Little Mary (Queen of the Divine Will)
- 8″ × 10″
- acrylic on wood
Devotion to the Divine Infant Jesus is a treasure of contemplatives in the Catholic Church. The Infant does not yet possess the faculty of spoken language, and so the beholder is silenced by a God Who reigns beyond words, beyond human understanding. The Divine Infant Jesus appears as a mercy to lift the believer beyond the human mind and human will, to ponder God as baby, Authority and silence, Authority and innocence, Authority and purity, equally, exquisitely, imponderably, Authority alive and docile. God is Silence, supreme in silence, perfection as silence, alive in silence.
But here is the pre-door to that higher reality, the silent child Mary, the One who would mother the Christ, Mary of Nazareth, only daughter of holy Joachim and Anne, the Hebrew couple who waited a lifetime for this lone conception and then gave the child quickly to the Temple at age 3.
Who is this Little Mary? As the Immaculate Conception, she precedes the Divine Infant Jesus, a human child wrought completely as a work of God.
In the Book of Heaven, the Dicastery of the causes of saints approved diary of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), Jesus teaches the Italian victim-saint about Mary, the first human to possess the Divine Will and to be possessed by the Divine Will. Being so, Mary lived in the wisdom of God, in the Divine Will. Mary is spared the misery, confusion, and distress of living in human will brought on by the Sin in Eden.
By Her dictations given to Luisa and first published in 1932, Mary teaches the Church how to live as She lived, in the Divine Will. This early text, The Virgin Mary in the Kingdom of the Divine Will, has secured four imprimaturs, one with each edition (1932, 1933, 1937, 1997).
In the Book of Heaven, Jesus introduces us to Mary, explaining Her very nature, Her favor, charisms and graces, the singular supremacy of Her being, and how She is Mother and Queen of the Divine Will.
The painting is an icon of the Mother of God, as Little Mary.
She is enclosed inside three spheres. The outer sphere is gold, the visible, material sign of (holy) creation. Classical iconography maintains the requisite use of metal gold (leaf) as the symbol of Heaven’s substance. But Heaven is God, and God is spirit – so is there material, physical gold in Heaven? The orthodox iconographers use gold to symbolize the light of Heaven, not meaning that gold is Heaven. Gold is the first and visible sign of Heaven.
The second sphere is pure white, conveyed here as untouched, unpainted gesso, a total of 15 coats of base color. The middle sphere is symbolic of the Unseen, the Ineffable, the actual substance of Heaven – pure, clean, eternal Light. It resides hidden within the Seen.
The third and center sphere is rose quartz pink, symbol of the greatest object of all reality and of God: the Divine Will. The Divine Will is omnipresent, resides in every speck of created matter and is sustained alone by It. All of reality is held together by the Divine Will; if It “forgot” to be Itself for one second, all reality would collapse. Everything in creation is sustained by the Divine Will, the incessant power and Divine Intention that animates the universe and mobilizes the works of all creatures. It is pink to sign Itself as Love.
The Book of Heaven reveals vast treasures that peer into God’s nature and manner. Though His attributes are many and known by creatures as the perfections – Peace, Joy, Happiness, Love, Wisdom, Knowledge, Rectitude, Righteousness, Purpose, Order, Meaning and many more – the Will of God is the largest, the most important, the greatest of all aspects of God. In Volumes 19, 20, and 21, Jesus unveils the Divine Will symbolized by Sun. This Sun is eternally generous, eternally blessing, eternally inexhaustible, only gives, never loses, loves all, blesses all, provides for all, and never ceases in its motions. The Sun is a symbol for God’s continuous omnipresent care and embrace, which no creature can evade or escape.
In the 2017 painting “The Four Hearts”, the icon writer encompassed the image of God the Father with an enormous Sun dominating the sky, far beyond the little sun as seen from daily earth. The artist did not know why it was given this mode of depiction until encountering the sun passages in the Book of Heaven seven years later.
So too Mary is enclosed in a pink Sun, “The Sun of My [Divine] Will” as Jesus called It [shares as title for the official Vatican biography of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta]. Mary possesses this Sun and is possessed by this Sun of the Supreme Fiat, the unending one act of God.
The pink love Sun of the Divine Will is lined with emanating rays, each a grace from God. Mary is the mediatrix of all these graces because when a soul belongs completely to the Divine Will, everything of the Divine Will belongs to the soul.
The victim of Medellin provided guidance from Mary Herself that She be depicted as a child of color, dark-haired with unmistakable darker skin tone. Yet, the Mary of the painting seems miraculously both white and non-white, embracing all human colors.
Her crown is studded with meaningful gems: seven sapphires for the seven dolors, three emeralds for her triune relationship with the Trinity, fourteen rubies for the powers of Marian prayer, two amethysts for the two Co-Redeemers.
Eight tiny trumpet lilies proclaim from the crown the capital virtue of purity, and symbolize the perfection of the Father.
From the crown spill forth twelve ‘stars’ of perfume. Each star is depicted in its own progress of diffusion, exuding the fragrance of its virtue. Each star is made of four nested colors: deep turquoise, brilliant blue, dark orange-magenta, and tangerine. The two blue colors denote sacrifice or sorrows of Mary, mild and intense; and two orange tones denote the joys of Mary, mild and intense. The fragrance of the virtues always carries the mixed notes of pain and happiness, that is, together, love.
The artist surmised that the Van Eyck brothers in the glorious altarpiece of Ghent (1422-1432) portrayed Mary with this same crown of twelve stars with this quality of ‘live’ aromatic sublimation. Whereas the Ghent altarpiece gives us the odors of Mary mature woman, icon of Little Mary gives us the odors of simplicity, of girl child saint.
The infant Mary has long been shown iconically holding both the Sacred Heart of Her Son and Her own Immaculate Heart [though Jesus is never shown doing the same!]. The Sacred Heart of Jesus blesses our desire to holiness, vocation, family, and work; while Mary’s Immaculate Heart, most beautiful and tender, blesses our desire for humility, and to protect and prosper the Domestic Church – the family. Both Hearts seek to beautify our souls with thoughts, words, and acts of love that come from intimate prayer: that is, to live in the Divine Will and to live in the state of grace.
Mary’s white tunic is accented at the neck with a trio of motifs that recall the original fifteen rosary mysteries with their accorded affections.
The painting begs us to enter into the dizzying purity of the Most Holy Virgin as infant. She is a door of pure contemplation, to destroy one’s human will in exchange for possession by the Divine Will. As disarming toddler, She shows us the way around our adult defenses and resistance to being cloistered in the Divine Will.
Mary enters the Temple at age 3, which is the age of individuation or ego-birth. But Mary exits this development before it begins and allows Herself to be formed in the Divine Will instead of Her own human will. She thus enacts the offramp that spells the escape of the human creature from the hell of ego/narcissism and to exist only in the grace of Divine Love, a perpetual minister to all creatures and creation.
July 27, 2024
