Mary's Life in the Holy Spirit: A Model for Us

ANDI ONEY

Mary’s Life in the Holy Spirit A Model for Us

Copyright © 2019 Andi Oney All rights reserved.

Published by The Word Among Us Press 7115 Guilford Drive, Suite 100 Frederick, Maryland 21704 wau.org 23 22 21 20 19

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ISBN: 978-1-59325-359-2 eISBN: 978-1-59325-534-3 Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV-CE are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America, Second Edition, copyright © 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with Permission. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright © 1997, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Cover design by Suzanne Earl Cover art by Cameron Smith, Immaculate Heart of Mary (2009) studiocameronsmith.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the author and publisher.

Made and printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933377

To Mom, The one who first introduced me to the Holy Spirit and his spouse.

Contents I N T RO D U C T I O N

Journey of Faith page 1

CHAPTER 1

Breath of Life page 7

CHAPTER 2

Chosen and Set Apart page 15

CHAPTER 3

A Visitation of Grace page 27

CHAPTER 4

Nothing Is Impossible for God page 35

CHAPTER 5

The Gift of Praise page 45

CHAPTER 6

Glory to God! page 54

CHAPTER 7

Cana and Calvary page 67

CHAPTER 8

The Promise Fulfilled page 78

CHAPTER 9

Living in Expectation page 88

CHAPTER 10

Living the Charism of Mary page 102

APPENDIX

The Miraculous Medal page 110 NOTES

page 114

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Journey of Faith From the first pages of Scripture, God demonstrates his desire to be with us, his people. Beginning with the story of creation we see this in his care for our earliest ancestors, Adam and Eve, and then throughout the Old and New Testaments, into the present age, and promised until the end of time. His desire to be near us continues. The reality is that we are God’s chosen people, and he wants to visit us today.

Increasingly, over the past few years, I have felt that we should look to Mary, the mother of Jesus, to show us how we can open ourselves to God’s presence by opening ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit. The goal of this book is to present Mary, the mother of God, for who she is in the order of grace—a woman filled with the Holy Spirit. Mary is the foretold vessel God used to bring the Messiah into the world. Her yes to God’s plan fulfills many Old Testament prophecies that speak of the manifestation of God’s presence on earth.

As Mary is revealed to us in God’s plan of salvation, it may seem that she is so far above us that we cannot know her or relate to her. The Church has defined her as immaculately conceived, the mother of God, a perpetual virgin, and one who was assumed into heaven. These truths depict Mary as pure, holy, humble, and contemplative, but they reveal only one side of the woman the Church calls its mother. We must not forget her humanness.

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Mary’s Life in the Holy Spirit

In Mary’s humanity, we see her boldness, her emotions of joy and sorrow, her daily activity, and her exercise of charisms— all lived out under the shadow of the Spirit. These traits draw us into her personhood and inspire us to live empowered by the Spirit, with fervor, as she did. In her holiness and in her humanity, Mary demonstrates the perfect will of the Father for all of us.

In his encyclical Redemptoris Mater (Mother of the Redeemer), Pope St. John Paul II sums up Mary’s life by calling it a “journey of faith.”1 Throughout this document, he emphasizes Mary’s faith as the driving force behind all that she does. This faith is evident each time we meet her in Scripture. It was Mary’s faith that enabled her to consent to be the mother of God. Her faith brought her to visit Elizabeth.

Her faith gave her strength to flee to Egypt with Joseph. Her faith moved her to action at the wedding at Cana. Her faith strengthened her at the foot of the cross. It was her faith at Pentecost that allowed her to receive the Holy Spirit in a new way. Mary’s faith was initiated by the Holy Spirit who led her to complete obedience.

We, like Mary, are called to a journey of faith. Although our journey differs from Mary’s, it has much in common with hers.

The Charismatic Renewal My journey of faith began when I was born into a family who practiced the faith and saw to it that I received the sacraments and participated in religious education classes. Our faith centered 2

Journey of Faith

on attending Mass and receiving the sacraments regularly. But my family’s journey changed when my mother began going to prayer meetings in the 1980s. These prayer meetings seemed to capture the joy, energy, and evangelizing power of the early Church, which we read about in Scripture. The meetings included the use of the charisms listed by St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians—such as prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, and the interpretation of tongues (see 1 Corinthians 12:8-10).

