She is beloved for her unshakable faith in her son, Jesus. But this Franciscan writer argues that Mary had a deeper understanding of his mission than we realize. 

If the mystic is one who experiences in an extraordinary way the intimacy with God offered to everyone, then Mary is the model and pattern of the mystical life. She literally carried God in her womb and gave birth to him. Spiritual impregnation, gestation, and giving birth are the initial stages of the mystical life. God invades our lives, usually when we are not expecting it; we embrace that gift. Even if we are tempted to hoard it as ours alone, God will be born from us; we will serve others as a result of God’s own indwelling love. 

Imagine Mary, a young girl at her prayers or perhaps performing her tasks or simply sitting and watching people pass by her window. Suddenly, there is a rush of wind like a flutter of wings, or a flash of light, and there is one like an angel addressing her: “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28). 

There it is: The Lord is with you. What can this mean? Gabriel, as if knowing her thoughts, continues, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” (Lk 1:30–31). Mary asks, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” (Lk 1:34). And the angel responds in the next verse, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” 

‘Behold, I am the Handmaid’ 

All mystics wonder what is happening to them when the Holy Spirit asks them to believe the seemingly impossible notion that God wants to enter their lives. They can, of course, refuse out of fear or doubt, and it is the glory of Mary that she does not refuse but says yes. Each true mystic who says yes to God at some point is sent forth into the world as the Father sent the Son to announce and build up the kingdom. 

For Mary, this moment comes almost immediately when the angel announces that her aged cousin Elizabeth is in her sixth month of pregnancy (for nothing is impossible with God). 

Mary says to the angel, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). 

And Mary sets out into the hill country to minister to her cousin Elizabeth. There God will be revealed in Mary’s deep charity, as God had been revealed in her deep prayer. For when she enters Elizabeth’s house, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. . . . Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled” (Lk 1:42, 45). 

Mary Magnifies God 

Mary’s decision and the truth of the angel’s message are confirmed, not when Mary is in contemplation, but when she is doing charity. The truth of the mystic’s visions and intimacy with God is proven in the selfless charity of the mystic’s life. Mary’s response to Elizabeth, her canticle, the Magnificat, distills the mystical life: 

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly.  

“The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever” (Lk 1:46–55). 

As with every true prayer, the Magnificat does just that: It magnifies the Lord, focuses on the almighty, who does great things among us, the One whose name is holy. 

As though already letting the child in her womb speak through her, Mary does more: She presages the major themes of Jesus’ future preaching and ministry. William Barclay, in his meditations on the Gospel of Luke, says that Mary ends her canticle with a moral, social, and economic revolution. The moral revolution is indicated in the line that God “scatters the proud in the plans of their hearts.” 

We begin to change when our own plans scatter us, bring us down; God’s plans replace them—God’s plans, in the case of the mystic, are revealed in a vision or a voice speaking to the soul. God’s plans work a revolution in our lives. We begin to change because of what we have seen and heard. 

The social revolution is heralded in the line, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones / and lifted up the lowly.” The mystic sees what the world does not see, that the lowly are the real authority, for they represent the kingdom of God in its fullness. Jesus says in the first words of his first sermon, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). Jesus does not say, “Theirs will be the kingdom of heaven,” but “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 

This is a now promise. Where there is poverty of spirit, the real kingdom happens. How different this is from the kingdoms of earth that happen where there is power, not lowliness and littleness. How powerless the mystics are in terms of human power, how powerful in things of the spiritual kingdom within. The economic revolution is foretold when Mary says, “He has filled the hungry with good things, / and sent the rich away empty.” 

Our Mother’s Canticle 

The kingdom Jesus will preach and that his disciples will model distributes wealth to the poor, embracing poverty as the fast track into the kingdom. “If you wish to be perfect,” Jesus says to the rich, young man, “go, sell your possessions, and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Mt 19:21). 

The medieval mystic Francis of Assisi will become the personification of this kind of gospel poverty, having been a rich young man who knew all too well that it is “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mt 19:24). 

Mary’s life, like that of her son, will be a living out of her own canticle. She will enter into the mysteries of Christ’s life. Like the Christian mystics after her, she will participate in a more intense way in the very mystery that she is sharing. 

As the model of intimacy with God, Mary will enter into the death and resurrection of her son. She will stand beneath the cross of his dying; she will rise with him body and soul in the mystery of her Assumption into heaven.  

—from the book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Love
by Murray Bodo, OFM

Franciscans pray a seven-decade rosary, the Franciscan Crown, based on the Seven Joys of Mary, that for me summarizes what it means to enter into the mystery of how we are transformed by and into Christ. The mystic knows in a uniquely graced way these mysteries that we believe and live out as we try to be true to the mystery of our baptism.

—from the book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Love
by Murray Bodo, OFM

That is the ultimate love; that very act is itself the love song.

