THE VISITATION II
And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
S. Luke I. 46, 47.
Forasmuch as we have no excuse, because of the multitude of our sins, we plead through thee, O Virgin Mother of God, with Him whom thou didst bear.
Lo, great is thine intercession, strong and acceptable with our Saviour.
O Stainless Mother, reject not us sinners in thine intercession with Him Whom thou didst bear.
COPTIC.
onderful was this day in the little town of Judah where these two women, each in her way an instrument of God in the upbuilding of His Kingdom, met and rejoiced together. There is revealed to us something of the possibilities of our religion when we try to follow the thought of these two women. They are so utterly devoted to God that God can speak to them. I think that it is well for us to dwell on this fact for a moment. We are apt to look upon inspiration, what is described as being filled with the Holy Ghost, as somewhat of a mechanical mode of God's operation. Our mistaken view is that God takes control of the faculties of a human being and uses them for His own purposes.
But that is quite to misunderstand God's method. God uses the faculties of a man in proportion as the man yields himself to Him; and one who is living a sincere religion becomes in a degree the medium of God's self-expression. This possibility of expressing God increases as we increase in sanctity. Those who have completely yielded themselves to God in a life of sanctity become in a deep sense the representatives of God: they have, in S. Paul's phraseology, His mind. To be capable of so becoming the divine instrument it is necessary, not only to offer no opposition to God's purposes, but to make ourselves the active executants of them. Our Christian vocation is thus to be the instrument of God, to be the visible demonstrations of His power and presence. There is a true inspiration, a true speaking for God to-day, no doubt, as true as at any time in the Church's history, wherever there is sanctity. What is lacking to present day utterances of sanctity is not the action of the Holy Spirit, but authentication by the Church: that is given only under certain special circumstances and for special purposes. But there is no need to limit the inspiring action of the Holy Spirit to such utterances as for special reasons have received official recognition.
What we need to feel is the constant action of the Holy Spirit--that He wants to speak through every man. And it helps to clear our minds if we go to our Bibles with the expectation of finding here, not exceptions to all rules which obtain in common life, but types of the divine action. The isolation of Bible history has done much to create a feeling of its unreality. What has happened only in the Bible can, we are apt to feel, safely be disregarded in daily life in the twentieth century. But if what we find there is customary modes of divine action in life, exceptional in detail rather than in principle, the attitude we shall take will be wholly different. We shall then study them with the feeling expressed in S. Paul's saying, "These things are written for our learning," and we shall expect to find in us and about us the same order of divine action, we shall learn to look on our lives as having their chief meaning in the fact that they are possible instruments of God; we shall learn to regard failure as failure to show forth God to the world.
In a way we can read our facts backward: the fact that "Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost," and the fact that Mary under the same divine impulse gave utterance to the words of the Magnificat, is a revelation of the character of these two women which would satisfy us of their sanctity had we no other evidence of it. The choice of them by God to be His instruments is evidence of the divine approval; and that approval can never be false to the facts; what God treats as holy must be holy.
So we come to holy Mary's Song with the feeling that in studying it we shall find in it a revelation of S. Mary herself. She is not an instrument on which the Holy Spirit plays, but an intelligent being through whom He acts. She, like S. Elizabeth, is filled with the Holy Spirit--she had never been in the slightest degree out of union with God--but still the Magnificat is her utterance; it represents her thought; it is the measure, if one may so put it, in modern terminology, of her degree of spiritual culture. Much that we say about S. Mary, her simplicity, her social place, and so on, seems to carry with it the implication of the ignorance and spiritual dullness that we associate with the type of poverty we are accustomed to to-day. But the poor folk whom we meet in association with our Lord are neither ignorant nor spiritually dull; and it would be a vast mistake to think of Blessed Mary as other than of great intelligence and spiritual receptivity, or as deficient in understanding of the details of her ancestral religion. We have no reason to be surprised that she should sing Magnificat, or to think that the Holy Spirit was speaking through her thoughts which were quite beyond her comprehension. Inspired she was, but inspired, no doubt, to utter thoughts that had many times filled her mind.