In the Catholic Church, prayer meetings of this nature began over fifty years ago. In 1967 the Holy Spirit came in power upon a group of college students who were on retreat near Duquesne University. These students had prayed and prepared for the retreat by reading the first four chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, which tell of the Holy Spirit’s descent on the followers of Jesus following his ascension. On the retreat, the students experienced something similar to what happened at that first Pentecost as God manifested his presence and power to them.

This weekend—commonly referred to as the Duquesne Weekend—marked the beginning of the charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church, a movement that has touched over 120 million Catholics and that every pope since has supported and encouraged. The baptism in the Holy Spirit is central to this movement. All four Gospels refer to being baptized in or with the Spirit, and Jesus uses this language in the Acts of the Apostles in reference to the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (see Matthew 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; John 1:33; Acts 1:5).

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Essentially this baptism involves praying for greater openness to the Holy Spirit and receiving all that this prayer brings, such as deeper union with God, a renewed appreciation for Scripture, growth in the fruits of the Spirit, and the operation in our lives of various gifts of the Spirit. Baptism in the Holy Spirit brings a new love for Jesus and a new life in the power of the Spirit, which enables us to surrender as Mary did and to live a life of prayer and obedience. To be empowered by the Holy Spirit is to live as a member of the body of Christ, building up that body through the Spirit’s gifts.

I was a teenager when I became involved in the charismatic renewal, a few years after my mother. Although the prayer meetings I attended included many of the same manifestations of the Spirit as described in the Acts of the Apostles—such as praise, praying in tongues, and prophecy—the most dramatic manifestation of the Holy Spirit was the deeper, more personal relationship with God that people experienced. Love for God and neighbor, along with a desire for holiness, were the priorities in our lives.

After I had been attending prayer meetings for about two years, I was prayed with to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I had already received the Holy Spirit as a child at Baptism, of course; this new prayer was for a release or renewal of the Holy Spirit in my life. And truly, my journey of faith took an unexpected turn at that moment, a turn that I can only describe as grace.

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Journey of Faith

The Upper Room Many years later, I had the privilege of visiting the upper room in Jerusalem along with 160 charismatic leaders from around the world. We were in the Holy Land on pilgrimage, to pray and consult in preparation for the golden jubilee of the charismatic renewal. Our trip concluded with an excursion to the place where the Spirit was poured out on Pentecost. Representatives from every continent raised their voices in praise. All spoke different languages, yet one unified cry magnified the Lord as the Spirit gave utterance. It sounded like Pentecost!

The atmosphere of praise ushered in many prophetic words that were given in boldness and conviction. The first word had to do with Mary, the mother of God. The central point of the prophecy was the importance of the mother of faith in our lives. We were reminded that Mary was the one who waited in faith with the disciples in that very room for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We were invited to entrust ourselves to Mother Mary.

With these words, praise continued, and many fell to their knees in worship. The soldiers who guard this holy site were no longer urging people to move out quickly; they seemed to respect what was happening, not disturbing the move of the Spirit. There was a final prophetic word at the end of our time there:

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I have poured out my Spirit abundantly, and I will continue to pour it out. I will pour out my Spirit generously, lavishly, continuously, until even the hardened hearts are softened and the wasteland becomes fertile. This I promise, that I shall pour out my Spirit continuously until I bring about, through my Spirit, the renewal that I intend.

When I left the upper room, I felt a passion and resolve for a new mission, directly related to what I experienced there.

This mission includes extravagant praise, zeal for testifying to and teaching about the life available to all through baptism in the Holy Spirit, and a yearning for myself and others to yield more fully and effectively to the charisms.

The more I think about the grace I received as a teen and that was renewed in me in the upper room, the hungrier I have become to understand the scriptural basis for these graces.

Interestingly, when I study Scripture and when I pray for the ability to articulate God’s desire for the Holy Spirit to be the animator of our lives, I always encounter Mary, who never lived apart from the Holy Spirit. Mary’s journey of faith is a life lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Mary is our model and our mother. Mary has a mission and a ministry. Mary is contemplative and charismatic. Mary is a gift of the Holy Spirit.

