Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

But let us come back to earth--to Bethlehem--on that first Christmas eve and listen to the songs of the angels as they sing over the star-lit fields. How near heaven seems! How real is God! How joyful is this season of peace to men of good will! The message is of peace, but that peace will need to have its nature explained in the coming years if men's hearts are not to fail them and their faith wither away. It is not a general peace to the world that is being proclaimed. Later on our Lord will say: "My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you." It is such a gift as can be enjoyed only by men of good will; converted men, that is to say, men whose will is close set with the will of God. For how should there be peace in any world on any other terms? How can there be peace for those who are in rebellion against God? Our Lord can promise peace, and can fulfil His promise because He is bringing a new potency into human life. He is a new way of approach to God, a new way into the Holiest of all. Through His humanity God is united to man, and through it man, any man, can be united to God. And one of the results of that union is this gift of peace, and the fact that it arises from the union explains its new character, why our Lord calls it His peace.

This peace is the Christmas gift of the divine child to us. This is the method of God's work, from the inside out; from the spiritual fact to its external result. We do not begin by finding peace with this world: "in the world ye shall have tribulation." And most of the failure to attain peace, and much of men's loss of faith is due to repudiation of the divine method. We live in a disordered and pain-stricken world where human life is uniformly a life of trial and struggle, and our easy yielding to temptation is an attempt at some sort of an adjustment with the world such as we think will produce peace and quiet. We constantly demand of religion that it should effect this for us. So far as one can see much of the revolt against religion to-day has its ground in the failure of religion to meet the demands made upon it for a better world. Men look out on a world seething with unrest and filled with injustice, and they turn upon the Church and ask, "Why have you not changed all this? Are you not, in fact, neglecting your duty in not changing it? Or if you are not neglecting your duty, you must at least confess to your impotence. Your self-confessed business is to make a better world."

True; but only on the conditions which love imposes. Religion does not propose to improve the world by a more skilful application of the principles of worldliness. It does not propose to turn stones into bread at the demand of any devils whatsoever. It does not say, "If you will support me and give me a certain superficial honour, I will bless your efforts and increase the success of your undertakings." Religion proposes to improve the world on the condition that the principles of religion shall be accepted as the working principles of life; on condition, that is, that love shall be made the ground of human association. Religion can make a better world, it can make the kingdoms of God and of His Christ; but it can only do so on the condition that it is whole-heartedly accepted and thoroughly applied. The proof that it can do this is in the fact that it can and does make better individuals. Wherever men and women have lived by the principles of the Gospel they have brought forth the fruits of the Gospel. It has done this, not under some specially favourable circumstances, but it has done it under all circumstances of life and in all nations of men. What has been done in unnumbered individual cases, can be done in whole communities when the communities want it done. It is quite pointless in times of great social distress to ask passionately, "why does not God make a better world?" The only question which is at all to the point is, "why has God not made me better?" The problem of God's dealing with the world is, in essence, the problem of God's dealing with me. If He has not reformed me, if I do not, in my self-examination, find that I am responding to the ideals of God, as far as I know them, there is small point in declamations about the state of society. Society that is godless, is just a mass of godless individuals; and I can understand why God does not reform the world perfectly well from the study of my own case. What in me prevents the full control of God is the same that prevents that control over the whole of society: and I know that that is not lack of knowledge, but lack of love. Men ignore the primary obligation of life: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... and thy neighbour as thyself." As long as they ignore that, there can be no reformed world, no world reflecting the divine purpose, no society,--whatever may be its widely multiplied legislation,--securing to men conditions of life which are sane and satisfactory.

Therefore the Child who is born of Mary in Bethlehem while the angels are singing their carols over the fields where the shepherds watch, the Child Who brings peace to men of good will, still, after nearly two thousand years, finds His gift ignored and His longing to lift men to God unsatisfied. "He came unto His own and His own received Him not"--and the conditions are not vitally changed to-day. When we think of a world of fifteen hundred million human beings, the number of those who profess and call themselves Christians is comparatively small; the number of actually practicing Christians, of men and women who do live by the Gospel, without reserve and without compromise, is vastly smaller. The resistance of the principles of the Gospel is to-day intense; the demand for compromise is insistent. We are asked to throw over a system which has obviously failed, and to accept as the equivalent and to permit to pass under the same name a system which is fundamentally different; a system whose end is man and not God, whose means are natural and not supernatural, which seek to produce an adjustment with this world that means comfort, rather than an adjustment with the spiritual world which means sanctity.

The ideal achievement of peace is here in Bethlehem where the mother holds the Holy Child to her breast, while her spirit is utterly in union with Him Who is both man and God. There is never any break in the pure peace of S. Mary because there is never any moment when her will is separated from the will of God, when her union with Him fails. This peace of perfect union has, through the merits of her Son, been hers always; she has never known the wrench of the will that separates itself from God. She has always been poor; she has been perplexed with life; she has suffered and will suffer intensely, suffer most where she loves most; but peace she has never lost, because her will has never wavered in its allegiance. What visibly she is doing in these moments of her great joy, holding God to her breast in a passion of love, she in fact is doing always--always is she one with God.

