A woman holds her statue of baby Jesus in the Hall of American Saints at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington Dec. 21. People brought their figurines from home for a special blessing after after Mass fashioned after the annual tradition instituted by St. John Paul II in St. Peter's Square. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn)
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks, OPDuring college, I befriended an elderly lady who attended the same midday Saturday Mass as I. The priests of the chapel dared to call her Helen, but to me she could only be Mrs. Regan. As formidable in personality as she was diminutive in stature, she strode energetically behind her walker, weaving confidently through slow-moving crowds. Her mischievous eyes sparkled as she inquired about my studies and extra-curriculars and sparked as spoke her mind on a whole range of contemporary questions.
Ninety-eight — as she proudly declared — when I first met her, she was two years over a century old when I left college. As I grew to know her, I realized that, behind the vivacity, a contemplative lay hidden, a soul whom God gifted with almost mystical insights into the Faith.
The spiritual gems she would let fall in passing frequently startled me. “The Mass always seems to go so fast,” she once confided — a superbly startling statement from a lady whose gait and mental activity both almost outpaced mine. “When the priest raises the host, I think of the Apostles on that first night and wonder what they were thinking when Jesus raised the bread. What was it like to be there?”
During Advent one year, she told me, “I don’t think young people get the same education any more. In grammar school, the nuns taught us to say this aspiration throughout the day during Advent: ‘Divine Infant of Bethlehem, I love and adore you. Come and take birth in my heart.’ We used to try to say it 1,000 times a day, which of course was ridiculous!”
Actually, if you tried to say an aspiration 1,000 times a day, that would be more than once a minute, so her usual candor was, as usual, right. But the idea of sprinkling one’s day with aspirations is a lost treasure of the spiritual life. Such aspirations remind one, in the course of a busy day, why one is doing whatever one is doing: for Jesus. These silent prayers remind one that He is always present, always listening, always loving. One can pray them on the hour, or at the start or end of big tasks.
Aspirations, with the love that lies behind them, transform us into contemplatives in the midst of the world, contemplatives like Helen Regan and like the greatest of them all: Mary. A profound prayer life does not mean we cannot be moving quickly, juggling many obligations, keenly interested in those around us. Indeed, the closer we draw to God, the more we are engaged in the world around us, because it is His world.
Mrs. Regan died during the summer of my first year as a Sister, and I pray fervently that she is now basking in full enjoyment of the Person who gave Himself to us in so extraordinary a manner at the Last Supper. “Divine Infant of Bethlehem, dear Eucharistic Lord, I love and adore you. Come and take birth in my heart.”
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
