Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

fter the rapid succession of fascinating pictures which are etched for us in the opening chapters of the Gospel there follows a space of about twelve years of which we are told nothing. The fables which fill the pages of the Apocryphal Gospels serve chiefly to emphasise the difference between an inspired and an uninspired narrative. The human imagination trying to develop the situation suggested by the Gospel and to fill in the unwritten chapters of our Lord's life betrays its incompetence to create a story of God Incarnate which shall have the slightest convincing power. These Apocryphal stories are immensely valuable to us as, by contrast, creating confidence in the story of Jesus as told by the Evangelists, but for nothing more.

We are left to use our own imagination in filling in these years of silence in our Lord's training; and we shall best use it, not by trying to imagine what may have occurred, but by trying to understand what is necessarily involved in the facts as we know them. We know that the home in Nazareth whither Mary and Joseph brought Jesus after the death of Herod permitted them to return from Egypt was the simple home of a carpenter. It would appear to have been shared by the children of Joseph, and our Lady would have been the house-mother, busy with many cares. We know, too, that under this commonplace exterior of a poor household there was a life of the spirit of far reaching significance. Mary was ceaselessly pondering many things--the significance of all those happenings which, as the years flowed on without any further supernatural intervention, must at times have seemed as though they were quite purposeless. Of course this could not have been a settled feeling, for the insight of her pure soul would have held her to the certainty that such actions of God as she had experienced would some day reveal the meaning which as yet lay hidden.

In the meantime other things did not matter much, seeing she had Jesus, the object of endless love. Every mother dreams over the baby she cares for and looks out into the future with trembling hope; so S. Mary's thoughts would go out following the hints of prophecy and angelic utterances, unable to understand how the light and shadow which were mingled there could find fulfilment in her Child. But like any other mother the thought would come back to her present possession, the satisfaction of her heart that she had in Jesus. With the growth of Jesus there would come the unfolding of the answering love, which was but another mode in which the love of God she had experienced all her life was manifesting itself. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and we are able to enter a little into the over-flowing love of Mary as she watched the advance, this unfolding from day to day. The wonder that was hers in guiding this mind and will, in teaching our Lord His first prayers, in telling Him the story of the people of whom He had assumed our nature! There was here no self-will, no resistance to guidance, no perversity to wound a mother's heart. In the training of an ordinary child there are from time to time hints of characteristics or tendencies which may develop later into spiritual or moral disaster. There are growls of the sleeping beast which make us tremble for the future: there are hours of agony when we think of the inevitable temptations which must be met, and suggestions of weakness which colour our imagination of the meeting of them with the lurid light of defeat. But as Mary watched the unfolding character of Jesus she saw nothing there that carried with it the least suggestion of evil growth in the future, no outcropping of hereditary sin or disordered appetite. A constantly unfolding intelligence, and growing interest in the things that most interested her, an eagerness to hear and to know of the will and love of the eternal Father, these are her joy. That would have been the centre--would it not?--of the unfolding consciousness of Jesus: the knowledge of the Father.

Training by love, so we might describe the life in the Home at Nazareth. And we must not forget the grave ageing figure who is the head of the household. The Holy Family--that was the perfect unity that their love created. There is a wonderful picture of these three by Sassaferato which catches, as no other Holy Family that I know of does, the meaning of their association. S. Mary whom the artistic imagination is so apt, after the Nativity, to transform into a stately matron, here still retains the note of virginity which in fact she never lost. It is the maiden-mother who stands by the side of the grave, elderly S. Joseph, the ideal workman, who is also the ideal guardian of his maiden-wife. And Jesus binds these two together and with them makes a unity, interpreting to us the perfection of family life.

