This mutual inherence of the members of the Body and these obligations to one another are in strict subordination to the Head; but they are very real duties and privileges which are ours to exercise. What we are concerned with at present is that from, this view of them that I have been presenting there results the possibility and obligation of intercession; the love and care of the members for one another is exercised in their prayers for one another. This privilege of intercession is one of the privileges most widely valued and most constantly exercised throughout the Church. Days of intercession, litanies, the offering of the Blessed Sacrifice with special intention, the constant requests for prayers for objects in which people are interested, all testify to the value we place on the privilege. Here is one action in regard to which there is no doubting voice in Christendom.
But curiously, and for some reason to me wholly unintelligible, there are a great many who think of this right and duty of intercession between the members of the One Body as exclusively the right and duty of those who are living here on earth; or at least if it pertain to the "dead" it is in a way in which we can have no part. One would think--and so the Catholic Church has always thought--that those whom we call dead, but who are really "alive unto God" with a life more intense, a life more spiritually clear-visioned, than our own, would have a special power and earnestness in prayer, and that a share in their intercessions is a spiritual privilege much to be valued. They are members with us of the same Body; death has not cut them off from their membership, rather, if possible, it has intensified it, or at least their perception of what is involved in it. They remain under all the obligations of the life of the Body and consequently under the obligation to care for other members of the Body. The intercession of the saints for us is a fact that the Church has never doubted and cannot doubt except under penalty of denying at the same time the existence of the Body. That certain members of the Church have of late years doubted our right to invoke the saints, to call upon them for the aid of their prayers, is true; but there seems no ground for rejecting the tradition of invocation except the rather odd ground that we do not know the mode by which our requests reach them! As there are a good many other spiritual facts of which we do not know the mode, I do not think that we need be deterred from the practice of invocation on that ground: certainly the Church has never been so deterred.
It is strange how little people attempt to think out their religion, and especially their obligation to religious practice. I have so often heard people say, when the practice of invocation of saints was urged: Why ask the saints? Why not go directly to God? And these same people are constantly asking the prayers of their fellow Christians here on earth! Suppose when some pious soul comes to me and asks me if I will not pray for a sick child, or a friend at sea, I were to reply: "Why come to me? Why not go directly to God?" I should be rightly thought unfeeling and unchristian. But that is precisely what the same person says when I suggest that the saints or the Blessed Mother of God be invoked for some cause that we have in hand! A person comes to me and asks my prayers, and I go to a saint and ask his prayers on precisely the same basis and for precisely the same reason, namely, that we are both members of the Body of Christ and of one another. We have the right to expect the interest and to count on the love of our fellow-members in Christ. We go to the saints with the same directness and the same simplicity with which we go to the living members of the Body, living, I mean in the Church on earth. If it be not possible to do that, then death has made a very disastrous break in the unity of the Body of Christ.
And if we can count so without hesitation upon the love and sympathy and interest of the saints, surely we can count upon finding the same or greater love and sympathy in the greatest of all the saints, our blessed Mother, who is also the Mother of God. She in her spotless purity is the highest of creatures. She by her special privilege has boundless power of intercession; not power as I have explained before, because of any sort of favouritism, but power because her spiritual perfection gives her unique insight into the mind of God. Power in prayer really means that, through spiritual insight we are enabled to ask according to His will "And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us." That is why righteousness is the ground of prevailing intercession, because righteousness means sympathetic understanding of the mind of God.
And in none is there such sympathetic understanding because in none is there such nearness to God, as in Blessed Mary. To go to her in our prayers and to beg her to intercede for us is, of course, no more a trenching upon the unique mediatorship of our Lord than it is to ask my human friend to pray for me. We tend, do we not? to select from among the circle of our acquaintance those whom for some reason we feel to have what we call a special power in prayer when we seek for some one to pray for us in our need. Is it not wholly natural then that we should go to our Blessed Mother on whose sympathy we can unfailingly count and in whose spiritual understanding we can implicitly trust, when we want to interest those who are dear to our Lord in our special needs? We have every claim upon their sympathy because they are fellow-members of the same Body; and we know, too, that He Who has made us one in His Body wills that we should receive His graces through our mutual ministrations.
Mary, Maiden, mild and free,
Chamber of the Trinity,
A little while now list to me,
As greeting I thee give;
What though my heart unclean may be,
My offering yet receive.
Thou art the Queen of Paradise,
Of heaven, of earth, of all that is;
Thou bore in thee the King of Bliss
Without or spot or stain;
Thou didst put right what was amiss,
What man had lost, re-gain.
The gentle Dove of Noe thou art
The Branch of Olive-tree that brought,
In token that a peace was wrought,
And man to God was dear:
Sweet Ladye, be my Fort,
When the last fight draws near.
Thou art the Sling, thy Son the Stone
That David at Goliath flung;
Eke Aaron's rod, whence blossom sprung
Though bare it was, and dry:
'Tis known to all, who've looked upon
Thy childbirth wondrous high.
In thee has God become a Child,
The wretched foe in thee is foiled;
That Unicorn that was so wild
Is thrown by woman chaste;
Him hast thou tamed, and forced to yield,
With milk from Virgin breast.
Like as the sun full clear doth pass,
Without a break, through shining glass,
Thy Maidenhood unblemished was
For bearing of the Lord:
Now, sweetest Comfort of our race,
To sinners be thou good.
Take, Ladye dear, this little Song
That out of sinful heart has come;
Against the fiend now make me strong,
Guide well my wandering soul:
And though I once have done thee wrong,
Forgive, and make me whole.
Wm. De Shoreham's translation
from the Latin, or French of
Robt. Grosseteste; C. 1325.