I can’t resist sharing this great excerpt with you, delivered as a part of an adult education program by Scott and Kimberly Hahn found at Newman Apologetics Resource, regarding Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant:

The fact is the Marian dogmas and the devotions to our Lady show to us some fundamental truths that our culture and our century are dying to hear. We need to know. Women and men especially need to hear the fact that God has established in a woman at once the infinite value of virginity and maternity. You might say, “Well, how frustrating.” No. Whatever you are as a woman, you can participate in the gift of God’s glory and grace to the Blessed Virgin Mary. If she is our mother, what mother receives all kinds of riches and glory and then says, “No, that’s not for you. That’s just for me?” No way. I mean even mediocre moms love to give it all to their kids. How much more the best and most perfect mother of all?

That just boils it down for me.  Mary loves us all because, well, that’s what moms do.  Maybe, in fact, it’s not what all moms do, but it’s what most moms do, what we expect from moms, what motherhood is about in many ways.

It continues:

She is proof positive that Christ is capable of taking dirty, rotten scoundrels like us and save us from sin, from selfishness, from injustice and ignorance and all kinds of things that we get addicted to. So it is, we can say to the world around us, that the Christian faith, the Catholic religion proves to us that women are not inferior. Women are not inferior. Women are different than men and vive la difference, but that difference is the key to understanding our redemption. Above every president, every premier, every commander-in- chief, every Caesar, every king that has ever lived stands, or I should say sits enthroned a woman. Above her is only the God-man.

The highest human person in human history is a woman and a mother, and our culture doesn’t like maternity sometimes, and a virgin, and our culture doesn’t like a virgin sometimes. We have a message of the greatest liberation of all. Whatever we are, we are always God’s children. We are God’s siblings, and we can even be God’s spouse. And Mary leads the way, and it’s all the work of Christ. He doesn’t transform her into a man or make her neuter or make her some desexed angel. She is glorified as woman, as mother and virgin over all humans. But not in a way that just leaves us just choking in the dust, but rather in a way in which she just kind of carries us all along up with her in the train of glory.

I love the imagery of a woman behind/above every man, and that woman being his mother.  And can’t you just picture a train, with Mary in the engine, hanging out with her hair swirling around, maybe even whooping and hollering and laughing?  (I’m not trying to paint her as undignified, mind you.  I’m just trying to further the proof of her as real, and this is the kind of thing that helps me with that.)

Do I love all of this because I am a mother?  Maybe.  Or maybe I love it because Mary answers a need deep within me (and within a lot of other people I know, which continues to surprise me).

If you want to read the entire piece (it’s lengthy), you’ll find it here.