The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

When a small child goes “to the cross” during Holy Communion, he usually goes with his parents or grandparents. When I give communion to their guides, I often realize the mutual similarity and think, this is how parents looked 30 years ago, grandparents 60 years ago. Or this is what the child will look like after the mentioned years. We don’t just inherit the outward appearance. Many times also character traits. And maybe even more. The transmission of physical resemblance is automatic, based on genes, without the parents’ knowledge. It seems that the transmission of character traits is not so automatic anymore. Why? Because the parent, by shaping his nature, passes on an already guided (or unguided) child. By shaping himself, he helps his children and the environment.

Perhaps that is why we celebrate the Feast of the Sacrifice of the Virgin Mary today, even though it was slowly gaining ground in the West and was abolished after the Council of Trent. It was canceled because it is based on a New Testament apocryphal writing called Jacob’s First Gospel (lat. Protoevangelium Jacobi). Although the Second Vatican Council violated the feasts without a historical and biblical basis, today’s was retained, despite its creation at the instigation of the Apocrypha, because the Virgin Mary ultimately sacrificed herself to God and the role he assigned to her in the history of salvation. With this, she incentivizes all Christians to follow her in this sacrifice.

And to the Virgin Mary, the devotion was handed down from her parents, who brought her to the temple as a child and thus coded the devotion for her. This is what Mary wants to pass on to us. So what should we do so that Mary’s son can also say about us: “Behold, my mother and my brothers.” For everyone who does the will of my Father who is in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  For help, let’s take the ancient mystical author Pseudo-Marius, who compares the soul to a great city. In the middle is a beautiful castle, and next to it is the market and all the institutions that belong to the town. The enemy, i.e., original sin, has occupied the surroundings of the castle; this is what our senses symbolize. And that is why we are so often worried. From the market, the sound also reaches the castle. And there, in the depths of our soul, we can accept or reject these temptations.

In the castle of our inner soul, we should not let sin go. St. Teresa from Avila perhaps inspired by this author, wrote “The Castle Inside.” He says that we can dialogue with our Lord without being disturbed by the market. However, and you may be right, we are often internally divided. That market, figuratively speaking, reaches too far into the castle of our soul. And that is often unpleasant and tiring for us. A person following Mary avoids sin and purifies his heart to return to inner peace. The goal of asceticism – spiritual exercise is to purify one’s thoughts in the depths of one’s heart.

Because we must not stay only with moral teachings. It is necessary to learn a relationship with God, which should occur more precisely in the depths of the heart and not through external actions. That is why Jesus is so critical of the Pharisees. This may have the consequence that many people outwardly observe the commandments, but as if they still consider belonging to the Church, faith, and keeping the commandments a burden. It’s like when the Israelites left Egypt. They kept looking behind the greasy pots. Moses taught them something else. That is why a person is doing wrong when he wants to treat restlessness with drugs, medicines, and false mysticism.

Christian spirituality offers us opportunities to gain peace. It is precisely from the point of view of heredity mentioned in the introduction that we realize that the drama of the martyrdom and death of the Son of God reflects the drama of a person who is entangled in hereditary and personal sin. The situation of all humanity, including each of us, is serious when the God-Man “had” to accept such a cruel fate: he had to suffer a lot, be rejected, despised, and crucified (cf. Lk 9, 22). Therefore, let us realize that we were sacrificed to God at baptism. The great preacher and saint St. In his sermon to the newly baptized, John Chrysostom describes what baptism makes of us with these words: “The baptized are not only free, but also holy, not only holy, but also righteous, not only righteous, but also sons, not only sons but also heirs, not only heirs but also brothers of Christ and not only brothers of Christ but also co-heirs, not only co-heirs but also members, not only members but also a temple, not only a temple but an instrument of the Spirit.”

In the book Restlessness of God, the Dutch painter Jean Verkade (representative of Nabism) tells how he became a Christian. Among other things, he writes: Intellectually, I got closer and closer to the Church. I was only afraid of the obligations I had to take on, and I could not yet genuinely believe. I told the priest. He was unsurprised and told me: “Unless you are baptized, you cannot believe as we do because the supernatural virtue of faith is the grace we receive at baptism. When you are baptized, all difficulties and doubts will likely disappear. And so it happened.” So we inherited a lot of goodness. We can follow the Virgin Mary.