Simcha Fisher on devotion to Mary

Here's a taste. Read the whole thing. Wonderful.

“Just try to imitate the Blessed Virgin,” my old pastor would always counsel me. This was when I was a teenager struggling with all the usual teenager sins. The only thing I could see that Mary and I had in common was the color blue: her mantle, my hair. So his advice, while technically excellent, was entirely unhelpful.

When I became a mother, I thought the imitation would come more naturally. But the opposite happened: the more I tried to imitate what I heard about Mary, the wider the gulf between us became. Imitate someone who was free from original sin, and so had no inclination to be impatient or sarcastic, self-pitying or lazy, lustful or arrogant? And whose Child, while clearly kind of a tricky case, never sinned either? Whose husband was a saint, and whose mission in life was clear as a bell?

And asking someone with four kids under the age of five to imitate a mother of one felt like asking someone who lives in a sod hut to be more like Martha Stewart. Imitate Mary? I might as well have tried to imitate a cirrus cloud, or pattern my life after a soap bubble or an innocent little butterfly. In Mary’s presence, I had to be on my best behavior, so as not to put a smudge on her pretty porcelain robes.

What baffled me was that so many other women clearly found such solace and strength in Mary. I knew that I must be missing something—that this wasn’t her fault, it was mine. I regretfully concluded that I just wasn’t one of those Mary People.

But my thinking has changed. Here’s the key: I was misunderstanding sin—and so, of course, misunderstanding Mary, conceived without sin.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/mary-sees-us/#ixzz1Y4Tg1rLX