Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

We cannot follow the thought of the Blessed Mother through these strange scenes and the experiences of these days. No doubt in the Jewish communities already flourishing in Egypt there would be welcome and the means of livelihood. But there would be perplexing questions to one whose habit it was to keep all things which concerned her strange Child hidden in her heart, the subject of constant meditation. Why, after the divine action which had been so constant from His conception to His birth, and in the circumstances which attended His birth, this reversal, this defeat and flight? Why after Bethlehem, Egypt? Why after Gabriel, Herod?

It brings us back again to the primary fact that the Incarnation is essentially a stage in a battle, and that the nature of God's battles is such that He constantly appears to lose them. He "goes forth as a giant to run His course"; but the eyes of man cannot see the giant--they see only a Babe laid in a manger. We are tricked by our notion of what is powerful.

"They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam'st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry."

The battle presents itself to us as a demand that we choose, that we take sides. The demand of Christ is that we associate ourselves with Him, or that we define our position as on the other side. "The friendship of the world is enmity with God" is a saying that is true when reversed: The friendship of God is enmity with the world. An open disclosure of the friendship of God sets all the powers of the world against us. This may be uncomfortable; but there does not appear to be any way of avoiding the opposition.

Our Lord, in His Incarnation, not only stripped Himself of His glory, took the servant form, and in doing so deliberately deprived Himself of certain means which would have been vastly influential in dealing with men, but He also declined, in assuming human nature, to assume it under conditions which would have conferred upon Him any adventitious advantage in the prosecution of His work. He would display to men neither divine nor human glory: He would have no aid from power or position, from wealth or learning. He undertook His work in the strength of a pure humanity united with God. He declined all else. And He found that almost the first event of His life was to be driven into exile.

And they who are associated with Him necessarily share His fortunes. Unless they will abandon the Child, Mary and Joseph must set out on the desert way. They had no doubt much to learn; but what is important is not the size or amount of what we learn, but the learning of it. When we are called, as they were, to leave all for Christ, it often turns out as hard, oftentimes harder, to leave property as riches; and the reason is that what we ultimately are leaving is neither poverty nor riches, but self: and self to us is always a "great possession."

Therein, I suppose, lies the solution of the problem of the relation of property and Christianity in the common life. Idleness is sin; every one is bound to some useful labour, no matter what his material resources may be. And if we work for our living, if our labour is to be such as will support us, then there at once arises the problem of possessions. Useful, steady labour will ordinarily produce more than "food and raiment." Under present social arrangments accumulated property is handed on to heirs. A man naturally wants to make some provision for his family. Or he finds himself in possession of considerable wealth and the impulse is to spend in luxuries of one sort or another,--modern invention has put endless means of ministering to physical or aesthetic comfort within his reach. He can have a motor car, a country house, an expensive library; he can have beautiful works of art. And then he is confronted with the picture of the Holy Family which can never have lived much beyond the poverty line. He realises the nature of our Lord's life of poverty and ministry. And though the plain man may not feel that he can go very far in imitating this life, he does feel that there is a splendour of achievement in those who take our Lord at His word and sell all to follow Him.

But the literal abandonment of life to the ideal of poverty is clearly not what our Lord contemplated for the universal practice of His followers. He nowhere indicates that all gainful labour is to be abandoned, or that having gained enough for food and raiment we are to idle thereafter, or even give ourselves to some ungainful work. The Kingdom of heaven does not appear to be society organised on the lines of socialism or otherwise. Our Lord contemplated life going on as it is, only governed by a new set of motives. It has as the result of the acceptance of the Gospel a new Orientation; and as a result of that it will view "possessions" in a new way. The acceptance of the Gospel means the self surrendered utterly to the will of God, and all that self possesses held at the disposal of that will. We may expect that God's will for us will be manifested in the events of life and its opportunities, and we shall hold ourselves alert and ready to embrace that will. It may be that the call will come to sell all, and we need to beware lest the thoroughness of the demand terrify us into the repudiation of our Lord's service; lest the thought of the sacrificed possessions send us away sorrowing. Ordinarily the call is less searching than that; or perhaps the mercy of God spares us from demands that would be beyond our strength. In any case, the truly consecrated self will regard luxury as a dangerous thing, replete with entanglements of all kinds, that it were well to avoid at the expense of any sacrifice. One does well to hold "possessions" in a very loose grip, lest the hold be reversed, and we become their servants rather than they ours. And it is well to emphasise again that the mere size of possessions is of small importance. There is a not very rational tendency to think of this as being a matter of millions, for the man of moderate income to think that there is no problem for him. The problem is as pressing for him as for any man. His minimum of comfort may be as tightly grasped as the other man's maximum. The only solution of the problem will be found in the converted self. Those who have really given themselves to God hold all things at His disposal. They are not thinking how they can indulge self but how they can glorify God.

Egypt to many will stand for another sort of abandonment which much perplexes the immature Christian: that is, the sort of isolation in which the new Christian is quite likely to find himself when first he attempts to put Christian principles into practice. We imagine one brought up in the ordinary mixed circles of society, where there are unbelievers and lax Christians mingled together, and where there are no principles firmly enough held to interfere with any sort of enjoyment of life which offers. Such an one--a young woman, let us suppose--in the Providence of God becomes converted to our Lord, and comes to see that the lax and indifferent Christian life she had been leading was a mere mockery of Christian living. Speedily does she find when she attempts to put into action the principles of living which she now understands to be the meaning of the Gospel that a breach of sympathy has been opened between her and her accustomed companions; that many things which she was accustomed to do in their society and which made for their common fund of amusement are no longer possible to her. The careless talk, the shameless dress, the gambling, the drinking, the Sunday amusements--such things as these she has thrown over; and she finds that with them she has thrown over the basis of intimacy with her usual companions. It is not that they are antagonistic but simply that their points of contact have ceased to exist. Her own inhibitions exclude her automatically from most of the activities of her social circle. She finds herself much alone. Her friends are sorry for her and think her foolish and try to win her back, but it is clear to her that she can only go back by going back from Christ.

This is the common case of the young whether boy or girl to-day, and the practical question is, Can they endure the isolation? It is easy to say: Let them make Christian friends; but that is not always practical, especially in the present state of the Church when there is no cohesion among its members, no true sense of constituting a Brotherhood, of being members of the same Body. We have to admit that the attempt to hold a high standard usually ends in failure, at least the practical failure of a weak compromise. But there are characters that are strong enough to face the isolation and to readjust life on the basis of the new principles and to mould it in accord with the new ideals. The period of this readjustment is one of severe testing of one's grasp on principles and one's strength of purpose. But the battle once fought out we attain a new kind of freedom and expansion of life. We look back with some amusement at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that amused us in our childish hours. The desert of Egypt that we entered with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we resolutely tread the desert way.