Reason for the season.

A great piece on the history of the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

And yet I find my thoughts turned towards Our Lady of Victory, of the Mother of the Messiah, who proclaimed God mighty and victorious in her Magnificat, and in these words spoke of the strength of His arm to cast down the mighty and exault the lowly. I think of all those precursors of the Mother of God- Miriam, the prophetess, who took a timbrel in hand and on the shores of the Red Sea, singing songs in praise of the God of Israel's triumph over the army of Pharoh; of Judith and Deborah and the fire that burned within their hearts for justice and the sword that they raised against the enemies of God's people; of Rahab and the spies and the fall of Jericho; of Esther the Queen, who risked her own life so that her people might be saved. The Bible is a book of battles. There is properly a peace making quality to our Biblical Faith, a hope for a restoration of the concord that the Creator intended between himself and humanity. But there is also a properly oppositional quality to our Faith, the recognition that in knowing what we stand for, we also know what we stand against. We can no more excise conflict from the Bible than we can deny its reality in our own history. We have been placed in the midst of a fallen world, not merely to surrender to its failure to love, but to live in defiance to that which opposes God. Resist we must, but to do so, we attempt to imitate, not the fallen powers of this world, but Christ the Lord, who wrested power away from the powerful, not by force of arms, but in the strength of his will to love us unto death. He is triumphant, but there still are battles left for him to fight in all the Lepanto's that rage within our own troubled souls. In the midst of these battles I know that Christ the Lord fights for us still, and that the Lady of Victory is at his side.