Glorious Suppliant

​‘God has given to his Mother great privileges and a mighty power of intercession. No one need fear that she will misuse her gifts or her power. She will not attempt to divert us from God; she will not scheme to attract us to the worship of anything less than the Most Holy Trinity: she will not jealously capture our devotion and hug it to her own self; she will not eclipse or obscure the streaming light of the divine Christ; she will do nothing to detract from his supreme godhead or his perfect manhood. Her one and only wish is to remain the handmaid of the Lord, and that all things shall be according to his word. Her one desire for us is that we should be like her, and thereby like him, in hearing the word of God and keeping it, her one command to men is: “Whatsoever he saith unto thee, do it.”
 
There she sits enthroned at his right hand; a glorious suppliant Queen beside her Lord and King. Yet what a suppliant! So near to God, so understanding of his mind, so ready to co-operate with his will. Remember that the Christian must see the universe as a great fellowship of co-workers: all working together with God. It has pleased him to delegate much of his work; some to the holy angels, some to the saints, and some even to us sinners here below. And in our devotional life the perspective will be distorted (to say the least) if we do not give Our Lady thousand times ten thousand and thousands and thousands, it is only when we realise that upon the King’s right hand stands the Queen in vesture of gold, and that around them is the court of Heaven numbering ten thousand times ten thousands and thousands of thousands, it is only when we make contact with that glorious array that our minds are really opened to the full grandeur of God, who reigns not as a solitary tyrant in lonely state, but as the loving Parent of that most wonderful of families, from which every family on earth is named – the family of the Holy Catholic Church which is also the Communion of Saints’.
 
from an address in the Pilgrim Church, Walsingham, 1956, by SJ Forrest, 1904-1977