Her spiritual attitude as revealed in the Magnificat is but the attitude which must have been hers habitually--the attitude that exalts God and not self. "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." That is the starting-place of all holy souls--the adoration of God. True humility is never self-conscious because self is lost in the vision of God. S. Mary was bearing in her pure body the very Son of God. Admit, if you will, that as yet she did not understand the full reach of her vocation; but she did know that she had been chosen by God in a most signal manner to be the instrument of His purpose. That which S. Elizabeth spoke under divine impulse,--"Whence is this that the mother of my Lord should come to me?"--must have had clear meaning for her. But the wonder of all that God is accomplishing through her only brings her to God's feet. That "He that is mighty hath done me great things," is but the evidence of His sanctity, not of her greatness.
One never gets through wondering at the beauty of humility; and it is one of the marks of how far we are from spiritual apprehension when we find this splendid virtue unattractive. It does indeed cut across many of the instinctive impulses of our nature; it can hardly be said to have dawned on humanity as a virtue until the Incarnation of God. Therein it has revealed to us God's attitude in His work and, by consequence, the natural attitude of all such as would associate themselves with God. It is not so much a self-denying as a self-forgetting virtue. It is ruined by the very consciousness of it. Such phrases as "practicing humility" seem self-contradictory--when one begins to practice humility it becomes something else. We do not conceive of our Lady as setting out to be humble, of thinking of what a humble person would do under such and such circumstances. She does not, as I was saying, think of herself at all, but thinks of God. The "great things" she has are His gift. That He has looked upon her low estate, and that in consequence of His visitation "all generations shall call her blessed," is a manifestation of the divine glory and goodness, not an occasion of pride to the recipient of God's gifts.
We who are so self-seeking, who are so greedy of praise, who are constantly wanting what we feel is our due, who hunger to be "appreciated," who are full of proud boasting about our accomplishment, will do well to meditate upon this point of view. We acknowledge the supremacy of God with our lips, but in our acts we are quite prone to assume that we are independent actors in the universe where whatever we have is due to our own creative powers. We claim a certain lordship over life, a certain independent use of it. We resent the pressure of religious principle as setting up a sort of counter-claim to control that which it is ours to dispose of as we will. Most of our difficulties come from this godless attitude which claims independence of life. It results in a religion which is willing to pay God tribute, but is not willing to belong to God. But the humble person has nothing of his own and moreover wants nothing; he wants simply that God shall use him, that he shall be found a ready instrument in God's hands.
It is this readiness that we find in Blessed Mary when she answered the astonishing announcement of the angel with her, "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord." It is that quality which we find in her here when she construes God's purpose in terms which go out far beyond her individual life and sees in her experience but one item in God's dealing with humanity in His age-long work of "bringing His wanderers home." We should have far less difficulty and find our lives far more significant if we could get rid of our wretched egotism and find it possible to lose ourselves in the work of God. We should then find the work important because it is God's work and not because we are associated with it. We should also find it less easy to be discouraged because we should not understand our failure to be the failure of God. Discouragement is but one of the aspects of egotism, and not the most attractive.
We cannot rise to anything like a passion of holiness unless we have found God to be all in all. Only so can we lose ourselves in God. And I must, at whatever risk of over-dwelling, stress the fact that we can only attain this point of view by dwelling on God and not on self. Let God be the foreground of our thought. Let our souls magnify the Lord. Let us dwell upon the "great things" God has done for us. In every life there is such a wonderful manifestation of the divine goodness--only we do not take time to look for it. It is well to take the time: to write out, if need be, our spiritual history. We shall then find abundant evidence of the goodness of God. It may be that it is a goodness that is seen chiefly in offers, in opportunities to be something which we have declined or have only imperfectly realized. Be that as it may, there is no life, I am quite convinced, that has not a spiritual history which is a marvellous history of what God at least wanted to do for it. It is also a history of what He actually has done: a history of graces, of rich gifts, of deliverances. It matters not that we have been so heedless as to miss most of what God has done. The facts stand and are discoverable whenever we care to pay enough attention to them to ascertain their true meaning. When we do that, then surely we shall be compelled to do, what blessed Mary never needed to do, fall at God's feet in an act of penitence, seeing ourselves, perhaps for the first time, in the light of God's mind.
