A Gaze Open

“Man as much as he perceives the shortness of his life, his being just earth, his being nothing, borders on cynicism. He walks on the brink of violence… instead, this girl of fifteen or sixteen who was perfectly aware of her smallness, of her nothingness, but without violent presumptions, had this awareness with her heart open in expectation.”

“‘Nothing is impossible with God.’ This is the secret, the reason that makes the expectation true. This is what makes the expectation reasonable and positive as opposed to what we call cynicism, and what makes it profound and discreet as opposed to sad.”

“Let it be done unto me according to your will...imagine how this girl must have felt psychologically without anything to rely on in the new condition in which the Lord had placed her. There was no apparent motivation except loyalty to the memory. She could have said, ‘It must have been an illusion; it was just my fantasy.’ […] Faith is precisely that strength full of attention with which the soul adheres to the sign that God has used and remains faithful to this sign despite everything.”
—Luigi Giussani, Mary in the Mystery of Christ and of the Church, May 2, 1988

“What would be a limit for us every day is destined to become as big as the gaze of Our Lady. Mary understood that the content of every human condition develops and realizes the plan of Another: not the plan of her own heart, but of the Heart of God. This is the Mystery that all the things that God creates have, that is, that makes them participate in the greatness and beauty of His world, without boundaries and without evil. So that everything that is born becomes a being of grace even when events are hard.”
—Luigi Giussani, Message to the Pilgrimage Macerata-Loreto, June 6, 2004