“Totus tuus, I am all yours,” the motto of St. Pope John Paul II, has also echoed in the heart of Chiara Lubich and the members of the Focolare Movement who not only have a special devotion to Mary, Mother of God and humanity, but also give new strength to their faith in her personal love for everyone.
One element of our spirituality is believing in love, indeed the basic point on which it all rests. Believing in God who is love, believing in the Father’s, the Son’s and the Holy Spirit’s love for us. Believing also in Mary’s love for us, a love which is an expression and manifestation of God’s love.
She has come closer to us. To her from many of our hearts that well-known phrase of the Pope1 is rising, now with much more conviction: “All yours,” signifying “All my being belongs to you, for you to give to Jesus.” “All yours.” It is an expression of love, the expression of love par excellence.
Even one who loves with simple human love can say nothing better to their beloved than: “I am yours.”
We have said it to Mary and repeated it. And she has not failed to help us, comfort us, to sweeten our life in its pains, to share the enjoyment of our tranquil hours. In a word: to show herself our mother.
But Mary has different ways of telling this to our soul. And for us there are different ways of understanding Mary’s maternity.
We know that Mary is mother, that she is mother of us all. But precisely because she is mother of the entire human race (of the people who have passed to the next life, of those alive on our planet today and of those to come), at times, one may fail to grasp in its entirety and truth, the role of the love she reserves for each of us. Immersed in this immense family of her children we probably imagine that no more than a crumb of her love could be ours, comparable to one little grain among the sands of the sea.
Yet, notice that Mary takes care to clarify the situation and instill in our souls, with a sort of divine touch, an enchanting conviction filling us with strength nobody can ever take away. She tells our heart, “I, too, am all yours. I, the omnipotent through grace, am here, all for you,” as if she belonged to no one else and loved no one but us. She makes us forget completely that she is the mother of all the others, so she can come before us as ours alone.
It seems to us that only at this moment Mary really enters our soul’s house, which welcomes both her and us. An absolutely new attitude toward her comes to life in our heart, totally different from before.
A deep relationship in fact is born: direct, face to face; an unbounded confidence in her wells up; we experience such a strong belief in her love that it feels as if we are so close to her that we can do everything, can obtain every grace. Maybe because we have told her repeatedly, “All yours, I’m all yours,” she now replies, “I, too, am all yours.”
Let’s revive our faith in Mary’s personal love for each of us, by opening wide to her the door of our soul.
Since she loves us so much, let’s try to return her love. How? Out of a thousand ways of doing so, the one we prefer is by imitating her.
Let us too then try always to use our life for telling the person we love (God directly: in prayer, or in work, at rest, or to sum it up: in every way we are fulfilling his will): “I am all yours, at your complete disposal, without reservation”; and let us try to tell the same to Jesus in every neighbor we deal with during the day.
We shall all be projected outside of ourselves in love; the “old self” will have no breathing space; we will be Mary, each of us, another her. In brief, we will burn like fire in this year of fire.
Chiara Lubich
(From a telephone conference call, Rocca di Papa, June 6, 1988)
1 John Paul II
