May has been associated with Mary for centuries. It's a very appropriate association.
First: May and Mary both have unique beginnings and endings.
May is unique among the months, never beginning or ending on the same day of the week as any other month in a given calendar year — and Mary is unique among the saints, beginning by being preserved from sin and ending by being assumed into heaven.
Second: May and Mary are both beautiful.
Poets celebrate the month of May a lot, especially Shakespeare, the chief poet of the English language, whose sonnets celebrate “The darling buds of May” and whose characters “do observance to a morn of May,” celebrate “Love, whose month is ever May,” and are “as full of spirit as the month of May.”
But as a more recent British writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, put it, “All of my own perception of beauty, both in majesty and simplicity, is founded upon Our Lady.”
Third: May and Mary were both favorites of saints.
Our new Doctor of the Church, Cardinal John Henry Newman isn't the only saint who was a fan of May. Another Doctor of the Church, St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote about May 13, 1877, when she was praying desperately for her mother before a statue of Our Lady.
“The expression of Our Lady’s face was ineffably sweet, tender, and compassionate; but what touched me to the very depths of my soul was her gracious smile. Then, all my pain vanished, two big tears started to my eyes and fell silently,” she said.
“Our Lady of the Smile” continued to comfort her when her mother died in August, and a year later when she received her first communion — in May.
Fourth: May and Mary both inspire gratitude.
In Anne of Avonlea, Anne Shirley describes why she sleeps with her window open in May: “You have to remember to be thankful; but in May one simply can’t help being thankful — that they are alive, if for nothing else. I feel exactly as Eve must have felt in the garden of Eden before the trouble began.”
Mary is of course the New Eve, and her Magnificat, prayed daily by the Church, is her song of gratitude.
Fifth: Both May and Mary are fruitful.
May has always been celebrated for its fruitfulness. The month is named from the Latin word for the Greek fertility goddess Maia. But it is no goddess who causes abundance in Spring.
As Jesus says, “Your heavenly Father … makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” He said he wants us all to be like that — and we pray the Hail Mary to celebrate the fruitfulness of her faith.
Sixth: May and Mary both point to something greater.
St. John Henry Newman celebrated both the month and the Mother in his Meditations on the Litany of Loreto and the Month of May.
May “is the month that begins and heralds-in the summer,” with its “brightness and beautifulness,” he wrote.
And like May promises summer, Mary promises heaven and freedom from sin, he said. “Her innocence, her humility and modesty, her simplicity, sincerity, and truthfulness, her unselfishness, her unaffected interest in everyone who came to her, her purity — it was these qualities which made her so lovable.”
“Would we to see her now,” he said, “our first thought would be, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and our second thought would be, ‘Oh, what ugly hateful creatures are we!’” as we reject sin.
Seventh: But the key to May and Mary is the connection both have with Jesus Christ.
May always includes the Easter Season, and the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, says we should always be oriented “firstly to the feasts of the Lord in which the mysteries of salvation are celebrated during the year” (No. 108).
In its Directory on Popular Piety, the Vatican suggests that we celebrate Our Lady and the sacraments, together:
“The pious exercises connected with the month of May could easily highlight the earthly role played by the glorified Queen of Heaven, here and now, in the celebration of the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Eucharist.”
Those are her greatest gifts — the salvation she made possible with her Fiat.