That undisturbed peace of a never broken union is never possible for us. We have known what it is to reject the will of God and go our own way and indulge the appetites of our nature in violation of our recognised standards of life. If we are to come to peace it must be along the rough road of repentance. And it is wholly just that it should be so; that we should win back to God at the expense of shame and suffering; that we should retrace the road that we have travelled, with weary feet and bleeding heart. This after all does not much matter: what does matter immensely is that there is a road back to God and that we find it. What matters is that we discover that repentance and reformation are the only road to peace. We are offered many other roads alleged to lead to the same place; but not even a child should be deceived by the modern substitutes for repentance, by the shallow teaching whereby it is attempted to persuade men of the innocence of sin. They are never worth discussing, these modern substitutes for repentance. Men accept them, not because they are rational or convincing, but because they offer a justification for going the way that they have already made up their minds to go. But it is plain that whatever else they do they do not afford a basis for peace. They are no rock foundation for eternity. Other foundation for peace can no man lay or has laid than the acceptance of the salvation offered in Jesus Christ. He is our peace; and when we discover that, He makes peace in us by the application to our souls of the Blood of His Cross. This is the peace He came to bring. This the peace that the angels announced as they sang over Bethlehem. This is the peace which is ceaselessly proclaimed from the altars of the Christian Church, the peace of God which passeth understanding, the peace which is offered to all men of good will.

How shall we attain it? By being men of good will, plainly. But what constitutes good will in a man? That which I have already discussed, perhaps abundantly, simplicity and childlike obedience of character. S. Joseph, the guardian of Mary and her Child here in Bethlehem, is the best example we can have of a man of good will, a man who under the most difficult circumstances responded with perfect readiness and complete obedience to the heavenly message that came to him. This is to be his course through the few years that he will live, to give himself to the will of God in the care of Jesus. We are men of good will if we do whatsoever our Lord says to us, if we are seeking first of all the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, if our estimate of values corresponds to our Lord's.

There is our trouble--that old trouble of feebly trying to live the life of the Kingdom when what we actually want is the offer of this world. There is, there can be, no peace in a divided life. There is a certain spiritual sloth which has the exterior look of peace, as a corpse looks peaceful, but it has no relation to the peace which God gives. It is in fact the wages of sin, wages easily earned and long enjoyed. But so long as we are spiritually alive, so long we cannot enjoy whole-heartedly even the most fascinating of sins because there is lurking in the background the sense of the transitoriness of our sin and of the imminence of death and judgment. There is the skeleton in every man's closet until he finally makes choice on one side or the other. For we are not ignorant of the spiritual obligations of life. We always know more than we have achieved. When we talk about our ignorance and perplexity, we are not meaning ignorance and perplexity about the obligation to live in a certain way, and to perform certain duties, on this particular day: rather we are making this alleged ignorance of the future an excuse for not taking action in the present, action which we know to be obligatory.

And peace is so wonderful a gift! To feel oneself in harmony with God, to know that one is carefully seeking His will and making it one's first and highest duty to perform it. To have found the peace of the forgiven soul as the result of absolution, at the expense of much shame and repugnance, it may be, but with what marvellous compensations when we go away with a sense of restored purity and the friendship of God--life looks so different when we look at it through purified eyes! The old life has held us so tightly, the old sins have clung so close; and then there was a day when we gave up self and turned to God and the Gift of God in Jesus Christ; and then we saw how miserable and vile and naked we had been all through the time of our boasted freedom; and we came as children to Mary's Child and offered ourselves to Him for cleansing. We kneel and offer to Him our wills and ask that they may be made good, and kept good in union with His most holy will. Then we find how true this word is: "In Me ye shall have peace: in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." It is true, is it not? not only as we commonly interpret, that the disciples of Christ shall have tribulation in this world; but that much that we, giving ourselves to the world, counted joy, was in reality tribulation, and we are glad to be rid of it.

A babe is born to bliss us bring.
I heard a maid lulley and sing.
She said: "Dear Son, leave Thy weeping:
Thy, Father is the King of bliss."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Lulley," she said and sung also,
"My own dear Son, why are Thou wo?
Have I not done as I should do?
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Nay, dear mother, for thee weep I nought,
But for the woe that shall be wrought
To Me ere I mankind have bought.
Was never sorrow like it i-wis."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Peace, dear Son! Thou grievest me sore:
Thou art my child, I have no more.
Should I see men mine own Son slay?
Alas, my dear Son, what means all this?"
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"My hands, Mother, that ye now see,
Shall be nailed to a tree;
My feet also fast shall be,
Men shall weep that shall see this."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Ah, dear Son, hard is my happe
To see my child that lay in my lap,--
His hands, His feet that I did wrappe,--
Be so nailed; they never did amisse."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.
"Ah, dear Mother, yet shall a spear
My heart asunder all but tear:
No wonder if I care-ful were
And wept full sore to think on this."
Now sing we with Angelis:
Gloria in excelsis.