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this is not just honor it is worship.

No sale. In fact I'm going to print up that stuff and stash it with my prayer materials.

Formally I would say the difference between worship and veneration, honor, whatever is not one of degree but of kind. And I'll grant you the APPARENT excessiveness of the language. It took me a while before I could call Mary, "vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra," without wanting to add in a kind of precatory legalese,"... always provided that the above language is not intended or understood to be intended to present to Mary any honorific or any other appellation (or Appalachian or any other massif) or sentiment not otherwise understood as pertaining to the Most Holy Trinity hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part or maybe first three parts, depending on whether we're counting persons or substances.......)

Here, let me hand you a knife to stab me with: On the one hand, over here: Jesus is my savior. He is the perfect revelation of God, and in Him, who is God's Word, that Word finds the fruitfulness of which Isaiah spoke.[and so on and so forth for pages and pages.] Yet, on the other hand I have said,"Mary saved my butt." I just said it a couple of nights ago at our RCIA anticipatory Christmas party (held now because most of the RCIA gang are university students and they have exams and then vacation and we won't see 'em again until January.)

Now, so to speak, schematically I want to avoid saying that Mary mediates in an strict sense between me and Jesus, because IHS is THE mediator, and any instance of true mediation happens by Him, with Him, through Him and so forth through preposition after preposition. He is the entirely sufficient Mediator, no other need apply.

Yet, consider:

I learned from one person how God could so ravish my will that what looked to the secular world like a loss of choice was in fact the gift of knowing and making the right choice.
I learned from another that when we say "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners," that includes me!
I learned from another that a sufficient justification for praying is that God wants me to.
and I could again go on and on ...

And I would say that in all these people Jesus was doing his saving work, and so I thank Him for them AND I thank them. And about some of them I can go on at some length about how wonderful they are,as teachers, friends, counselors, what have you. And yet, while I do pray for them and ask them to pray for me, there is no risk of my confusing them with Jesus or with the Most Holy Trinity.

Somewhere C.S.Lewis points out that in a way a photograph is more "like" its subject than an oil painting. And we might say that a portrait artist painting in oils "captures" his subject and portrays the truth of the subject more richly and completely than a photograph does or could do.

And yet no one, I think, would mistake the portrait for its subject. So my friends, teachers, and counselors have presented to me some of the reality of who IHS is, and in their doing so, IHS Himself was using them as adjuncts to and agents of his mediatory activity.

I am grateful to these people. I love them. (And the ones I'm thinking of are all Protestants, btw.) But I know they aren't God, however much I may sometimes gush about them. And I don't hesitate to say that they brought me to Christ or brought me closer to Christ.

Now if I had to say that every time I engaged in a Marian devotion, id be even further behind on my household chores than I currently am. So I just work and pray in confidence that God knows what I mean, and that my Protestant brothers will occasionally tolerate me even if they bridle at my lengthy attempts to explain.

as always, seeking more to explain or describe than to persuade.