THE HOME OF S. JOHN
And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.
S. John XIX, 27.
But now we unite to praise thee, O Pure and Immaculate One, blessed Virgin and sinless Mother of thy great Son and the God of all. O perfectly spotless and altogether holy, thou art the hope of despairing sinners. We bless thee as most full of grace, who didst give birth to Christ, God and Man. And we fall down before thee. We all invoke thee and implore thy help. Deliver us, O Virgin, holy and undefiled, from every pressing strait and from all temptations of the Evil One. Be thou our peacemaker in the hour of death and judgment. Do thou save us from the future unquenchable fire and from the outer darkness. Do thou render us worthy of the glory of thy Son, O Virgin and Mother, most sweet and clement.
A PRAYER OF S. EPHREM THE SYRIAN.
here is no scene in the whole range of Scripture narrative which is more full of pathos than this scene of the Cross. Two agonies meet: the agony of the nailing, the lifting, the dying; and the agony that looks on in silent helplessness. But while our Lord's physical agony was in some sort swallowed up in the intensity of the love which was the motive for enduring it, overpassed in the vision of the need of those for whom He was dying, S. Mary's agony was the pain of a love concentrated upon the Sufferer Who hangs dying before her eyes. If there be anything that can lighten the pain of such love it is that it feels itself answered, that its object is conscious of it and is helped by it. And S. Mary had that consolation: the love poured to her from the Cross, and revealed itself when the suffering Son turned His eyes upon her agony and, understanding what her desolation would be, committed her to His beloved disciple: "Behold thy Mother; behold thy son." These two great loves which had been our Lord's human consolation were thus committed to one another. And when the darkness fell, and death relieved the agony, and the Sacred Body had been cared for, then the mother found refuge with S. John: "and from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home."
From the day of Pentecost on, S. Mary is no more heard of in the history of the Church. As so often, the Scriptures are silent and decline to answer our interested questions. They go on with the essentails of their story, the founding of the Church of God, and leave other things aside. So we do not know any of the last years of the life of Blessed Mary. Where did she live? How long did she live? The traditions, in any case of quite an untrustworthy nature, are contradictory. Jerusalem and Ephesus contend for the honour of our Lady's residence. Jerusalem must have been the site of that "home" to which S. John took her after the crucifixion. Did she remain there, or did she follow S. John, and at length come to live with him in Ephesus? Ephesus puts forward the claim, and we feel that it would be well founded in the nature of the relation between these two, if S. Mary lived until the settlement of the last of the apostles in the Asian city. Our Lord's committal of His Mother to the beloved disciple implies their personal association as long as S. Mary lived: if till S. John was settled in Ephesus, then we may be sure that she was there. She would be with S. John as long as she lived, but can we think of her as living long? Would not a great love draw her to another world and the presence of her triumphant Son?
Let us, however think, as one tradition bids us, of our Lady as living some time with S. John at Ephesus. We can understand the situation because it is so much like our own. These Asia Minor cities of the imperial period were curiously like the great centers of population in the Western world of to-day--London, Paris, New York, Chicago. There was the same over-crowding of population, the same intense commercial activity, the same almost insane thirst for amusement and excitement, the same degeneracy of moral fibre. The sins that sapped the life of Ephesus are the same that degrade contemporary life. In some ways Ephesus was, possibly, more frankly corrupt; but on the other hand it had no daily press to advertise and promote sin and social corruption. There is more of Christianity and of Christian influence in the modern city, but even here there is a curious resemblance between the two. The Christian Religion had but recently been introduced into Ephesus, but already it had precisely that touch of ineffectiveness that seems to us so modern. The message of the risen Lord to the angel of the Church in Ephesus is: "Nevertheless I have this against thee, that thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."
The things that hearten us are sometimes strange; but I suppose that there is a feeling of encouragement in our present day distress and spiritual ineffectiveness in the thought that even under S. John the Church in Ephesus was not wholly ideal. The conditions which baffle us, baffled him. The converts who were so promising and enthusiastic declined in zeal and fell back under the spell of worldliness. Zeal is a quality which is maintained with great difficulty, and the pull of the world, whether social or business, is steadily exercised. Converts in Ephesus, like converts in New York, felt that their friends were right who declared that they were quite unnecessarily strict, and that in order to serve Christ it was not necessary to turn their backs absolutely on Diana.