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CHAPTER 1

Breath of Life My paternal grandmother, Rene—short for Irene—had a healthy respect for education and was a lover of history. Rene was an Acadian, a descendent of those French Catholics who left France during a period of social upheaval and founded a colony in North America. They settled in an area known as Acadia, now part of the Maritime provinces of Canada.

The Acadians flourished for nearly 150 years, but when the British gained control of the area, the Acadians refused to offer their allegiance to them. British soldiers forcibly removed the Acadians from their homes, redistributed their property, burned their crops, and scattered their families from Canada all the way down to Louisiana.

The deportation of the Acadians in 1775—an early episode of ethnic cleansing in North America—plays a prominent role in Acadian history. I think that this history in turn played a significant role in shaping my grandmother’s character.

Rene left each of her grandchildren a piece of her passion.

She made every one of us a scrapbook that included cards we had written as children, school accomplishments, photos of our parents as children, and even signatures of our great-grandparents that she cut from discarded checks. She organized pictures of relatives spanning several generations, along with names, dates, addresses, and even, frequently, a snapshot of the family’s house.

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Mary’s Life in the Holy Spirit

Rene also conducted extensive research into our family history. She developed the family tree and wrote it down on legal notepads for each family. She was the guardian of our ancestry and had a knack for keeping it alive.

My most cherished keepsake from Rene was not something she intentionally kept for me, but something I discovered while visiting her house after her death. I was grieving the loss of my grandmother, but as I saw all her belongings, I also grieved leaving behind the home and things associated with her. The words from the liturgy for the dead echoed in my mind: “Life is changed not ended.” As if to confirm that, my memories of her became more vivid the longer I was there, sorting through and helping to find new homes for her things. I felt that I too wanted something of hers to hold on to, something that would remind me of her.

As we emptied the cabinets, I discovered an item that pointed to a reality deeper than my Acadian ancestry. It was an old check my great-grandmother had written in the year of my birth and then kept among her financial papers after it had been cashed. The check was made out to the Association of the Miraculous Medal, a ministry that promotes devotion to Mary, the Mother of God. The devotion began after Mary appeared to a young nun, St. Catherine Labouré, in Paris, France, in 1830. Mary asked that a medal be designed that would feature a prayer and an image of Mary, and she promised great graces to those who wore the medal in faith. Because those graces proved to be so abundant, the medal quickly became known as the 8

Breath of Life

miraculous medal. (See the appendix for a brief review of this Marian apparition.)

I am devoted to Mary and wear a miraculous medal. When I discovered this check, this little piece of family history, it brought to mind our family’s earliest beginnings in France. But more than that, I felt that I was uncovering a secret from previous generations, a source of the rich spiritual fruit that has grown over the years on our family tree. Rene had preserved this sign of our family faith for me.

This seemingly insignificant check, discovered in my grandmother’s house along a bayou in Louisiana, is worth more to me than any heirloom. It is a reminder that faith is part of history.

Divine Ancestry The technological revolution of the past few decades has put unprecedented power literally at our fingertips. We can research topics, get directions, have a social life, follow news from around the world, and even discover our ancestry with a few clicks.

And through DNA studies offered online, we can discover often surprising information about our genetic makeup and family past. On one level, technology has made it far easier to do the research into family history that Rene did.

But what we can’t always discover through online searches is the presence of faith in our family history. An internet search probably won’t turn up a canceled check such as my great-grandmother left behind. Nor can it reveal a sense of the personal 9

Mary’s Life in the Holy Spirit

relationships within our families over the generations. Technology, for all its benefits, is limited.

In the past—even in the recent past—family members communicated primarily face-to-face or through handwritten letters and phone conversations. These have been replaced with email, text messages, and photos. While there is much benefit in such communication, including ease and speed, these methods do not compare to the style of communication that goes back to our very creation: physically encountering another person.

And when we lose that sense of personal connection and intimacy, we risk losing a key to understanding how and why God brought the human family into existence.

The personal element is so important to faith because the encounter with persons is present in the earliest pages of Scripture. If we step back from the ever-increasing reach of virtual reality and turn to Scripture, we will find in the Bible that in the spiritual realm there exists a reality that supersedes all.

