Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

There is no doubt much to be learned from the study of our Lord's method of the limits of the social and political activity of His Church. It has constantly fallen a victim to the temptation to undertake the reform of the world by some other means than the conversion of it. It has shown itself quite willing to be made "a judge and divider." It has not always declined the invitation it has received to assume the purple. "Your business is to reform this miserable world which so sadly and so obviously needs you," men say to it; "You are not living up to your principles and you are neglecting your duty by not supporting this great movement for the betterment of the race," others say. Still others urge, "You are losing great masses of men through your inexplicable failure to adopt their cause." And the Church in the whole course of its history has constantly yielded to this temptation, and has not seen until too late that in so doing it was making itself the tool or the cat's-paw of one interest or another whose sole interest in religion was the possibility of exploiting the influence of the Church. In the stupid hope of forwarding its spiritual interests the Church has entangled itself with the responsibilities of temporal power; it has made itself the backer of "the divine right of kings"; and it has found itself bound hand and foot in the character of a national or state Church; and with a curious incapacity to learn anything from experience is now enthusiastically cheering for democracy! Poor Church, whose leaders are so constantly misleaders.

It is all due to the hoary temptation to try to get to one's end by some sort of a short cut: "All these things will I give you if you will fall down and worship me." Our Lord knew that Satan could not really give Him the ends He was seeking; but His followers are constantly confident that he can, and are therefore his constant and ready tools for this or that party or interest. They sell themselves to monarchy or democracy, to capital or labour, with the same guileless innocence of what is happening to them, with the same simple-minded incapacity to learn anything from the lessons of the past. There are no short cuts to spiritual ends, and those ends can never be accomplished by secular means. The interests of the Kingdom of God can never be forwarded by alliance with the powers of this world; the interests of particular persons or parties in the Church may be--but that is quite another thing.

The lesson is one that is not without application to the individual life. There again the tendency to mind something other than one's own business is almost ineradicable. We have before us the work of building our spiritual house, of finishing the work that the Father has given us to do, of carrying to a successful conclusion the work of our sanctification. In view of the experience of nearly two thousand years of Christianity and of our own personal experience, that would seem a sufficiently difficult and obligatory work to occupy the undivided energies of a life-time. But we are accustomed to treat this primary business of life quite as though it were a parergon, a thing to play with in our unoccupied hours, the fad of a collector rather than the supreme interest of an immortal being. That spiritual results are no oftener achieved than they are can occasion no surprise when one understands the sort of spirit wherewith they are approached. If the average man adopted toward his business the attitude he adopts toward his religion he would be bankrupt within a week,--and he knows it. You know that the attention you are paying to religion and the sort of energy and sacrifice you are putting into it are insufficient to secure any sort of a result worth having. Spiritually speaking, your life is an example of misdirected and dissipated energy. There is no spiritual result because there is no continuous and energetic effort in a spiritual direction. You are not like a master-builder planning and erecting a house. You are like a child playing with a box of blocks who begins to build a house with them and, when it is half built, is attracted by something else and runs after that--not even waiting to put the blocks back into the box!

Life, no doubt, this modern city life into which we are plunged, is terribly distracting. Concentration upon a single aim is hard to attain. So we plead in our excuse, but the excuse is a false one and we know it. We know it because we know many people who have achieved the sort of concentration and simplicity of aim that we complain of as so difficult. They to be sure have other ends than those we claim to be ours, but that would not seem to be important. By far the greater part of the male population of this city is intensely concentrated in money making. I do not believe that I have overheard during the last year two men talking in a car or on the street who were not talking about money. There is a good enough example of the possibility of concentrating on a single end under the conditions of our life. There are other people, you know some of them, whose lives are devoted in the most thorough manner to the pursuit of pleasure. They find no difficulty in such concentration, and they afford an even better example of what we are discussing than the money-makers. The money-maker says, "I have to live and my family has to live, and we cannot live unless I devote myself to business. It is all very well to talk about spiritual interests, but those are the plain common sense facts. A man who spends all his time on religion will find it pretty difficult to live in New York." Very well, that seems unanswerable. But go back to the men and women whose sole interest is amusement--how do they live? In some way they seem to have so succeeded in subordinating business to pleasure that they get what they want, and they somehow escape starvation!

