Mary only slept in order to love and serve God better
2 min • Digitized on May 24, 2022
From The Month of Mary According to the Spirit of St. Francis De Sales, page 202
By Don Caspar Gilli
Say not that the Most Holy Virgin, like all men, was subject to the necessities of life. It may be said, in the words of the Canticles, that her sleep was the sleep of Love, the celestial Spouse saying, I adjure you, daughters of Jeru salem, that you stir not nor awake my love till she please.
The Queen of heaven and earth granted to her chaste body that repose only which was necessary to restore its strength, in order to serve God more perfectly; and we may say that her sleep never interrupted the exercise of holy love, because it proceeded from an act of most excellent charity. Does not St. Augustine teach that we must love our body, that it may serve us in those works which God requires of us, and because it forms part of ourselves, and is one day to share our eternal felicity?
The Most Holy Virgin, indeed, had other reasons to love her body with a virtuous love, because it was not only pure, submissive, and docile to all the functions of holy love and embalmed by Divine sweetness, but it was, moreover, the living source of the Sacred Body of Our Saviour. Thus it belonged to her in an incomparably singular manner, so that before yielding to sleep she could truly say to it, ‘Rest from your fatigues, O throne of the Divinity, tabernacle of the new Covenant, ark of all Sanctity; recruit your strength through the repose which I allow you to take.‘