taken from: Month of Mary of the Preachers, by Father C. Martin

We read in the Gospel of Saint Luke that very shortly after receiving the greeting of the archangel Gabriel, who had come down from Heaven to announce Her election to the Divine Maternity, Mary, following the sweet impulse of Her heart, went eagerly across the hill of Hebron to Elizabeth, Her dearest cousin, who received Her with cordiality and happiness. Elizabeth suddenly felt the young child in her womb tremble, and said to Mary: “Blessed are You among women, and blessed is the fruit You bear in Your chaste womb. – The Mother of God deigns to honor me with Her presence, what goodness! what tenderness!”

It was then that Mary chanted the Magnificat canticle, sung in Her services by the universal Church.

How worthy of publication is this first canticle of the New Testament, dictated to Mary by the Holy Spirit, who had led Her to Saint Elizabeth, Her venerable cousin! Yes, it was the Spirit of love, Her divine Spouse, who placed in Mary’s heart the noble and touching words that we are meditating on here. How energetic is this hymn of thanksgiving, and how unctuous is the feeling of gratitude! This privileged Virgin thanked God for Her heavenly childbirth: She attributed nothing to Her own merit, but credited everything to the grace of the Almighty in singing His ineffable benefits. Yes, Mary’s Magnificat song has remained in the Gospel as a monument of Her profound humility, Her perfect gratitude and Her ardent charity towards the Most High, who had deigned to raise Her to the maternity of the divine Word. In order to understand its sublimity, let us expose successively each of the words which compose it.

1. My soul magnifies the Lord.

It is an act of glorification. The soul filled with the idea of the divine greatnesses, not being able to praise them worthily, rises through admiration to rapture. When Elizabeth adores the Child Jesus and canonizes the Mother who carries Him in Her virginal womb, at the same moment Mary is ravished all in God, and from the tenderest part of Her heart, She cries out: May My soul glorify the Lord and may all My powers bow down at His feet to adore His immensity and to pay Him homage. Oh, how great He is and how small I am in His presence!

2. And My spirit rejoices in God My Saviour.

It is a movement of jubilation, that is, a joy so great that the spirit is all beside itself; the heart leaps and is confined in the bosom from where it would like to escape. John the Baptist, in his mother’s womb, forgets that he is a captive; he breaks the bonds of nature; he rejoices in the presence of the Infant God of whom he will be the precursor. But the heart of the Queen of Angels makes other great efforts; and as She always has God present in Her, so She is incessantly transported with joy and overwhelmed in Him who is Her Savior.

3. He has seen the humility of His servant, and therefore all generations will call Me blessed.

It is an absolute gratitude, a fidelity so complete and so pure, that She returns to the unique bounty of Her God all the goods that She has received. God, seeing My humility, or rather My lowliness, touched with compassion, has filled Me with all His benefits; He has taken pleasure in putting everything in what was nothing and the immensity of His mercies in the immensity of My miseries. The more He fills Me with graces, the more I retreat into My nothingness and ingenuously confess My unworthiness and My weakness. It is for that reason that all generations will call Me blessed. It is not because of My own qualities, oh, no; for I have nothing but Myself and this Myself is little; but I will be called blessed because I received from the infinite charity of My God a world of mercies. It is therefore Him who is praised when I am praised, since it is to His unique graciousness that I am indebted for all My happiness.

4. For the Almighty has done great things for Me: holy is His name.

The astonishment is united to the gratitude in the heart of the humble Mary. Do you want to know why I am blessed? It is because this almighty Love was pleased to exercise His omnipotence on My heart. He deigned to make it His empire; He poured a deluge of graces into it; He exhausted, it seems, the treasure of His gifts not for Me but for the glory of His holy name. He wished to form a masterpiece with His divine hands, in order to show angels and men what He could do; for whoever considers that I have presented nothing but emptiness and nothingness will be obliged to cry out with Me in astonishment and to say: “Oh, how great God is! how boundless is His goodness and His power, since He has found the means of enshrining so many divine greatnesses in One who was so unworthy of them!”