There, I fancy, is the explanation--they get what they want. In a broad way we all get what we want. We accomplish in some degree at least the ends which we make the supreme ends of life. We are back therefore where we started: What are our supreme ends? Are they in fact spiritual? Have we mastered the technique of the Christian life sufficiently to be single-eyed and pure-hearted in our pursuit of life's ends? Are we devoted to the aim of manifesting the glory of God and finishing the work that He has given us to do?

This, once more, was the secret of our Lord's life, and it is the secret of all those who have at all succeeded in imitating Him. They have followed Him with singleness of purpose. They have felt life to be before all else a vocation to manifest the will of God and to finish a given work. That was the attitude of our Blessed Mother; she began on that note: "Behold the hand-maid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." It was the Gospel that she preached: "Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it." Her whole life was a response--the response of love to love.

That no doubt, goes to the heart of the spiritual problem. If we are to accomplish anything at all in the way of spiritual development, if we are to conduct life in simplicity toward spiritual ends, it will only be when the source of life's energy is found in love. He who does not love has no compelling motive toward God and no abiding principle to control life. If we conceive the Christian life as a task that is forced upon us, and which in some way we are bound to fulfil, we may be sure that the way in which we shall fulfil it will be weak and halting. We may be as conscientious as you please, but we shall not be able to concentrate on a work which is merely a work of duty and not the embodiment of a great love. Our primary activity should be devout meditation and study of our Lord's life, with prayer for guidance and help, till something of the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, till we feel our hearts burn within us and our spirits glow and we become able to offer ourselves, soul and body, a living sacrifice unto Him.

MARY:	I cried: "Maudeleyn, help now!
	My Son hath loved full well thee;
	Pray Him that I may die,
	That I not forgotten be!
	Seest thou, Maudeleyn, now
	My Son is hanged on a tree,
	Yet alive am I and thou,--
	And thou, thou prayest not for me!"
MAUDELEYN	said: "I know no red,
	Care hath smitten my heart sore.
	I stand, I see my Lord nigh dead;
	And thy weeping grieveth me more.
	Come with me; I will thee lead
	Into the Temple here before
	For thou hast now i-wept full yore."
MARY:	"I ask thee, Maudeleyn, where is that place,--
	In plain or valley or in hill?
	Where I may hide in any case
	That no sorrow come me till.
	For He that all my joy was,
	Now death with Him will do its will;
	For me no better solace is
	Than just to weep, to weep my fill."
	The Maudeleyn comforted me tho.
	To lead me hence, she said, was best:
	But care had smitten my heart so
	That I might never have no rest.
	"Sister, wherever that I go
	The woe of Him is in my breast,
	While my Sone hangeth so
	His pains are in mine own heart fast.
	Should I let Him hangen there
	Let my Son alone then be?
	Maudeleyn, think, unkind I were
	If He should hang and I should flee."
	I bade them go where was their will,
	This Maudeleyn and everyone,
	And by myself remain I will
	For I will flee for no man.

From St. Bernard's "Lamentation On Christ's Passion."
Engl. version, 13th Cent., by Richard Maydestone.

MARY:	I cried: "Maudeleyn, help now!
	My Son hath loved full well thee;
	Pray Him that I may die,
	That I not forgotten be!
	Seest thou, Maudeleyn, now
	My Son is hanged on a tree,
	Yet alive am I and thou,--
	And thou, thou prayest not for me!"
MAUDELEYN	said: "I know no red,
	Care hath smitten my heart sore.
	I stand, I see my Lord nigh dead;
	And thy weeping grieveth me more.
	Come with me; I will thee lead
	Into the Temple here before
	For thou hast now i-wept full yore."
MARY:	"I ask thee, Maudeleyn, where is that place,--
	In plain or valley or in hill?
	Where I may hide in any case
	That no sorrow come me till.
	For He that all my joy was,
	Now death with Him will do its will;
	For me no better solace is
	Than just to weep, to weep my fill."
	The Maudeleyn comforted me tho.
	To lead me hence, she said, was best:
	But care had smitten my heart so
	That I might never have no rest.
	"Sister, wherever that I go
	The woe of Him is in my breast,
	While my Sone hangeth so
	His pains are in mine own heart fast.
	Should I let Him hangen there
	Let my Son alone then be?
	Maudeleyn, think, unkind I were
	If He should hang and I should flee."
	I bade them go where was their will,
	This Maudeleyn and everyone,
	And by myself remain I will
	For I will flee for no man.

---