It is May. That means Catholic schools and parishes will
be having May Crowning.
About two years
after my conversion, the whole Mary-and-the-month-of-May thing hit my radar.
“So what's with Mary and the month of May?” I asked my cradle Catholic friend.
She explained that the Church has set aside the month of May to honor the
Blessed Mother – hence, May Crowning. It’s time to pray the rosary and present
the Blessed Mother with flowers and a crown, she said.
Try explaining
that to your Protestant family & friends.
You do what?
We pray the rosary... [You've already lost them, and you haven't
even gotten to the part about the crown.]
Have you ever read
the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a
Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff?
It's kind of like that.
If you mention May
and the Blessed Mother, you have to mention May Crowning. If you mention May Crowning, you have to
explain how Mary is the Queen of Heaven & Earth. If you mention that Mary is the Queen of
Heaven & Earth, you have to talk about the Assumption, the Immaculate
Conception, the Ark of the Covenant, the New Eve and why that's all scriptural.
You’ll have to crack open the Bible and look at the Book of Revelations and the
“women clothed with the sun” and explain how Mary was prefigured by Hannah,
Ruth, Queen Esther, and Judith.
And if you make it
to Judith, you are going to have to explain why Judith is not in their
Protestant Bibles--but they don't know what they are missing because Judith is
the most amazing widow in Salvation History.
And if you find
yourself back to the Bible, you are going to have to talk about the rosary
again and how those prayers come right out of the Bible because Jesus prayed
the Our Father, and the Hail Mary is a combination of the words of Archangel
Gabriel and Saint Elizabeth.
And if you manage
to explain why Catholics pray memorized prayers, you will have to explain that
we pray in many different ways and it all comes together in the Mass and the
Mass fits into the Liturgical Calendar and the Liturgical Calendar takes us
from Advent to Christmas to Ordinary Time, to Lent to Easter to Pentecost, and
then to...
May.
To the Blessed
Mother.
And... if you
mention the month of May and the Blessed Mother, you'd better put on another
pot of coffee because you are about to cover the same ground all over again.
Our Faith is organic.
It all fits together. It cannot be reduced to one sound bite. It lives and
breathes and has a complexity and beauty that is as mysterious and glorious as
the Body of Christ.
And the month of
May is connected to that living, breathing intricacy.
Let’s face it. The
best way to experience Mary's month is to become a little child. Don't try to
figure it all out at once like someone cramming for a final exam.
Just go cut some
flowers and lay them at her feet. Pick up your rosary and pray the Glorious
Mysteries. Or simply plan to learn the
Hail Mary if you have never tried to do that.
For you see, it
all comes down to this:
Sometimes, the
best way to find Christ is to let yourself find Mary. Embrace the simple elegance of it and the
organic complexity will fall into place.
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