May Reflection
"If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Lk. 14:26).
Giving up one's personal freedom for someone or something else is unimaginable to many individuals. We have our own grandiose ambitions and plans in life. We are all looking for what is bigger, better, and permanent, and we do not stop until we approach this something we are seeking or even possess it.
We are God's creatures and His disciples. By being one with God, we have not limited ourselves only for Him but, have opened ourselves up to something bigger, better, and permanent. God is not subject to change. He is forever and He is good. All things come from Him. He is everywhere for He is Omnipresent.
We cannot see God with our naked eye, so we have to pray much, and participate in community activities. We have to be present and find Him in our lives, or else, we might try to find Him in some other avenue which might not be very encouraging to our personal situation.
Isolating oneself is of no use, it is a SIN, for it is of the devil. The devil would like us to be in the dark and not in the know. He wants to increase hate in us, so that we will not know love. He also wants us to be selfish so that we will not serve others. The devil, himself, said, "Non Serviam!" (I will not serve).
Do not commit the mistake of making the wrong choice. Choose what is Bigger-Better-Permanent. Choose God.
Reflection About Our Lady
Saint Thomas Aquinas says that true devotion to Mary consists in a "prompt and complete gift of one's entire self. The word devotion indicates a giving, or better, a giving of self which includes not only giving of oneself, but also giving with love, generosity and delight. Devotion to Our Lady then ought to consist in having a loving bestowal of oneself to Our Lady; that is, we should make a gift of ourselves to her.
When one receives a gift, that person can do with it whatever it wishes with the gift. We on our part, cannot do anything other than what the person who received the gift desires and finds pleasing and is effecting. The more devoted we are to Our Lady, the more we surrender to her and adjust our ways to suit her wishes, living in all respects under her guidance.
Marian devotion is best understood to mean that it requires the consecration of oneself to Out Lady; that is, the explicit offering to Mary of one's whole being, of all that one is and all that one has--soul, body, senses; external goods, internal goods, present and future; one's life, death and eternity. This type of consecration makes one reach the fullness of devotion to Our Lady because, in every way, we are truly given to Our Lady and unconditionally belong to her; we make the choice to live, without reservation, as her child, either to be her "slave of love" (Saint Louis Grignon de Montfort), or, to go further, to make ourselves her "property, an instrument within her hands" (Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe), or-going even further-one offers themselves as a "victim of holocaust" in honor of her motherly and merciful love and for the coming of God's kingdom into all souls.