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “The Great Surrender: Embracing ‘Sister Death’” 
by Murray Bodo, OFM

This is especially true when we feel helpless to do anything to change our circumstances. We begin to just be. And at some point from within comes the voice,

Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know that I…
Be still and know that …
Be still and know…
Be still and…
Be still.
Be.

—from Franciscan Spirit‘s “Holy Mary: Model of Patience“
by Murray Bodo, OFM

St. Francis embraced all journeys of life—and even his own death—with a willing heart. 

The walls of my room when I was a child were covered with pictures of saints—at least from the time I was 10 and discovered books that told the lives of the saints. I know that must sound silly, especially at a time when most boys are collecting baseball cards. Even I think it was silly from the vantage point of my mid-80s. But that’s who I was and that’s what I “played”—acting out the lives of the saints. 

It was a piety that took me years to grow out of, or maybe I never really did. I just grew into a deeper understanding of who the saints were, especially the mystics who fascinate and intrigue me even now. These are the saints and sacred objects I continue to walk with and whose intercession I rely on. I dialogue with them and continue to explore the contour of their lives and the depth and clarity of their seeing. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is a mystic to me, and Francis and Clare of Assisi have been a preoccupation since I was 13. I have written books on both St. Francis and St. Clare, and they each have a chapter in my book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Love (Franciscan Media). 

I am not as conversant with, nor have I read extensively, the works of St. Teresa of Avila, but I love her image of the inner life as an interior castle. I like, too, her feisty outspokenness when she said to God, “No wonder you have so few friends, the way you treat them.” Who has not felt that at times—when God seems not to be listening or seems not to care? I also admire her practical treatment of the interior life, as when she said of prayer that it is an ongoing conversation with Jesus. 

Mysticism itself has intrigued me since I was a teenager and was introduced to the mystics through my reading of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. In time, I came to my own definition of a mystic as someone who has been touched by God in such a way as to want to live  life in union with God and in love for neighbor. 

The Divine Duet 

I think about the poem I wrote titled “St. Francis on Dying,” which can be found in the book on which this article is based. It is hard to romanticize death, exactly, even the death of St. Francis, though his life was one long song of love, a love of God that was made real for him in Jesus Christ. Death is death, and just as Francis’ lover, his very Lord, died a painful death on a cross, so Francis of Assisi died bearing the wounds of Christ, legally blind with what was probably trachoma, suffering the last stages of tubercular leprosy, and disillusioned by what he perceived as some of his brothers’ betrayal of Lady Poverty. 

How lonely that picture is—and yet it has elements of the romantic, too, because, like Jesus, Francis was surrounded at the end by his brothers and others who loved him, including Lady Jacoba de Settesoli, whom he had called “Brother” Jacoba. And so, in the end, his life was one of the great Romantic deaths (Romantic in the 19th-century conception of the perfect Romantic paradox): joy that is pain and pain that is joy. 

What is romantic is what is also almost unbelievable: joy in the face of suffering and death. What is real is the love that becomes joy when it is wed to the Beloved. And the love is made real in the ultimate surrender to the Beloved. 

Jesus says in his dying moments, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Francis asks his brothers to read aloud from St. John the Evangelist’s rendering of the final words of Jesus at the Last Supper: John 13:1–9, 12–15. And then Francis asks his brothers to help him pray aloud Psalm 142…

With my own voice I cry to the Lord; 
with my own voice I beseech the Lord. 
Before him I pour out my complaint, 
tell of my distress in front of him. 
When my spirit is faint within me,  
you know my path.  
As I go along this path, 
they have hidden a trap for me.  
I look to my right hand to see =
that there is no one willing to acknowledge me. 
My escape has perished;
no one cares for me. 
I cry out to you, Lord, 
I say, You are my refuge,  
my portion in the land of the living.  
Listen to my cry for help, 
for I am brought very low.  
Rescue me from my pursuers, 
for they are too strong for me. 
Lead my soul from prison, 
that I may give thanks to your name. 
Then the righteous shall gather around me 
because you have been good to me. 

What a profoundly painful and yet joyful dialogue at the end of his earthly life! It is a divine duet in which first the Beloved speaks and washes the feet of his human loves, then the Lover sings his final song of love. 

Love Song 

In his “Canticle of the Creatures” Francis has already sung his love song to God by praising God through and with every creature God has made. And now as his death draws near—“Sister Death,” as Francis dubbed her—he sings a duet with Christ in anticipation of this final passage from this life to the life Christ has prepared for those who love him. Francis is not a pretty picture as he lies dying, but he is beautiful with love. He is every one of us, as we, too, are in our last moments on earth. 

Both Christ and St. Francis show us that they suffered what we suffered, but they suffered in love, and that makes all the difference. And the love is in the surrender of my will to God’s will. 

St. Francis was once asked what kind of death he wished to have: a quick and sudden death or a slow, lingering death in which he can prepare for his passage into heaven. His answer was, “I want whatever death God wants for me.” 

That is the ultimate love; that very act is itself the love song.