You get joined forever to the Holy Spirit by the Grace of God. All the blessed (however you pronounce it, it always means those who have received or are receiving a blessing) in Heaven are joined forever to the Holy Spirit.
to the extent that she is the HS,
I'd need to see this fleshed out a little. (or maybe a LOT.) Mary is NOT the Holy Spirit in any normal sense of those words. However, there is a relationship between the saved and the Spirit of Christ which is mentioned (mostly by allusion) by Paul. We are dead and now Christ lives us. When we don't know how to pray (in my case, all the time) the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. That kind o' stuff. In terms of the KIND of relationship with the Holy Spirit, I don't think Mary is or is taught to be essentially different from any of us.
(IN that connection, the assumption is to be understood in an eschatological or temporal way: Mary CURRENTLY enjoys what all the blessed WILL enjoy, NOT something essentially different.)(It is in Marxist thought that a difference in degree is taken to imply a difference in kind, not in our thought.) is the one standing between mankind and Jesus Christ
Again, I'd need to see an official De Fide type statement and discussion of that before I undertook to say anything I was certain of on that topic.
But there is some sense in which Mary brought IHS to Elisabeth and John the Baptist, and was "between" them and Him. There is a sense in which she brought Him to us.
Protracted Analogy Alert:
It is not exactly right, but it is not all wrong either, to consider my daughter a gift of my wife to me. And that is about not just the conception and gestation, but also the nurturing, caring for ... all the parental stuff that the boss-lady did after the 'orrible brat child was born.
And since for a while there, I was the "primary care giver" (beats work!) the boss-lady is not exactly right but not all wrong to consider the 'orrible brat child my gift to her.
Nuance is out friend in these things. Consider: my wife tells my child it's time to get me a birthday present. My child comes to me and asks for some money to buy me a birthday present. My wife takes my child shopping and advises her what can be gotten for my miserly amount of money. She carries it to the counter and hands the money to the clerk. They come home and the little one (this WAS a few years ago) makes a scribble on a piece of paper with a crayon. The boss-lady wraps the gift, puts the scribbled piece of paper on it.
And on "That great and terrible Day" my child presents it to me proudly. SHE knows, with her young mind that it is not all from her. I certainly know it. And what do I do?
I receive the present, make appropriate expressions of delight and gratitude. I hug my child to my breast and make much of her, and looking over her at my wife, I mouth, "Thank you!" to her. And in my heart, and later aloud, I thank God for my gift, my child, my wife -- along with all the other things for which I thank Him.
Knowing that every good gift comes from Him, that my wife's life and love, my child's life and love are all from Him, am I wrong to thank them and love them? To me the gift is unspeakably rich, coming as it does from God. It is even richer, coming as well "from", or possibly "through" my wife and then richer still, coming "through" and "From" my child, who also came "through" my wife (who came from God) and from God.
Heck, when I go out dining, once every five years, a good waiter gets more "Face time"-type thanks from me than the cook and the owner, though as I've matured, I've come to appreciate all the labors and laborers who brought my dinner to me.
Certainly, the "bulk" of my time in prayer is NOT spent on Mary, or "through her" to Jesus, and through Him to the Father. Certainly it is to the Holy Trinity that I turn whenever I begin my prayers, even when I begin a Rosary, which is predominantly, but not only, addressed to Mary.
So it is in a very qualified and even, one might say, attenuated way (compared to the involvement of the Holy Spirit) that my approach (so to speak) to God or the Son is "through" Mary.
Even if I were to agree, which I don't, that Mary was "THE ONLY" way to Christ, I can still see how that is without her being "divine" in the same way that the Three persons of the Trinity are divine.
It helps to "Get into" two things: First, Paul's use of "in" when he's talking about spiritual things. Second, the medieval and Gothic mind with it's delight in portraying things in series and gradations. (This is not an argument in favor, just an explanation of the kind of images one finds.) God, utterly divine, is mediated to mankind though the God-Man, Jesus. Then Jesus is "brought forth" to us through the Human, but very Holy Mary. At the end of the series of givers is, the human but not so holy me, the shepherd or, possibly, a king who receives access to God through all these givers.
Certainly, one Mary is "elected" which after all just means "chosen" to be the God bearer, she is, in a particular, NOT a general, way standing between mankind in Jesus.
When all is said and done, the Salve Regina is a "fulsome" in the old sense -- though I suspect you all may find it fulsome in the modern sense -- wheedling to Mary for permission to see her baby, just as I might ask any mother if I might see and maybe even hold, her child.
Most of the objections voiced here (and elsewhere on FR) about Marian devotion take the matter far further than we do and then insist that ALL our language ONLY describes the view from that barren and deadly outpost. And that's why we spend so much time arguing not for what we believe but against the misstatement of what we believe, because mostly misstatement is what we get.
Now see, we find this idea ridiculous and we see it as such because it flies in the face of everything that God teaches through the written word.
Jesus is not a little child, nor does he need his mother interceeding for us to him. By taking this view, it appears that far from acknowledging the work of the cross, you diminish it. You make her increase and him decrease and to us, this will never fly.
by the way, did you know the Greek goddess "Hera" was also given the title "The Queen of heaven" and, she renewed her perpetual virginity by bathing. Catholic views of Mary, not being biblicaly based, get mixed up with dare we say it -- pagan beliefs.
Hebrews 5:7-10 7Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared;
8Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;
9And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him;
10Called of God an high priest after the order of Melchisedec