5. And His mercy extends from age to age to those who fear Him.

Here is the trust in God’s faithfulness and the assurance of the fulfillment of His promises. This act gives great firmness to the heart and makes the soul never waver. His mercy extends from generation to generation, and is poured out from race to race upon those who live in His holy fear. Oh, how great is the faithfulness of our God! He promises to only one, to Abraham, His servant and our father, and He gives to all; He promises only one benefit and He pours them out in thousands; He speaks only of one day and His goodness extends that day into an eternity. What courage does a heart full of faith in the divine promises have when it sees the heavenly blessings descend from the fathers to the children on a people loved by their God? Indeed, who has ever trusted in Him without seeing himself at the end consoled and filled with the goods he had desired. There is no good that He grants to one man that He cannot grant to another; He can always do even greater things. Every day He makes Abrahams by faith, Moses by gentleness, Davids by piety, Salomons by wisdom, prophets, apostles, Saints in every condition, by a thousand different means, to the great astonishment of heaven and earth. Alas, He has done unto Me graces which I did not expect, which I would never have dared to ask for, which I could not even think of; but He has willed to use His infinite goodness to work in Me wonders which have never been seen or heard of since heaven and earth came out of His hands.

6. He has deployed the strength of His arm, He has scattered the proud of mind and heart.

It is a thrill and a rapture that seizes the heart when it considers the amazing effects of the omnipotence of the great God. He has redoubled the efforts of His arm, He has deployed His extraordinary power to overthrow the proud spirits and to punish their guilty temerity. It is the despair of hell to see the same arm that struck down Lucifer and millions of angels lift up a Daughter of Adam and give Her the place of honor in heaven. Nothing less than the strength of such an arm was needed to raise a simple virgin like Me to this degree of greatness, and to do what He did with Her, to the great astonishment of men and angels. My heart is annihilated when it sees this blow of the sovereign hand of the Monarch of the universe. And you, Elizabeth, do you not feel your heart tremble when you weigh these ineffable mysteries and these inscrutable efforts of the Almighty?

7. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and raised up the lowly.

The Virgin Mother enters with David, Her forefather, into the powers of the Lord, and adores the depth of His judgments. O abysses without bottom and without shores! O holy fearful justice of My God! He overturns the powers of heaven, He casts them into the abyss, condemning them without resource, and giving to their punishment no other term than eternity! On the other hand, He exalts the humble, He uplifts the weakest of His creatures and raises them to such an eminent degree of magnificence that the highest seraphim see them raised above their heads, and adore the counsels of the great God.

8. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed.

I do not know how it can be that our hearts do not burst with joy, do not melt with sorrow, when they feel the effects of the ineffable compassion of the Heart of God. He sees our miseries, He knows well, He feels well the extreme poverty of our souls. When He sees us starving for His graces, touched with pity, He runs to us and fills our hearts with torrents of heavenly sweets. But, at the same time, He condemns the rich to an eternal hunger, to an immortal thirst, which cannot be satisfied by all the created goods. And I, the last of His creatures and the smallest of the daughters of Zion, I feel, O Elizabeth, so excessively overwhelmed by His divine sweetness, that My heart cannot contain them, and My tongue cannot tell them worthily!

9. He has lifted up Israel His servant, remembering His mercy.

It is the ordinary conduct of Divine Providence to test His children, to bring them through the Red Sea into the promised land, which is the Jerusalem of Heaven. But in this pilgrimage He makes Himself the protector of Israel, that is to say of His faithful children; He remembers His ancient mercies, and He has such a tender and maternal solicitude for His creatures, that you would say that His only care is to crown them with His blessings. If He has eyes, hands, and a heart, it is to watch over them, it is to shower them with His favors, it is to love them, but with a love worthy of a God. Oh, if we could make ourselves worthy of His infinite goodness and serve Him as He deserves, soon our souls would be changed into a paradise of delight!

10. As He promised our fathers, in favor of Abraham and his descendants forever.

May we be as faithful to Him as He is to us! Far from breaking His divine promises, He always fulfills a thousand times more than He promised us. Let Abraham, Isaac and Jacob be brought back to earth, and they will see that all the promises made to them and their descendants are faithfully fulfilled, that they are fulfilled with a kind of superabundance; they will see that God says little, that He does much, that He promises again, and that His love goes on to infinity. O Elizabeth, My beloved cousin, what a heart we would need to respond to the Heart of the great God! Or rather, how many millions of hearts would we need to love, to admire, to adore a Majesty as excessive in doing us good as He is infinite!

The affections expressed in this hymn give us an idea of Mary’s devotion. These sparks make us guess the immense fire that burns in Her soul. But the most beautiful things remain hidden in Her virginal heart, and the veil of Her modesty covers everything for our eyes, which are not worthy of these secrets.