My kids and I surprised my wife with an early Mother’s Day present today. You see, we have this garden in front of our house. A dear friend landscaped it for us and stocks it with tulips every winter. The tulips bloom during Lent most years. My wife plants her zinnias not long after the tulips die off and for the whole summer we have a beautiful garden of colorful flowers with a row of holly bushes as a backdrop.
And then there’s the gap.
Due to a pedimented dormer on the roofline directly above the middle of the garden, there is a spot where the two middle hollies just won’t grow together. It’s been this way forever. The roof casts a shadow or something like that. I don’t really care about the details. As I tell my wife, I like the look of a garden but I do not like to garden.
And for many years I’ve known just want that spot needs. If you guessed a statue of the Blessed Mother then you get a gold star!
The problem is I wanted it to be the right statue, the perfect image of Mary. And nothing ever looked right to me, certainly not for the price these things run.
So a few days ago, knowing that Mother’s Day was approaching, I stayed just a little longer after Mass so I could make a pitch to Our Lord.
“My Lord,” I said, “I truly desire the opportunity to honor Thy holy Mother in everything I do.”
This is true. As I move deeper into tradition the lessons I learned from my own mom and dad and the wisdom of the ancient Church are hitting me harder. The Blessed Mother is the key and no, we can never love her as much as her Son does so no need to worry about that. But filled with a true sense that since Calvary, His mother is our mother as well, I find myself asking Him every day to teach me to be devoted to her. I truly hope that any act of devotion toward her can only go in my favor at my judgment. And why wouldn’t it? I hope to hear: “You were a miserable wretch… but you loved My mother and so in that regard you tried to be like Me.”
So I continued, “Lord, I want to place a statue of her in my garden. And I want it to be the right one. Direct me to the statue YOU want me to place there and know that this garden in for her, the flowers, everything.”
I walked over to the parish bookstore and it was there waiting for me. No joke. I had never seen this statue there before. It looked so perfect. I asked my friend behind the counter how much it cost. He mentioned an obscene amount I was hoping not to pay before saying, “But I need to reduce it a lot since it hasn’t sold.”
He gave me a new figure. We shook on it. I came back this morning and bought it. And this… is what we now have.
An enclosed garden, an hortus conclusus, – as the Canticles tell us – because that is a figure of Mary. I hope she is pleased. My wife truly loved it.
Mystical rose, pray for us!
Happy Mother’s Day!
Harvey Millican's Blog: Musings of a Trad Dad 