The Lay Dominicans of the Queen of the Holy Rosary Group will be posting a meditation for the next fifteen Tuesdays leading up to the feast of our Father Dominic on August 8th.   See here for more information on the 15 Tuesdays devotion.

Our Lord called Himself the ‘Light of the World.’ When the Light took on human flesh, entering the world, He did so through the cooperation of Mary. According to an ancient tradition, Mary had taken a vow of virginity so that she might commit herself entirely to God. Nevertheless, when He called her to be a mother she immediately accepted. By putting aside her own desires, she was more completely committed to God than she ever could have been otherwise.

We see a similar response to God’s call, to vocation, in the life of our Father Dominic. He was a member of a religious community Canons Regular in Spain, where he could have expected to stay until he died. When he was picked by the Bishop to take part in a match-making mission on behalf of the King, Dominic discovered that the Albigensians of southern France were repelled by the worldly clerics sent to bring them back into the Church. He realized that to be successful, the missionaries would have to do more than proclaim the Gospel with their lips. They would need to live the Gospel in every aspect of their lives.

Dominic committed himself completely to this new vocation and earned for himself the title ‘Light of the Church.’ It is a title which reminds us that the light which we honor in him was none other than Light of the World, Jesus Christ. It is true that Dominic identified problems in the Church’s missionary efforts and established the Order of Preachers to solve those problems, but he was not successful on his own. As perceptive and skillful as he was, he depended on the intercession of Our Lady and her gift of the Rosary to ultimately be successful. As with Mary, our Father Dominic’s greatness lies in having set his own will aside to follow a different path set out for him. We too must respond to God’s call, setting aside our own ideas of how life should be to grow in holiness wherever God has actually put us.