Welcome, Mary’s Anawim!

A very warm welcome to all of you who are looking for a place to go that is wrapped in the warmth of good, old fashioned, Abraham-like hospitality.

This blog is for all of the precious anawim who truly love being Catholic … I mean, the entire treasury of our faith.  Therefore, in the spirit of hospitality, this blog will be a safe haven of only positive posts and comments about our faith, our Catholic Church, and our heroic spiritual shepherds. 

I want to begin by noting that this is the first time I have put together a blog, and I am very excited.  Especially as this first post comes on July 7, 2007 (07-07-07).  I’m not sure what that means, but I trust God will let me know in His time.

Also, I just concluded a very special Marian novena that has prepared us for this new beginning.  This novena has loosed many new opportunities, and I highly recommend it for all.  It is called, “Mary, Undoer of Knots,” and was inspired by St. Irenaeus’ (Bishop, 202 a.d.) meditation on Mary: “Eve, by her disobedience, tied the knot of disgrace for the human race; to the contrary, Mary, by her obedience, undid it.”

It is that obedience that is at the heart of describing what it means to be one of “Mary’s Anawim.”  Anawim (pronounced ann-a-weem) is a Hebrew word from the Old Testament which describes the “poor ones” who remained faithful to God in times of difficulty.  It is the Anawim, “the lost and forgotten ones,” to whom Jesus refers in his beautiful beatitudes on the Sermon on the Mount: “Blesssed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” and “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt 5:3,5). 

The great Marian canticle (Luke 1:46-50) “reveals in filigree,” as Pope Benedict XVI so beautifully teaches, “the spirituality of the biblical ‘anawim,’ that is, of those faithful who not only recognize themselves as ‘poor’ in the detachment from all idolatry of riches and power, but also in the profound humility of a heart emptied of the temptation to pride and open to the bursting in of the divine saving grace.”

“The bursting in of the divine saving grace” … aaahhh … isn’t that what we want in our lives?  Mary’s Anawim are those who have come to understand that there is only one true way to open ourselves to that “bursting in,” and that is to offer our loving hearts, burning H.O.T. for the Lord … hearts of Humility, Obedience and Trust. 

In Pope John Paul II’s inspiring reflection on Psalm 149, he draws attention to the anawim in this way: “The ‘day of the Lord’s wrath’ is really the day described in the second part of the Psalm when the ‘poor’ are lined up on the side of God to fight against evil. By themselves they do not have sufficient strength or the arms or the necessary strategies to oppose the onslaught of evil. Yet the Psalmist does not admit hesitation: ‘The Lord loves his people, he adorns the lowly (anawim) with victory’ (v. 4). What St Paul says to the Corinthians completes the picture: ‘God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are’ (I Cor 1,28).”

How, as Mary’s Anawim, do we contribute to building the kingdom of God here on earth?  How do we fight against the mounting evil in our world?  By trusting prayer and unreserved love for all. 

That is the hope of this blog … that it be a place where we can all reflect on the countless ways in which God is responding to the prayers of the humble and the hearts of the lowly — Mary’s Anawim.

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