Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

We try to get before us what would have been the mind of S. Mary through all these happenings which attended the birth of her Child. What is written of her here is no doubt characteristic: "Mary kept all these and pondered them in her heart." Wonder at the ways of God had been hers for so many months now--wonder, with devout meditation upon their meaning. Where there is no resistance to God's will but only the desire to know it more fully there is always the gradual assimilation of the truth. S. Mary moves in a realm of mystery from the moment of the Annunciation to the very end of her life. It is so difficult to understand what is the meaning of God in this unspeakable gift of a Son conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and in the constant accompaniment of pain and disaster and disappointment which is the unfolding experience of her life in relation to Him. But we feel in her no speculation, no rebellion, no insistence on knowing more; but we feel that there must have been a growing appreciation of the work of God, unhesitating acceptance of His will. Just to keep things in one's heart is so often the best way of arriving at an understanding of them; is the best way, at least, of arriving at the conviction that what we in fact need to understand is not so much what God does as that it is God Who does it. Our true aim in life is to understand God, and through that understanding we shall sufficiently understand life. Failure in human life is commonly due to an attempt to understand life without any attempt to understand it in relation to God. It is like an attempt to understand a work of art without an attempt to understand the artist, to estimate in terms of mechanical effort, rather than in terms of mind. A work of art means what the artist means when he creates it: life means what God means in His creation and government of it, and it is hopeless to expect to understand it without reference to the mind of God.

Therefore Mary's way is the right way--the way of acceptance and meditation. So she sought to follow the mind of God. We are told little of her, but we are told quite enough to understand this. We know well her method, that she kept things in her heart. And we have one splendid example of the result of the method in the Magnificat. There the results of her communion with God break forth in that Canticle which ever since has been one of the priceless treasures of the Church. The Gospels never tell us very much; but if we will follow Mary's method they tell us enough to let us see the very hand of God in the working out of our salvation; they give us sample events from which we easily infer God's meaning otherwhere.

And we may be sure that the months that followed the Annunciation would have been months of ever-deepening spiritual communion, resulting in a rapidly advancing spiritual maturity. One necessary result would have been to prepare the blessed Mother to receive new manifestations of God's Providence, and to fit them into the whole body of her experience. She would not at any time be lost in helpless surprise before a new development of the purpose of God. Surprised as she must have been when the Eastern Sages came to kneel before the Child she carried at her breast, and hail Him as born King of the Jews, she would have set to work to fit this new experience into what her acquired knowledge of the divine meaning had become. And one can have no doubt that these visitors from afar would have told her enough of the grounds of their action to illumine for her the prophecies concerning her Son.

The special incidents that the Gospel select for record leave us always conscious that they are a selection and therefore must have special significance. That we are told that the Magi offered certain gifts, rather than told the words of homage wherewith they presented them turns our attention to the nature of the gifts as presumably having a significance in themselves rather than because of any actual value. In the gifts of these Gentiles come from afar to kneel before Him Whom they recognise as King of the Jews, we are compelled to see a certain attitude of humanity toward Him Who is revealed to be not only the King of the Jews, but Lord of Heaven and earth; they give what humanity needs must always give--the gold of a perfect oblation, the incense of perpetual intercession, the myrrh of a humble self-abandonment.

These which are offered as the ideal tribute of humanity by the star-led Magi are found in their highest human perfection exemplified in the Mother of the Child to Whom the tribute is made. Perfect are they in our Lord; and she who is nearest Him in nature is nearest Him in the perfection of nature. We turn from God's ideal as set out in our blessed Lord to see it reflected as in a glass in the life of her whose perfection is the perfect rendering of His grace. Mary is so perfect because, by God's election, she is "full of grace."

We, alas! limp after the ideal at a long distance. One pictures the life of sanctity under the familiar symbol of the race course, where many start in the race, and many, one by one, fall out by the wayside. Those who go on the race's end, go on because of certain qualities of endurance that we discover in them. In those who run the spiritual race for the amaranthine crown these qualities of endurance are not natural, but supernatural: they come not of birth but of rebirth. They are qualities which we draw from God. "It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." The hand that sets the race confers the gifts that enable one to win it. "So run that ye may obtain."

And perhaps the chiefest of all those gifts is that which makes us, the children of God, capable of the adoration of our Father. Worship is no other than the utter giving of ourselves, giving as Christ gave, "Who being originally in the form of God, thought it not a thing to be grasped at to be equal with God, but emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men"; giving as the blessed Virgin gave when she gave, as she must have thought and have been willing to give, her whole reputation among men in response to the call of God; giving complete, in which there is no withholding. That is worship, sacrifice, the pure gold of self-oblation.

But it is possible to think of the power of worship from another point of view. God never takes but He gives. What He appears to take He gives back with His blessing, and we find the restored gift multiplied manifold. So in the very act of our worship God confers on us power.

For it is true, is it not, that in the very act of worship we experience, not exhaustion but exhilaration. In the very act of giving ourselves to God, God gives Himself to us, and in overflowing abundance. That is what we find to be true in our highest act of worship, the blessed Eucharist. Here God and man meet in a perfect communion. Here we offer ourselves in sacrifice--ourselves, our souls and bodies--in union with the sacrifice of our Lord; and here our Lord, Who is the sacrifice itself, not only offers Himself, but also He imparts Himself to those who are united with Him. And out of this sacrifice, thus issuing in an act of union, there flows the perpetual renewing of the vitality of the spiritual life. We are sustained from day to day by this sacrificial feeding; our strength which is continually being drawn upon by the demands of life, by the temptations we have to resist, by the exertion that is called for in all spiritual exercise, is renewed by our participation in the Body and Blood of our Lord. I am sure that all those who are accustomed to frequent communion feel the drain upon their strength when at any time they are deprived of their great privilege. I am also sure that many who feel that their spiritual life is but languid, or those other many who seem only dimly to feel that there are spiritual problems to be met, and spiritual strength needed for the meeting of them, would find themselves immensely helped, would find their minds illumined and their strength sustained in more frequent participation in the sacrificial worship and feasting of the Church. The attitude of vast numbers of those who are regarded as quite sincere Christians is wholly incomprehensible. The life of God is day by day poured out at the altars of the Church, and they go their way in seeming unconsciousness of its presence, of its appeal, of its virtue, or of their own sore need of it. The Magi come from a far distance on a hazardous journey into an unknown country that they may offer the gold of their adoration to an infant King; and the Christian feebly considers whether he is not too tired to get up of a morning and go a short distance to receive the Body and Blood of the Redeemer of his soul!

The Magi came also bringing the incense of their intercession. Their privilege was that they were admitted to the very Presence Chamber of the great King. That the Infant in Mary's arms did not show any sign of kingship, the humble room where they were received bore no resemblance to the presence chamber of such kings as they were accustomed to wait upon, was to them of no consequence. They were endowed with the gift of faith, and believed the supernatural guiding rather than the outward seeming. The faith that had followed the star from so great a distance was not likely to be quenched by the antithesis of what must have been their imagination of the reality, of all the pictures that had been filling their minds as they pushed on across the desert. It was no more incredible that the King Whom they were seeking should be found in humble guise in a peasant's cottage than that they should have been guided to Him by a heavenly star. The gift of God to them was that they should be permitted to enter the presence of the King.