Let Others Lift You Up

Some say it’s good to be queen, and in the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Lucy is dismayed to learn she can’t be queen when she grows up. You have to be born one. “If I can’t be a queen,” she says, then “I’ll work and work until I’m very rich and then I will buy myself a queendom.” Good grief! Wrong on both counts. Queen saints became saints by doing very un-queenlike things – such as giving away their wealth. Jesus’ Mother Mary, too, simply lived the incomparable dignity of being a woman, a wife, a good and holy Jew, and a mother. The only thing her son ever ran from was a crowd that wanted to make him king. Exalting us is someone else’s job.