The
Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary includes a lovely hymn in
which we ask Mary to obtain several realities for us: “the victory
of hope over anguish, / of joy and beauty over boredom and disgust,
of eternal visions over temporal ones, of life over death.”
The
third of these particularly struck me as I was praying this hymn last
night: “of eternal visions over temporal ones...”
Our
visions can be so narrow. We often see only through the lens of this
world. We are bound by time and space, but we rarely seek to look
beyond them.
Therefore,
when tragedy strikes, when suffering increases, when we face all
sorts of trials and experience so many sorrows, we often fail to see
beyond our hurt and our anxieties and our fears. We become focused
on how horrible everything is, how
frightened we are, how we cannot find a way out. We wonder where God
is and why He has let such things happen.
We
are stuck in our temporal visions.
So we
ask our Lady to replace those temporal visions with eternal visions.
We pray to catch a glimpse
of our worst
situations through God's eyes. And as
we do, we learn many things.
We discover that suffering
has meaning and value,
that it conforms us to Christ, that it cleans
and polishes us, that it allows us to spread God's grace to others,
that it helps us grow and learn,
that it leads us to rely on
God completely, that it prepares us for Heaven. We
realize that God is perhaps closer to us than ever when we face
difficult times and
that He wants us to draw closer to Him so He may comfort and console
us.
We
come to understand that God has a plan for us, even if we don't see
it fully, and that His plan is perfect even though some parts of it
may hurt greatly. In the end, if we cooperate and remain in His
grace, He will work everything out for our good. He will lead us to
eternal life, home to Heaven, where our
eternal visions will be permanent and
where all our suffering will be only a memory.
