After a year as seminarian in St Sulpice in Paris, Eugene reflects in his journal on the place of Mary in his spirituality:
But devotion to the Blessed Virgin must excel all others; for the glorious Mother of God is called by the Church: our life and our hope. It is morally impossible for a soul to make any progress in the ways of perfection if it lacks this tender and sincere devotion to the most holy Mother of God.
General counsels for achieving perfection, notes taken in 1809, EO XIV n.39.
“Mary’s gaze is not directed towards us alone. At the foot of the Cross, when Jesus entrusted to her the Apostle John, and with him all of us, in the words: ‘Woman, here is your son’, the gaze of Mary was fixed on Jesus. Mary says to us what she said at the wedding feast of Cana: ‘Do whatever he tells you’. Mary points to Jesus, she asks us to bear witness to Jesus, she constantly guides us to her Son Jesus, because in Him alone do we find salvation. He alone can change the water of our loneliness, difficulties and sin into the wine of encounter, joy and forgiveness. He alone.” Pope Francis
Devotion to Mary. Something that originates with God/Jesus, it is not Mary drawing any attention to herself; “…the gaze of Mary was fixed on Jesus”.
I think of how God has brought/continues to bring me to himself. It always begins with God (and ends with him). It was not through any great personal streak of genius that I decided to say the Hail Mary prayer as a part of my breathing in and breathing out. To have it become like a mantra so that no matter what I was doing my spirit would be repeating the prayer over and over, as a part of who I am – not to praise Mary, but rather to pass through her so that my spirit would be focused always on God. A little bit like praying with icons.
Eugene too was led for he seemed to know this so intimately from the very start and only grew stronger in it during his lifetime. Mary was/is a model in a very real way of Jesus living within us. “…our life [our sweetness] and our hope”. We avow, we state this when we sing the Salve Regina, when we recite [most often with the Rosary] the prayer of Hail Holy Queen.
Mary’s song “my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit exalts in God my Savior…” states exactly what she is all about. I cannot do it justice in my own words, but it is summed up perfectly by Francis; “…she constantly guides us to her Son Jesus, because in Him alone do we find salvation. He alone can change the water of our loneliness, difficulties and sin into the wine of encounter, joy and forgiveness. He alone.” O Jesus, living in Mary, come and live in [me] your servant….