The Magnificat, if we consider it as a personal expression, is a wonderful expression of selfless devotion, where the perception of the glory and majesty of God excludes all other thoughts. It is, too, a thanksgiving for the personal gift which is her vocation to be the Mother of the Saviour. Out of her lowliness she has been exalted--how highly she herself cannot at the time have dreamed. We can see what was necessarily involved in God's choice of her, and to-day we think of her as in her perfect purity exalted in heaven far above all other creatures. Mother of God most holy we call her, and in the words of her canticle ever repeat her thanksgiving as our thanksgiving, too, for the vocation that God sent her and for the gift which through her has come to us.
But there is a more universal aspect of the Magnificat. Essentially it is the presentation of the constant antithesis which runs through all revelation between the flesh and the spirit, between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this world. It embodies the conception of God striving to save a world which has revolted from Him, and now at last entering upon that stage of His work which is the beginning of a triumph over all the powers of the adversary. In Mary's song the contrasted powers are still presented under the Old Testament terminology which was the natural form of her thought. The adversaries of God are the proud, the mighty, the rich; while those who are on God's side are the humble, the god-fearers, the hungry. The form of the thought and its essential meaning remain the same through the centuries, though our terminology changes somewhat. Presently in the pages of the New Testament we shall get the presentation as the contrast between the children of this world and the sons of God. We shall find the briefest expression of the latter to be the saints.
We no longer feel that rich and poor express a spiritual contrast. Nor do we, who are quite accustomed to the action of labour leaders, regard social position as being the exclusive seat of arrogancy. But we know that the spiritual values which are expressed in the varying terminology are constant; we know that the warfare between God and not-God is still the most important phenomenon in the universe. And it happens as we look out on the battlefield where the forces of good and evil contend, where before our eyes they seem to sway back and forth on the field of human life with every varying fortunes, that we not seldom feel that the battle is not obviously falling to the side of righteousness. There come moments when we are oppressed by what seems to us the lack of power in the ideals of righteousness. The appeal of the proud and of the rich is so dazzling; the splendour of the visible kingdom of the world is so intoxicating, the contagion of the crowd which follows the uplifted banner of Satan is so penetrating, that we hardly wonder to see the new generations carried away in the sweep of popular enthusiasm. Here is excitement, exhilarating enjoyment, the throb and sting of the flesh, the breathless whirl of gaiety, the physical quiet of satisfied desires. What is there to appeal on the other side? As the crowds troop past to the sound of music and dancing they for a moment raise their eyes, and above them rises a hill whereon is a Cross and on the Cross an emaciated Victim is nailed, and at the foot of the Cross a small group of discouraged folk--S. John, The blessed Mother, the other Mary--stunned by the grief born of the death of Son and Friend.
These two utterances stand in eternal contrast: "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me": and, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." As yet the appeal made from an "exceeding high mountain" visibly seems to prevail against that made from "the place which is called Calvary."
And what have we to counteract the depression which is the natural reaction from the spectacle of the world-rejection of Christ? We have the truth which is embodied in Mary's Magnificat, we have the fact of Mary's vocation to be the Mother of God. The revelation of God's meaning and purpose is a basis of optimism which no promise of Satan can overthrow. When all is said, the view from the exceeding high mountain is a view of the Kingdom of this world only; from the place called Calvary you can see the Kingdom of God as well. From this point of vantage alone the permanent values of life are visible; and to the taunt flung at us, the taunt so terrifying to the young, "You are losing life," the enigmatic reply from the Cross is that you have to lose life to gain it; that permanent and eternal values are acquired by those who have the self-restraint and the foresight not to sacrifice the substance to the shadow, nor to mistake the toys of childhood for the riches of manhood. "In the meantime life is passing and the shadows draw in and you have not attained" so they say. True: we count not ourselves to have yet attained; but we press on toward the mark of our high calling in Christ Jesus our Lord. We are not in a hurry, because the crown we are seeking is amaranthine, unfading. We are not compelled to compress our enjoyment within a given time; we do not awake each morning with the thought that we may not outlast the daylight; we are not hurried and fevered with the sense of our fragility. The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them must be seized now: Satan cannot afford to wait because his kingdom has an end. But God can afford to wait because of His Kingdom there is no end.