As one tries to reconstruct the situation in Ephesus, one feels that our Lady would have had no prominence in the Church in the way of an actively exercised influence. One thinks of her as living in retirement, as not even talking very much. If she lived long she would be an object of increasing interest and even of awe to the new converts, and an object of growing love to all those who were admitted to any sort of fellowship with her. But one cannot imagine a crowd about her, inquiring into her experiences and her memories of her divine Son. Once she told of her experience, for it was necessary that the Church should know of the circumstances of the coming of the Son of God into the world, but beyond that necessary communication of her experience we cannot think of her as speaking of her sacred memories. Silence and meditation, longing and waiting, would have filled the years till the hour of her release.
But in the quiet hours spent with S. John it would be different. Between the Blessed Virgin and S. John there was perfect understanding and perfect sympathy, and we love to think of the hours that they would have spent together in deep spiritual intercourse. Those hours would not be hours of reminiscence merely; they would rather be hours in which these two would attempt with the aid of the Spirit Who ruled in them so fully to enter deeper and ever deeper into the meaning of Incarnate God. Jesus would be the continual object of their thought and their love, and meditation upon His words and acts would lead them to an ever increasing appreciation of their depth and meaning.
We have all felt, in reading the pages of S. John, how vast is the difference both in attitude toward his subject and in his understanding of it from that of the other Evangelists. The earlier Evangelists seem deliberately to keep all feeling out of their story, to tell the life of our Lord in the most meagre outline, confining themselves to the essential facts. Anything like interpretation they decline. In S. John all this is changed. The Jesus whom he presents is the same Jesus, but seen through what different eyes! The same life is presented, but with what changes in selection of material! The Gospel of S. John seems almost a series of mediations upon selected facts of an already familiar life rather than an attempt to tell a life-story. And so indeed we think of it. When S. John wrote, the life of our Lord as a series of events was already before the Church. The Church had the synoptic Gospels, and it had a still living tradition to inform it. What it needed, and what the Holy Spirit led S. John to give it, was some glimpse of the inner meaning of the Incarnation, some unfolding of the spiritual depths of the teaching of Jesus.
We know how it is that different people listening to the same words get different impressions and carry away with them quite different meanings. We hear what we are able to hear. And S. John was able to hear what the other disciples of our Lord seem not to have heard. What dwelt in his memory and was worked up in his meditations and was at length transmitted to us, was the meaning of such incidents as the interview with Nicodemus, and the talk with the woman of Samaria, the discourse on the Holy Eucharist and the great High-priestly prayer. Men have felt the contrast between S. John and the other Evangelists so intensely that they have said that this is another Christ who is presented by S. John, and the influences which have shaped the author of the Fourth Gospel are quite other than those which shaped the men of the inner circle of Jesus. But no: it is the instinctive, or rather the Spirit-guided, selection of the material afforded by those years of association with Jesus for the purpose of transmitting to the Church a spiritual depth and beauty, a spiritual significance in our Lord's teaching, that the earlier Gospel had hardly touched.
Which perhaps they could not touch because when they wrote there was not yet in the Church the spiritual experience which could fully interpret our Lord. Through the life of union with the risen Jesus and all the spiritual experience, all the illumined intelligence that that life brought, S. John was enabled to understand and interpret as he did. Writing far on toward the end of the first century he was writing out of the personal experience of Christian living of many years, which brought with it year by year an increased power of spiritual vision opening to him the depth and wonder of the fact of God made man. It is to an experience of our Lord that he appeals as the basis of his teaching. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life: (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ." And as we read on in S. John's Epistles we cannot fail to see how deeply the years of meditation have influenced his understanding of our Lord and His teaching, and how much his past experience of our Lord has been illumined by the experience of the risen Jesus which has followed. At no time, we are certain, has S. John been out of touch with his Master.
