The All-Beautiful
| {rokbox title=|Mary :: Theotokos, Loppiano | size=|561 350| thumb=|images/foto/madonna-india-p.jpg|}images/foto/madonna-india.jpg{/rokbox} | Guardando la natura sembra che Gesù dia il suo comandamento nuovo anche ad essa. When we look at nature, it seems that Jesus gives it his new commandment too. I observed two plants and I thought about pollination. Before this happens the plants grow upward, as if they were loving God with all their being. Then they unite, almost as if they were loving one another as the Persons of the Trinity love one another. From two they become one. They love one another to the point of abandonment, to the point of losing their personalities, so to speak, like Jesus in his forsakenness. |
Then from the flower that blossoms, a fruit is born and life, therefore, continues. It is like God’s eternal Life imprinted in nature. The Old and the New Testaments form a single tree.
Its flowering happened in the fullness of time, and its only flower was Mary.
The fruit which followed was Jesus.
The tree of humanity was also created in the image of God.
When, in the fullness of time, it blossomed, unity was made between heaven and earth, and the Holy Spirit espoused Mary.
Therefore, there is one flower: Mary. And there is one fruit: Jesus. And Mary, though alone, is nevertheless the synthesis of the entire creation in the culminating moment of its beauty when it presents itself as spouse to its Creator.
Jesus, instead, is creation and the uncreated made one: the Marriage consummated. And he contains Mary within himself just as the fruit contains the flower. Once the flower has served its purpose, it falls and the fruit matures.
Even so, if there had never been a flower, then neither would the fruit have ripened.
Just as Mary is daughter of her Son, similarly, the flower is child of the fruit which is its child.
Yet the time span between the flower and the fruit is so short that it is almost annulled, since fruit is the result of the flower.
Whereas the flower, following a long duration, is born of the tree, generated by the seed contained within the fruit.
Likewise, Mary is the flower blossoming on the tree of humanity, born of God who created the first seed in Adam. She is daughter of God her Son.
As I watched a small geranium breaking into a flower of red, I wondered to myself and asked it: “Why are you flowering in red? Why do you change from green to red?” It seemed such a strange thing to me!
Today I understood that all of humanity flowers in Mary. Mary is the flower of humanity. She, the Unstained, is the flower of the stained.
Sinful humanity flowered in Mary, the All-Beautiful!
And just as the red flower is grateful to the small green plant, with its dirt-covered roots, which made her flower, so too is Mary grateful to sinners like us who constrained God into thinking of Mary.
We owe our salvation to her; she owes her life to us.
How beautiful Mary is! She is creation in flower, creation turned beautiful. Mary is all of creation in flower, like the foliage covering the tree. From his heavenly heights, God fell in love with this flower of flowers. He pollinated her with the Holy Spirit and Mary gives to heaven and earth the fruit of fruits: Jesus.
In order to descend, the Lord God of heaven had to find Mary. He could not descend into sin, and, therefore, he “invented” Mary, who, gathering in herself all of the beauty of creation, “tricked” God and drew him to earth.
Yet she is the flower of humanity, and calling God to herself, she calls him for humanity, because she is grateful to humanity for having given her life.
Chiara Lubich
Published in Chiara Lubich, Essential Writings, New City Press, New York, 2007, pp. 141-142.