Family life is a tremendous test, it brings out the best and the worst of those who are associated in it. The ordinary restraints of social intercourse are of less force in the intimacy of family life: there is less need felt to watch conduct, or to mask what we know are our disagreeable traits. It is quite easy for character to deteriorate in the freedom of such intercourse. It is pretty sure to do so unless there is the constant pressure of principle in the other direction. The great safeguard is the sort of love that is based on mutual respect,--respect both for ourselves and for others. We talk a good deal as though love were always alike; as though the fact that a man and a woman love each other were always the same sort of fact. It does not require much knowledge of human nature or much reflection to convince us that that is not the case. Love is not a purely physical fact; and outside its physical implications there are many factors which may enter, whose existence constitute the differentia from case to case. It is upon these varying elements that the happiness of the family life depends. One of the most important is that character on either side shall be such as to inspire respect. Many a marriage goes to pieces on this rock; it is found that the person who exercised a certain kind of fascination shows in the intimacy of married life a character and qualities which are repulsive; a shallowness which inspires contempt, an egotism which is intolerable, a laxity in the treatment of obligations which destroys any sense of the stability of life. A marriage which does not grow into a relation of mutual honour and respect must always be in a state of unstable equilibrium, constantly subject to storms of passion, to suspicion and distrust.

And therefore such a marriage will afford no safe basis on which to build a family life. But without a stable family life a stable social and religious life is impossible. It is therefore no surprise to those who believe that the powers of evil are active in the world to find that the family is the very centre of their attack at the present time. The crass egotism lying back of so much modern teaching is nowhere more clearly visible than in the assertion of the right of self-determination so blatantly made in popular writings. By self-determination is ultimately meant the right of the individual to seek his own happiness in his own way, and to make pleasure the rule of his life. "The right to happiness" is claimed in utter disregard of the fact that the claim often involves the unhappiness of others. "The supremacy of love," meaning the supremacy of animalism, is the excuse for undermining the very foundations of family life. No obligation, it appears, can have a binding force longer than the parties to it find gratification in it. Personal inclination and gratification is held sufficient ground for action whose consequences are far from being personal, which, in fact, affect the sane and healthy state of society as a whole.

The decline of a civilisation has always shown itself more markedly in the decline of the family life than elsewhere. The family, not the individual, is the basis of the social state, and no amount of theorising can make the fact different. Whatever assails the integrity of the family assails the life of the state, and no single family can be destroyed without society as a whole feeling the effect. "What," it is asked, "is to be done? If two people find that they have blundered, are they to go on indefinitely suffering from the result of their blunder? If an immature boy or girl in a moment of passion make a mistake as to their suitability to live together, are they to be compelled to do so at the expense of constant unhappiness?"

It would seem obvious to say that justice requires that those who make blunders should take the consequences of them; that those who create a situation involving suffering should do the suffering themselves and not attempt to pass it on to others. It is not as though the consequences of the act can be avoided; they cannot. What happens is that the incidence of them is shifted. It is a part of the brutal egotism of divorce that it is quite willing to shift the incidence of the suffering that it has created on to the lives of wholly innocent people; in many cases upon children, in all cases upon society at large. For it is necessary to emphasize the fact that society is a closely compact body: so interwoven is life with life that if one member suffer the other members suffer with it. Breaches of moral order are not individual matters but social. This truth is implied in society's constantly asserted right to regulate family relations in the general interest even after it has ceased to think of such relations as having any spiritual significance. We need to-day a more vivid sense of the community lest we shall see all sense of a common life engulfed in the rising tide of individual anarchism. We need the assertion in energetic form of the right of the community as supreme over the right of the individual. We must deny the right of the individual to pursue his own way and his own pleasure at the expense of the rights of others. And to his insolent question, "Why should I suffer in an intolerable situation?" we must plainly answer: "Because you are responsible for the situation, and it is intolerable that you should be permitted to throw off the results of your wickedness or your stupidity upon other and innocent people."

And it is quite clear that should society assert its pre-eminent right in unmistakable form and make it evident that it does not propose to tolerate the results of the egotistic nonsense of self-determination and the right of every one to live his own life, the evils of divorce and of shattered families would presently shrink to relatively small proportions. The present facility of divorce encourages thoughtless and unsuitable marriages in the first place; and in the second place, encourages the resort to divorce in circumstances of family disturbance which would speedily right themselves in the present as they have done in the past if those concerned knew that their happiness and comfort for years compelled an adjustment of life. When as at present any one who loses his temper can rush off to a court and get a marriage dissolved for some quite trivial reason, there is small encouragement to practice self-control. If a man and woman know that the consequences of conduct must be faced by them, and cannot be avoided by thrusting them upon others, they will no doubt in the course of time learn to exercise a little self-control.