And can we for a moment think that the years of intercourse with our Lady meant nothing in the spiritual development of S. John? On the contrary, may we not think that much of the spiritual richness which is the outstanding feature of his writings was the outcome of his association with the blessed Mother? No one has ever shown the sympathetic understanding of our Lord, has been so well able convincingly to interpret Him, as the beloved disciple. I myself have no doubt that much of his understanding came by way of S. Mary. Her interpretative insight would have been deeper than any one else's, not only because of her long association with Jesus, but because of her sinlessness. No two lives ever touched so closely; and there was not between them the bar that so blocks our spiritual understanding and clouds our spiritual vision, the bar of sin. I suppose it is almost impossible for us to appreciate the effect of sin in clouding vision and dulling sympathy. Our every day familiarity with venial sin, our easy tolerance of it, the adjustment of our lives to habits that involve it, have resulted in a lack of spiritual sensitiveness. Much of the meaning of our Lord's life and words passes over us just because of this dimness of vision, this insensitiveness to suggestion. And therefore we find it difficult to imagine what would be the understanding, the insight, the response to our Lord, of one between whom and Him there was no shadow of sin. And such an one was the blessed Mother. With unclouded vision she looked into the face of her Son. As His life expanded she followed with perfect sympathy; indeed, sometimes, as at Cana, her understanding of what He was made her precipitate in concluding as to His necessary action. When He became a public teacher and unfolded largely in parable His doctrine, it was her sinless soul which would see clearest and deepest, and with the most ready response. And therefore I am sure that we cannot go astray in thinking that S. John's relation to S. Mary was not simply that of a guardian of her from the pressure of the world, but was indeed that of a son who listened and learned from the experience of his Mother. No doubt S. John himself was of a very subtle spiritual understanding; notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding his exceptional opportunities of learning, we may still believe that there are many touches in his Gospel which are the result of his association with his Lord's Mother.
Is it not possible for us to have our share in that pure insight of blessed Mary? When we try to think out the lines of our own spiritual development and the influences that have contributed to shape it, do we not find that the presence or absence of devotion to our Lady has been a factor of considerable importance? Devotion to her injected an element into our religion which is of vast moment, an element of sympathy, of gentleness, of purity. You can if you like, in condemnatory accents, call that element sentimentalism, although it is not that but the exercise of those gentler elements of our nature without whose exercise our nature functions one-sidedly. You may call it the feminine element, if you like; you will still be indicating the same order of activity. Surely, an all around spiritual development will bring out the feminine as well as the masculine qualities. And it seems to be historically true that those systems of religion which represent a revolt against the cultus of our Lady and carefully exclude all traces of it from their worship, show as a consequence of this exclusion a hardness and a barrenness which makes their human appeal quite one-sided. And when those same systems have realised their limitations and their lack of human appeal, and have tried to supply what is lacking, they have again failed, because instead of reverting to historical Christianity they have taken the road of humanitarianism, basing themselves on our Lord's human life and consequent brotherhood with us, rather than upon His supernatural Personality as operative through His mystical Body. Stress is laid upon charitable helpfulness rather than upon the power of grace. The modern man tries to reform life rather than to regenerate it.
And, I repeat, I cannot help associating with a repudiation of the cultus of the saints, and especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a consequent failure to understand the Christian life as a supernatural creation. If one leaves out of account the greater part of the Kingdom of Heaven, all the multitudes of the redeemed, and their activities, and fastens one's attention exclusively upon that small part of the Kingdom which is the Church on earth, one can hardly fail to miss the significance of the earthly Church itself. Religion understood in this limited way may well drift more and more toward Deism and Humanitarianism, and further and further from any supernatural implications. This is no theory; it is what has happened. It was the course of Protestantism from the Reformation to the eighteenth century; and, after a partial revival of supernaturalism, is once more the rapid course of Protestantism to-day. Protestantism has lost or is fast losing any grip on the Trinity or the Incarnation: to it God is more and more a barren unity, and Jesus a good man. And this largely because all interest in the world of the Redeemed has been abandoned and all intercourse with the inhabitants of that world denied.
It is therefore of the last importance that we, infected as we are with Protestantism, should stress the revival of the cultus of the saints, and should insist upon our right and privilege to pay due honour to the Mother of God and ask our share in her prayers. We must do all we can to make her known to our brethren. We need her sympathy, her aid, her example.
Above all, the example of her spotless purity. It is notorious that one of the most marked features of our time is the virulent assault on purity. We had long emphasised a certain quality of conduct which we called modesty; it was, perhaps, largely a convention, but it was one of those protective conventions which are valuable as preservative of qualities we prize. It was protective of purity; and however artificial it was, in some respects, it existed because we felt that purity was a thing too precious to be exposed to unnecessary risk. Well, modesty is gone now, whether in conduct or convention. One hears discussed at dinner-tables and in the presence of young girls matters which our mothers would have blushed to mention at all. The quality of modesty is declared Puritanical and hypocritical. "Hypocritical virtue" is a phrase one frequently meets; and we seem fast going on to the time when all virtue will be regarded as hypocrisy. Customary standards are falling all about us, overthrown in the name of personal liberty.
