It is this readiness that we find in Blessed Mary when she answered the astonishing announcement of the angel with her, “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord.”  It is that quality which we find in her here when she construes God’s purpose in terms which go out far beyond her individual life and sees in her experience but one item in God’s dealing with humanity in His age-long work of “bringing His wanderers home.”  We should have far less difficulty and find our lives far more significant if we could get rid of our wretched egotism and find it possible to lose ourselves in the work of God.  We should then find the work important because it is God’s work and not because we are associated with it.  We should also find it less easy to be discouraged because we should not understand our failure to be the failure of God.  Discouragement is but one of the aspects of egotism, and not the most attractive.

We cannot rise to anything like a passion of holiness unless we have found God to be all in all.  Only so can we lose ourselves in God.  And I must, at whatever risk of over-dwelling, stress the fact that we can only attain this point of view by dwelling on God and not on self.  Let God be the foreground of our thought.  Let our souls magnify the Lord.  Let us dwell upon the “great things” God has done for us.  In every life there is such a wonderful manifestation of the divine goodness—­only we do not take time to look for it.  It is well to take the time:  to write out, if need be, our spiritual history.  We shall then find abundant evidence of the goodness of God.  It may be that it is a goodness that is seen chiefly in offers, in opportunities to be something which we have declined or have only imperfectly realized.  Be that as it may, there is no life, I am quite convinced, that has not a spiritual history which is a marvellous history of what God at least wanted to do for it.  It is also a history of what He actually has done:  a history of graces, of rich gifts, of deliverances.  It matters not that we have been so heedless as to miss most of what God has done.  The facts stand and are discoverable whenever we care to pay enough attention to them to ascertain their true meaning.  When we do that, then surely we shall be compelled to do, what blessed Mary never needed to do, fall at God’s feet in an act of penitence, seeing ourselves, perhaps for the first time, in the light of God’s mind.

The Magnificat, if we consider it as a personal expression, is a wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts.  It is, too, a thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the Mother of the Saviour.  Out of her lowliness she has been exalted—­how highly she herself cannot at the time have dreamed.  We can see what was necessarily involved in God’s choice of her, and to-day we think of her as in her perfect purity exalted in heaven far above all other creatures.  Mother of God most holy we call her, and in the words of her canticle ever repeat her thanksgiving as our thanksgiving, too, for the vocation that God sent her and for the gift which through her has come to us.