Grace has been defined as “God’s better splendor, the beauty of the soul.” And Mary, who is full of grace, radiates that splendor, that religious beauty. Grace (sanctifying grace) gives us a percentage inside the Divine Life; it conforms our souls into the likeness of Christ. Mary in her abundance of grace is a meditated beauty of her Son. She possesses the “radiance” that is the third of the characteristics of splendor. The tremendous St. Bernard of Clairvaux announces that “thinking of the countenance of the Mother is the first-class way of getting ready to look the superb face of the Son.” Saward endorses this idea by way of pointing to the reality that Our Lord is conceived by means of the Holy Spirit without seed, for this reason there’s simplest one human individual whom He resembles in His humanity, and that is His Virgin Mother.
How does Mary’s splendor permit girls of today to be an photograph of genuine beauty, and therefore of reality and goodness also? Mary, the Theotokos – the Mother of God, the Mother of Infinite Beauty, who is herself stunning, will guide ladies to that that is proper and proper. She suggests the falsehood of “seductive beauty,” which we’ve stated above as being something allures us to our self-destruction (morally or spiritually), by using holding up her own “authentic” beauty in comparison. Before displaying the essence of Mary’s beauty, which meets St. Thomas’ requirements for splendor: wholeness, due percentage, and radiance, we will examine society’s claim of womanly splendor. Women these days are informed by means of society that what is ideal and exquisite is that that’s glamorous and seductive. Beauty is separated from God, Who is omitted and Whose goodness is exchanged for a “base thoughts and wrong behavior” (Rom. 1:28), main to both spiritual and frequently physical dissolution. The “truth” that they are taught is one that “considers the individual (and for this reason, the girl) no longer as someone however as a element, as an object of exchange, on the carrier of egocentric hobby and mere pride… This falsehood produces such bitter end result as contempt for men and for women, slavery, oppression of the susceptible, pornography, prostitution…”
Thus, beauty is regularly seen as a trifling physical pleasant. It lacks “due share” due to the fact simplest one issue of the entire individual is considered. Society emphasizes casearn.com the bodily to the exclusion of the religious. Flowing from this same sort of mentality, we see that girls are commemorated extra for his or her work out of doors the house than for their paintings in the family. What is “visible” as attractive is a girl who’s able to reap the “proper” of a a success career, which promises happiness and “equality with men.” In order to achieve this, ladies frequently times either resign their femininity or become a mere imitation of the male role. They are in a sense trading inside the fine of “integrity,” that is essential for actual beauty, for society’s restrained declare of the lovely. This “seductive splendor” which promises so much “properly” gives upward thrust to a hedonism that distorts and falsifies human sexuality and the authentic dignity of the human man or woman. This leads now not handiest to a lack of appreciate for what womanhood is to be, because the truth approximately their non-public dignity as one that become created and redeemed with the aid of God is unknown, however it additionally hinders ladies from achieving the “fullness of grace” for which they had been created. It leads to girls’s spiritual destruction because they’re no longer residing a life of grace. They aren’t living for God.
Mary, who lived a grace-crammed existence, is, however, the version of redeemed girl. God Himself “manifests the consideration of ladies within the maximum form feasible via assuming human flesh from the Virgin Mary, whom the Church honors as the Mother of God.” The maximum elevation of the human nature befell inside the masculine gender, while Jesus, the Son of God, have become guy and male. The highest elevation of the human character occurred within the female gender, within the Virgin Mary. Her divine maternity gives her an exalted dignity. She is “blessed among ladies.” Therefore, all womanhood shares in her blessing and is made radiant via her. “When the Virgin Mary is humbly commemorated for the sake of her Son, girls can be honored…For she has revealed the real splendor of womanhood.”