“A favourite image, under which St. John of the Cross with so many other mystical writers illuminates the necessity of our receptivity and purity in order to receive God within us, is the image of the window that must let through the light of the sun. On the paintings of our Flemish masters, in the presentation of the Message of the Angel to Mary, this image is not rare. We see the Holy Spirit as a sunray that casts its light through the window. The window is the image of Mary. No creature took up more purely that divine Light that came into this world; no one gave it on more purely and became more one with Him than Mary. Mary is the clearest pane of glass, who let through the Light of the world pristinely for us and who was wholly filled with it. It applies first and foremost to her what St. John says about the mystical union, that the soul and all that is peculiar to God are then one through a transformation that causes the soul to seem more God than itself, is God through its sharing in the Divine nature, although its essence in nature remains in spite of its rebirth, just as distinct from God’s essence as before, just as the pane of glass, however much illuminated by the sunray, all the same retains its own nature, totally different from that of the sunrays. ‘If, however, the pane of glass is clean’, thus he then says, ‘clean and clear, then the sunray will in such a way il – luminate and, as it were, transform it that it seems to be the sunray itself and gives the same light'”
Bl. Titus Brandsma
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