Mary, Gate of Heaven

Okay, this is gonna get a bit theological, but hang with me. I am not an expert or a scholar on Catholic teaching, nor do I have any accreditation to potentially have a command on Catholic doctrine. But I am a Catholic woman with a brain, and I have some thoughts. Thoughts that I am trying to tease out here and some of which I think may be legitimate. So please, bear with me.

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I don’t remember where I heard this title for Our Lady this week, but it intrigued me…it was different from others I had heard and for that reason, it stuck. Mary, Gate of Heaven… Is she the gate? Does she stand in front of the gate? I imagine she’s not the gate-keeper. She does not send anyone sadly away. She is our sweetness and our hope. I imagine she is the structure itself..the visual evades me right now, but if you go to a gate, appropriately unlatch and push, it opens! It’s not a tricky thing, that’s how gates work. But you have to approach the gate. You have to work the latch mechanism properly. You have to put in some effort and push! 

Catholics have this go-to phrase you may hear quite often. To Jesus, through Mary. I never even really noticed it until I was reading my daughter the children’s book on St. Louis de Montfort’s life. He thought it was a really big friggin’ deal, let me tell you. His ardor for Mary is devastatingly beautiful, and as silly as it makes me feel to admit it, this children’s book opened my eyes to this concept. To Jesus, through Mary. 

Whhhhyyyyy was my question. Why did it matter? Why did it matter so much to St. Louis and why does the Catholic Church make such a big deal about honoring her? Why can’t we just go straight to Jesus, I know he hears me! Why put in the extra step?  I have found so many answers, but I want to focus on this concept of Mary, Gate of Heaven. 

Something I heard during an online virtual catholic conference (one of the best things that came out of Covid in my opinion!) was one solid suggestion. I scoffed at it initially, but it stuck. This man challenged his listeners: instead of taking the stance of trying to poke holes in Catholic teaching right off the bat, what if, just for the heck of it, you took the approach of living from the place of “what if all of this is actually true?” How would you live differently? What would you hear differently? How would your perspective on the meaning of life and the day to day change? 

I didn’t even realize it in that moment, but recalling that challenge later on, compelled me to try it…What if all grace comes to us from Jesus through Mary? What if God wants us to go to His Mother first and have a beautiful and profound relationship with her because he thinks she is just that great? How human is that? Who isn’t pumped to have their two favorite people meet and get along? Jesus loved His Mama. He wants us to love her too.

Jesus came to us quite literally through Mary. Without her, Jesus would not have been born on this earth. Is it not worth a moment of pause to consider that perhaps this was an intentional example of how we are to reach Jesus now in Heaven? That she is earth’s portal to heaven, a grand tour jete from how heaven came down to earth. Perhaps now, for us to get to Jesus, we must now seek him through His Blessed Mother? God chose to give Jesus to us through Mary. How fitting that He would want us to now seek Jesus through her as well

Just think about it….it’s almost simplistically sensible. How sweet.