It is one beautiful thing to perform the ritual of the crowning of Mary as we have just done, but now it’s time for this question: what does it it look like to crown Mary in your own life?
How do the jewels and wonders of her celestial royalty reflect in your own experience?
Now the answer to that will be unique for each and every one of you, and perhaps you have never stopped to ask yourself what it looks like to crown Mary in your own life. But if there is one thing that I believe is universal, it is that in order to even see the crown of Mary operating within your experience, one must have love for her. Just like how glasses remedy severely hindered eyesight, love for the Queen of Heaven is the lens through which her crown comes clearly into view. Without that love, her royalty remains nothing more than a blurry, abstract idea.
Well how do you fall in love with Mary? This is the exact question that my colleague asked me recently, and at first didn’t know if it was a real or a rhetorical question! I then realized it was difficult to answer not because falling in love with her is difficult, but because it is so easy. How do I even explain how easy it is to love her?
When I recall my own experience, there is one particular thing that stands out, and that is how after over a decade of being exiled from Christianity and having a lot of erroneous ideas about God, Mary brought me clarity. Through her, I was able to see who God really was and how I could be brought out of exile from love.
There’s a passage from St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary where he writes:
She is an echo of God, speaking and repeating only God. If you say “Mary” she says “God.” When St. Elizabeth praised Mary calling her blessed because she had believed, Mary, the faithful echo of God, responded with her canticle, “My soul glorifies the Lord.”
This – being an echo of God where if you say Mary she says God – is exactly what I have found to be true not only in my experience, but for others who know and love her. Not to mention how instrumental she has been in combatting heresies throughout Church history – just ask de Montfort and how Mary was essential to his successful battle against Jansenism. The Blessed Mother has been essential to my understanding of the faith, being both the literal and figurative womb through which I became a Catholic Christian, and because her vocation is to bring us directly to Jesus without fail, this creates a certain gratitude that overflows in my soul and makes her easy to love.
Therefore when I see the crown of Mary in my own life, I see how much I love her and experience love from her and how this has permeated every compartment of my life. There is no area of life that cannot be illuminated by her crown jewels, no confusion about God that she cannot clarify, and no distance from Jesus that she cannot remedy. Hail Holy Queen indeed!
Curated Catechism 