23 Daily Ways to Live the Marian Option

  1. Pray the Rosary: Keep Rosaries close, listen to the Rosary, encourage others (especially as a family).
  2. Consecrate yourself to Mary
  3. Go to Mass.
  4. Practice 1st Saturday devotions of Fatima.
  5. Find a Holy League
  6. Teach children Marian hymns.
  7. Say a Hail Mary when you hear sirens.
  8. Celebrate Marian feasts.
  9. Tell stories of miracles.
  10. Plant a Mary Garden
  11. Fill your home with beautiful Marian artwork
  12. Use books for children: Our favorite is the beautifully illustrated Take It to the Queen by Josephine Nobisso (author) and Katalin Szegedi (illustrator).
  13. Make your own rosaries.
  14. Have your home blessed, get a statue of Mary.
  15. Go to adoration
  16. Pray the Liturgy of the Hours, Fatima Prayer.
  17. Visit a Marian Shrine
  18. Pray a Novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots
  19. Use Mother Theresa’s Flying Novena Mother Teresa used this tool when she needed a prayer answered immediately. It consists of nine Memorares of petition and a tenth for thanksgiving.
  20. Pray the Angelus
  21. Wear the brown scapular, miraculous medal,
  22. Be mindful of Mary’s constant presence:
  23. St. Maximilian Kolbe has made Marian devotion so much easier through tangible ways to connect with her. Here is one of his best: “It is not a matter here of kneeling down a long time and praying, but of this relationship of a child to its mother. A loving glance at her statue, the frequent repetition of the name Mary, even if it be just in our hearts. Different prayers and formulas are good and beautiful, but the essential thing is the simple relationship of a child to its mother, this sense of our need for this mother, the conviction that without her we can do nothing.” 198

In opting for Mary, we allow her to become the Marian Solution. Like when she asked Jesus to turn water into wine at Cana, she has the ability to help us transform our lives, our families, and our world—one prayer at a time. Our work is to ask and to trust. 192

Going Deeper with Marian Consecration

  • St. Louis de Montfort has offered Christians a deeper way to devote ourselves to Mary: the Marian consecration. He calls it the “easiest way to get to heaven.” By making ourselves her “slaves,” we offer up and give to her everything that belongs to us—including even the rewards of any good actions—and she in turn transforms them into something better than we could have imagined. Like the peasants of old who knew that they could get to the king through the kind heart of the queen, Marian consecration offers Mary our littleness, which through her greatness and love, is transformed into something beautiful for God. 163
  • Marian consecration, then, takes devotion to another level—the highest level. As Father Roten has explained, when a person is consecrated to Jesus through Mary, “the existential bond with Jesus through Mary is here not only symbolized through a medal or scapular, it also becomes an existential and embodied reality and dedication of the whole person.” 164
  • Pope St. John Paul II attested to this when he said, “In repeating every day ‘Totus tuus [totally yours],’ and living in harmony with her, one can attain to the experience of the Father in limitless confidence and love, to docility to the Holy Spirit, and to the transformation of self according to the image of Christ.” 164
  • the best description of the Rosary’s power was given by Blessed Pope Pius IX (1792–1878): “Give me an army saying the Rosary and I will conquer the world.” 165
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