We are content then with promises and with such partial fulfilment as we find on our pilgrim-way. We are content because we see the end in the beginning. To those who in the first days of the Church objected that though the promises were wonderful and abundant the fulfilment was small; to those who said we do not yet see the perfection of the kingdom; the answer of inspiration was: True, we do not yet see the accomplishment of all of God's promises, but we do see Jesus. And there is where we stand to-day. The work that God has to do in the spiritualising of the human race is tremendous; but we actually see its beginning in Jesus, and we are content to wait with God for the perfect accomplishment.
And we must remember when we think of the work of God in terms of time, that the length of time that is required to accomplish the spiritualisation of the human race is not to be estimated in terms of the divine will but in terms of the human will. It is not divine power but human resistance which is the determining factor, for God will not compel us to obey Him, nor would compelled obedience have any spiritual value. And we can estimate something of the human resistance that has to be overcome by concentrating attention upon one unit of that resistance. That is, we can learn from the study of our own life what is the resistance of one human being to the triumph of the will of God; and, taking oneself as a fair sample of the race can multiply our resistance to God's will by the numbers of the race. We are perfectly certain of the will of God: God wills that all men shall come to the knowledge of the truth and be saved. "This is the will of God, even your sanctification." So far as we are thwarting that will we are playing into the hands of the power of evil. But that power is of limited existence; it draws to its end. Its death knell was struck when the noon-day darkness lifted from Calvary.
Therefore the rejoicing of blessed Mary, whose Song reads the necessary end in the beginning, is well considered; and we rejoice with her and in her. It is our privilege--and it is a vast privilege--to rejoice in blessed Mary as the instrument of God in bringing the triumph of His Kingdom one stage nearer its accomplishment. And in especial we rejoice because we see in her one more, and the most marked, illustration of the divine method. "He hath regarded the low estate of His Handmaiden." "He hath exalted them of low degree." "He hath filled the hungry." The method of God is to work to His results through those who are spiritually receptive. The less of self there is in us the more room there is for God. "The Kingdom of God is within you," that is, the starting-point of God's work in the building of the Kingdom is within the soul of man. He must master the inner man, must win the allegiance of our souls, before His work can make any progress at all. The Kingdom of God cometh not "with observation," that is, from the outside in an exhibition of power; it must of necessity come from the inside in demonstration of the Spirit. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God."
In blessed Mary we see the new starting-point in this last stage of the work of God. For the foreseen merits of her Son she is brought into union with God and spared the taint of sin, and becomes the second Eve, the Mother of the new race. Acting upon her pure humanity, the Holy Spirit produces that humanity which joined to the divinity in the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity becomes the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In Mary's rejoicing in this so great fact, the bringing of human redemption, we rightly share. It is with a right understanding of her Song that the Church throughout the ages has embodied it in its worship and through it constantly rejoices in God its Saviour. The actual detailed accomplishment of God's work in man's redemption is going on under our eyes. It is regrettable that human stupidity seems to prefer dwelling upon what seem God's failures, and are actually our own, rather than upon the constant triumphs of grace. But God reigns; and we can always find grounds of optimism if we can find that He is day by day reigning more perfectly in us. When we pray "Thy Kingdom Come," the field to examine for the fulfilment of our prayers is the field of our own souls.
Our Lady took the road
To Zachary's abode;
O'er mountain, vale and lea,
Full many a league sped she
Toward Hebron's holy hill,
By God's command and will.
Full light did Mary, make
Of trouble for his sake.
God's Very Son of yore
Within her breast she bore;
And angels bright and fair,
Unseen, her fellows were.
She, ere she took her way,
An orison would say,
That God her steps might tend
Safe to their journey's end;
And there, in manner meet,
Her cousin she 'gan greet.
Elizabeth full fain
Eft bowed her head again;
She wist 'twas God's own Bride,
As, worshipful she cried:
'O Lady, Full of Grace,
Whence do I see thy face?'
O House and Home of bliss,
O earthly Paradis--
Nay, Heaven itself on ground
Wherein the Lord is found,
The Lord of Glory bright,
In goodness great and might--
Clean Maiden thou that art,
Come, visit this my heart;
And bring me chief my Good,
God's Son in Flesh and Blood;
Bless body, soul; and bide
For ever by my side.
From the Köln Gesang-Buch. XVI Cent.