Queen of All Hearts

This week we celebrate the Queenship of Mary. Mary is our Mother and her royalty is manifested to us most powerfully in how she tends to our needs with such solicitous, knowing, maternal care.

When I was 10 years old, my parents moved from Maryland to Pennsylvania. It was late August, and there was a severe time crunch so my brother and I could begin the school year in our new location. My parents didn’t know where we’d live. My Mom tells the story that it was the feast day of the Queenship of Mary. She got down on her knees in the kitchen and cried out to the Blessed Mother. “Mary, I put our housing under your crown. Please take care of our family and our sensitive timing needs for a new home so my children can start at their new school.” She really entrusted the matter entirely into Mary’s hands. With that, the phone rang. It was an acquaintance of my parents from PA. “Bonnie, my husband and I have been thinking. We know your predicament and we’d like to offer you our home to rent for a year before we put it on the market. You can move in right away.”

Wow! Mother Mary did not waste any time answering that one! Spot on! Mary is on it! And we are in her. We can count on her. Let us go to her with our daily longings, urgencies, requests, cries, joys. She knows, she cares, and she can implore before the Throne of Grace for timely help. Mary is Queen of our needs; and she is Queen of our hearts. As stated in the August edition of Magnificat: Pope Benedict XVI wrote that, “precisely because Mary is with God and in God, she is very close to each one of us. While she lived on this earth she could only be close to a few people. Being in God, who is actually within all of us, Mary shares in this closeness of God.” She “knows our hearts, can hear our prayers, can help us with her motherly kindness. She always listens to us… We can always entrust the whole of our lives to this Mother.”

What solace. We have a Mother who hears every groan of our beating, aching heart, and how swift she is to come to our aid. Benedictine monk, Fr. Boniface Hicks, in his new book, The Fruit of Her Womb:33-Day Preparation for Total Consecration to Jesus w rites of this cry of our hearts and our abiding in Mary: “We are crying for a home, crying to belong, crying for the things we need to grow, crying to make sense of the pain and find support, crying for others. When we cry out, Mary responds to us and brings into her arms and then into that tighter, safer, more beautiful embrace of her womb… Jesus made Mary’s womb the perfect place for all our needs to be met and also the place that we can always find Him…”

Mary, we plunge ourselves into the safe refuge of your womb. Draw us into the experience of you as our Mother in the ordinary. Queen of our daily bread, Queen of our needs, womb of love and security, we place our hungry hearts and little lives under your crown of glory. We are in you, and you are on it!

Copyright 2023 Marian West