The Father’s Will

This is the fourth in a series of commentaries on Pope Benedict XVI’s Consecration of Priests to the Maternal Heart of Mary. I am writing it from Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska, where I am preaching a retreat to members of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (F.S.S.P.).
Immaculate Mother,
in this place of grace,
called together by the love of thy Son Jesus
the Eternal High Priest, we,
sons in the Son and His priests,
consecrate ourselves to thy maternal Heart,
in order to carry out faithfully the Father’s Will.
Not My Will, But Thine Be Done
Pope Benedict XVI presents consecration to the maternal Heart of Mary as a means to carrying out faithfully the Father’s will. In doing this he echoes the teaching of Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, for whom consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary was a simple, straight, and secure way of following Jesus in His obedience to the Father and in the wisdom of the Cross. One who frequents the school of Mary, in the company of a vast company of saints, enters into Virgin’s total adhesion to the Will of the Father by repeating after her, “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to Thy word” (Lk 1:38). It is by repeating these words of the Mother, that one is prepared to repeat those of the Son: “Father . . . not my will, but thine be done” (Lk 22:42). It is by entering into dispositions of the maternal Heart of Mary that one becomes capable of expressing in one’s own life, and at the hour of one’s death, the dispositions of the filial and priestly Heart of Jesus, saying with Him: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46).
The Psalms
The life of Our Lord was characterized by a single burning passion: the Father’s Will, the Father’s plan, the Father’s designs, the Father’s glory. The priest who desires to participate in this one burning passion of the Heart of Jesus does well to open the psalter as he would the tabernacle, confident of finding therein the bread of a spiritual communion with Our Lord in His obedience to the Father, in His prayer to the Father, in His filial surrender to the Father.
Draw Me After You
I am thinking, in particular of Psalm 118, that long litany in praise of the Law that, in the mouth of Jesus, becomes a litany of obedience to His Father’s Will.
One does well, at least from time to time, possibly during a retreat, to pray the entire psalm Beati immaculati in via. One hears the voice of Jesus praying to His Father; one senses the pulsation of His Sacred Heart and the rhythm of His breath. One is compelled to say to him in the words of the Canticle: “Draw me: we will run after you to the odour of your ointments” (Ct 1:4). What ointments are these? The ointments of His Divine Anointing as Son, as Priest, and as King, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost poured out in abundance upon the Head for the sake of all His members and, first of all, for His priests.
The Gospel of Saint John
Again, one might open the Gospel of Saint John to discover from the first page to the last the irrepressible impetus of Our Lord ad Patrem. When He speaks, He speaks to His Father or of His Father. He has no desires apart from those of His Father, no words and no deeds that are not sign and revelation of the Father. “Amen, amen, I say unto you, the Son cannot do anything of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing: for what things soever He doth, these the Son also doth in like manner” (Jn 5:19). His very being is an epiphany of the Father. “He that seeth me seeth the Father also” (Jn 14:9). “Do you not believe, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak to you, I speak not of myself. But the Father who abideth in me, He doth the works” (Jn 14:10). Freely, the Son enters into His Passion, saying, “But that the world may know, that I love the Father: and as the Father hath given me commandment, so do I: Arise, let us go hence” (Jn 14:31).
To My Father and to Your Father
After His Resurrection, Our Lord continues to speak of His Father. “Go to my brethren,” He says to Mary Magdalene, “and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God, and to your God” (Jn 20:17). And in the final verses of the Fourth Gospel, when Jesus speaks to Peter, after eliciting from him a threefold confession of love and attachment, He says to him, “Follow me” (Jn 21:10). I have always understood this, “Follow me,” as Our Lord’s way of calling Peter after Him, through the Cross, into the glory of the Father. Would this not be the word to which Peter remains attached and to which he would have us attend, “as to a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts” (2 P 1:19)?
United to the Father, With the Son, in the Holy Ghost
In a word the will of the Father is that we should come to Him through the Son, and with the Son be united to Him in the bond of the Holy Ghost. To carry out the Father’s will, then, is to do those things — shown us by the teachings of Our Lord, by the light of the Holy Ghost, and by the example of the Saints — by which the Father’s love for the Son may be in us, and the Father Himself in us, even as He is in the Son, and the Son in Him.
The Chalice Which My Father Hath Given Me
The priest consecrated to the will of the Father has but one response to those who question him on the meaning of his life: “The chalice which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink of it” (Jn 18:11).