaiden because God commanded the angels to recognize her as his daughter who would become the vessel of his Son. We clumsy humans also share in her experience of having angels kneel before us.
—from the book Universal Mother: A Journal for Finding Yourself in Mary
by Holly Schapker and Cecelia Dorger