That reality starts with the fact that in the beginning, humanity was created from a relationship of persons. As we see in the first story of creation, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26, emphasis mine). God is a family of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—which explains the use of the words “us” and “our” in the creation story.

In our quest for knowledge and self-discovery, we must not overlook the fact that God made us in his divine image, and thus we are made for relationship. This is fundamental to who we are.

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Breath of Life

Our True Heritage And so the truth is that every person has a heritage far beyond what we can discover through genealogy sites or DNA data.

We are the creation and masterpiece of Love himself. We have a heritage as adopted sons and daughters of the most high God. We are members of God’s family through Christ. To say we are special is an understatement. Of all creatures, we are the only ones created to be in tender and intimate communion with God. The second story of creation (Genesis 2:4-25) describes how God formed Adam out of clay and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. It is interesting to note that the “mighty wind” that hovered over the water in the first lines of Scripture (1:2) is related to the breath that God gave Adam. Ruah is the Hebrew word for “wind,” “spirit,” or “breath.” The “mighty wind,” the ruah, the breath of God, brings order to chaos. In creating Adam and blowing his ruah into him, we see a hint of the significance of this gift in God’s plan for humanity. We see more of God’s creative action as he creates Eve, who becomes Adam’s delight and equal, “bone of my bones” and “mother of all the living” (Genesis 2:23, 3:20). Through this heritage, God has given you, me, and everyone his personal imprint, his very breath.

Both stories of creation reveal our ancestry as a people of God. Catholic biblical scholarship views these stories neither as literal scientific descriptions of the beginning of our world nor as myth. Rather they reveal divinely inspired truths about our first parents and about who we are. And the underlying truth of each account of creation is that God made us in his 11

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image and gave us his breath. Adam and Eve were intimately created and were called to live out that intimacy in personal relationship with God. It is no different for us.

Scripture is clear: the Creator of the universe planned us, knew us before we were in our mother’s womb, knit us in our mother’s womb, and gave us his breath, the breath of life: “Your eyes saw me unformed; / . . . my days were shaped, before one came to be” (Psalm 139:16). And so our birth parents were acting not merely on a human level when they conceived us; they were participating in divine creativity.

The Long Arm of Sin But our first parents had a problem: temptation entered the garden. The enemy came, under the guise of a serpent, to plant a seed of doubt by questioning what God had told them: “Did God really say . . . ?” (Genesis 3:1). This cunning tactic of the enemy succeeded. Adam and Eve fell to temptation and were exiled from the garden.

God is omniscient. He knew that the sinful choices made in the garden would affect all humanity through the ages. But he continued to love and provide for our first parents even after their fall, and he does the same for us. Knowing the pain, suffering, and ultimate sacrifice he would endure, he still chose to create us. Our divine ancestry has roots that may not be traceable by DNA, but they are traceable by love and faith.

The story of Adam and Eve may leave us feeling disappointed, wondering what life would be like had the fall not 12

Breath of Life

occurred. But from the first, God was at work, fulfilling his plan beyond what we could hope for or imagine. He gave us the one who reverses the disobedience of Eve, the one whose obedience will affect all of history.

He gave us his mother.

Questions to Ponder 1. Describe a memory from your childhood that brings you joy. Why does it spark happiness in you? Was it a moment when you felt close to God? To other people?

2. In your family, who do you most resemble in character? In what ways? Consider both the positive and negative traits.

How can you build up the positive aspects and get a handle on the negative?

3. Does your family have any traditions related to the faith?

What are they? How have they brought you closer together?

What tensions, if any, have they created? Which of them do you continue to observe?

4. What is your greatest family treasure? Does it help you keep alive some memories of your ancestors? Have you discovered anything new about your ancestors through this item or through stories you’ve heard about family members?

How have these discoveries affected your relationships to your family and your faith?

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Mary’s Life in the Holy Spirit

Reflection God’s vital and life-giving breath is not limited to the initial moment of creation, but keeps all creation in existence and gives it life by continuously renewing it: “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104 [103]:30).

—Pope St. John Paul II2

Prayer to the Holy Spirit Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, That my thoughts may all be holy.

Act in me, O Holy Spirit, That my work, too, may be holy.

Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, That I love but what is holy.

Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit, To defend all that is holy.

Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit, That I always may be holy.

—St. Augustine3

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