And by liberty, one gathers, is meant freedom to do as one pleases, and especially as one sexually pleases. The assault is pushed hardest just now against the sanctity of the sacrament of matrimony and the morals of that sacrament as they have been developed by the Christian Church. Protestantism long ago assented to the overthrow of Christian standards in the marriage relation and has aided the sexual anarchy with which we are faced to-day. To-day the chief attack is on the purity of marriage in the interests, ostensibly, of humanity. A vigorous campaign in favour of what is called birth-control is being carried on, and is being supported in quarters which are professedly Christian. There are many grounds for opposing the movement, social, humanitarian and other. We are here concerned with it only as it is an attack on purity. From the Christian point of view the marriage relation has for its end the procreation of children for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God. If circumstances are such, through reasons of health or economy, that children seem undesirable, the remedy is plain, self control. The theory that human beings have no more control over their appetites than beasts, while it has much to support it in contemporary life, cannot be admitted from the point of view of religion. Self-control is always possible, and is constantly exercised by many men and women who choose to be guided by principle rather than by passion. And in any case the Christian Religion can become no partner, not even a silent one, in a conspiracy to murder, or in the sort of compromise that turns marriage into a licensed sodomy. If indeed the economic status of the modern world is such that the average couple cannot support a family, then the Christian Church may well aid in the bringing about of an economic revolution; but it can hardly aid in the destruction of its own ideals of purity.
What is ultimately at stake in the modern world is the whole conception of purity as a quality that is desirable. This attitude has become possible among us for one reason because we have consented to the suppression of ideals of life which were calculated to sustain it. To sustain any moral or spiritual conception there must be maintained certain appropriate ideals which, while out of the reach of the average man, create and sustain in him an admiration and respect for the ideal standard. So the standard of purity presented in Mary and protected by the belief in her Immaculate Conception and her assumption, has the effect, not only of commending the life of chastity in the sense of the vows of religion, but also in the broad sense of the restraint and discipline of appetite whether within or without the marriage relation. It impresses upon us the truth that purity is not only a human quality but a divinely created virtue, the result of the infusion of sanctifying grace into the soul. Is it not largely because the young are taught (when they are taught anything at all in the premises) that purity is a matter of the will, that they so often fail? If they were taught the nature of the virtue and were led to rely more on the indwelling might of the Holy Spirit would they not have better success? And if there were held constantly before their eyes the example of the saints and especially of Blessed Mary ever-virgin, would not they have an increased sense of the value of purity?
The life and example of S. Mary are an inestimable treasure of the Church of God, and her removal from the world has only enhanced that value. To-day her meaning is clearer to us than ever. The spirit-guided mind of the Church has through the centuries been meditating on the meaning of her office as Mother of God. The words in which she accepts her vocation, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, implying, as they do, an active co-operation with the divine purpose, a voluntary association of herself with it, imply, too, the perpetual continuance of that association, and contain in germ all Catholic teaching in regard to her office. She passed from this world silently, and to the world unknown; but to the Church of God she ever remains of all human beings the greatest spiritual force in the Kingdom of God.
Weep, living things, of life the Mother dies;
The world doth lose the sum of all her bliss,
The Queen of earth, the Empress of the skies;
By Mary's death mankind an orphan is.
Let Nature weep, yea, let all graces moan,
Their glory, grace and gifts die all in one.
It was no death to her, but to her woe,
By which her joys began, her griefs did end;
Death was to her a friend, to us a foe,
Life of whose lives did on her life depend:
Not prey of death, but praise to death she was.
Whose ugly shape seemed glorious in her face.
Her face a heaven; two planets were her eyes,
Whose gracious light did make our clearest day;
But one such heaven there was, and lo, it dies,
Death's dark eclipse hath dimmed every, ray:
Sun, hide thy light, thy beams untimely shine;
True light since we have lost, we crave not thine.Robert Southwell, 1560-1595
Robert Southwell, 1560-1595