Sunday, March 18, 2012

During her Last Illness

Mother Margaret
Mother Margaret had a childlike familiarity with Our Lady and conversed with her daily in prayer.  During her last illness, when suffering from excruciating agonies in the back, Margaret one day said, “I am almost ready to fall out with the Blessed Virgin.  Tell her that if she had a bad back I would soon cure her if I could.”  Still she remarked what a blessing she felt in praying to her in this way.  She realized others might think she took liberties but she knew the Blessed Mother understood her when she spoke in this way as a Mother understands her own child.  Mother Francis Raphael Drane wrote, “Such language is beyond criticism, for it is the language of the heart, and has in it something of that ‘heavenly rhetoric, against which the world cannot hold argument.’  For cold-hearted as that world proverbially is, it has not yet claimed to reduce the language of love to the rule and compass of its own sobriety.”