Mary, Mother of Christians

She is the Temple through whom God comes to man, from whose doors living waters flow.  Excerpts:

...The mystery of theosis, it seems to me, is something we need to be reminded of today more than ever, at the end of a secular age in which so many have tried to live as though God did not exist. The vision of Mary, crowned with flowers on earth and with stars in heaven, is the one image of human destiny that can stand up against the hedonistic vision, the corrupted imagination twentieth century...

Mary is the heart of the Church of which we are the members. If the only fulfilment of nature is through grace, then she who is full of grace shows us the fulfilment of our own natures also. To her state we may also attain - even if only in the partial way appropriate to our less central position in the Mystical Body, and through a process of purification that for her is unnecessary. She does not have to struggle for sanctity, but she suffers with us in our struggle, and accompanies us, not in the useless way of a person who makes all the same mistakes, but in the helpful way that can support us with unfailing patience, compassion and wisdom...

In any case, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclicals and numerous weekly audiences on Mary, has shown that Mary's "state of royal freedom" flows precisely from her humility as handmaid, mother and sister.

...If Mary is, as the Catechism tells us in one of its headings, an eschatological icon of the Church, it is in the figure of the Virgin Mary, united with Christ in heaven, that our destiny and calling as human beings are most fully revealed to us. Mary is already the Church that we are summoned to become through repentance and purification. She is nature perfected in a single person, and transfigured by the grace to which she offers not the faintest shadow of resistance. It is the image of her "Coronation" or eschatological transfiguration that most fully expresses the final effects of grace on nature: the integration of human life with the life of the eternal and ever-blessed Trinity...