Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues,
as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Acts II, 3.

Holy Mother of God, Virgin ever blessed, glorious and noble, chaste and inviolate, O Mary Immaculate, chosen and beloved of God, endowed win singular sanctity, worthy of all praise, thou who art the Advocate for the sins of the whole world; O listen, listen, listen to us, O holy Mary, Pray for us. Intercede for us. Disdain not to help us. For we are confident and know for certain that thou canst obtain all that thou wiliest from thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, God Almighty, the King of ages, Who liveth with the Father and the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever.
MS. Book of Cerne, belonging
to Ethelwald, BP. of Sherbourne,
760.

hen the Day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place"--I suppose the "all" will be not merely the "twelve," but the "all" that were mentioned by S. Luke a few verses before. He mentions the Apostles by name and then adds, "These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren."

We think of our Lady as sharing in the Pentecostal gift. This was the first act of her ascended Son, this sending forth of the Holy Spirit whom He had promised. It was the fulfilment of the prophecy: "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." I do not know of anything in the teaching of the Church to lead us to suppose that this gift was to the Apostles alone: rather the thought of the Church is that to all Christians is there a gift of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is imparted to the Church as such, and within the organisation He functions through appropriate organs. "There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit." Whatever the operations of God through the Body of Christ, the same divine energy is making them possible. "All these worketh that one and selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will."

That the Holy Spirit should manifest Himself in her life was, of course, no new experience for S. Mary. Her conscious vocation to be the Mother of God had begun when the Holy Ghost had come upon her, and she had conceived that "Holy Thing" which was called the Son of God. And we cannot think that the Spirit Who is the Spirit of sanctity had ever been absent from her from the moment of her wonderful conception when by the creative act of the Spirit she was conceived without sin, that is, in union with God. But as there are diversities of gifts, so the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost would have meant to her some new or increased gift of God.

For the Church as such this coming of the Spirit meant the entrance of the work of the Incarnation upon a new phase of its action. We may, I suppose, think of the work of our Lord during the years of His Ministry as intensive. It was the work of preparing the men to whom was to be committed the commission to preach the Kingdom of God. They had been chosen to be with Him, and their training had been essentially an experience of Him, an experience which was to be the essence of their Gospel and which their mission was to interpret to the world. "Who is this Jesus of Nazareth Whom ye preach? What does He mean?" was to be the question that they would have to answer in the coming years; and they would have to answer it to all sorts of men; to Jews who would find this conception of a suffering and rejected Messiah "a stumbling-block"; to the Greeks who would find "Jesus and the resurrection" "foolishness"; to all races of men who would have to be persuaded to leave their ancestral religions and revolutionise their lives, and before they would do so would wish to know what was the true meaning of Christ in whose name their whole past was challenged. As we watch the perplexity, the bewilderment, of these Apostles in the face of the collapse of all their hopes on the first Good Friday, as we see them struggling with the fact of the Resurrection, and attempting to adjust their lives to that; and then listen to their preaching and follow their action in the days succeeding Pentecost, we have brought home to us the nature of the action of the Holy Spirit when He came to them as the Spirit of Jesus to enable them to carry on the work that Jesus had committed to them.

We understand that the work of the Spirit was first of all the work of interpreting the experience of the last three years. During these years they had been with Jesus, and the result was an experience which, however wonderful, or rather, just because it was wonderful, was in their consciousness at present little more than a chaotic mass of impressions and memories. It was the work of the Spirit to enkindle and illuminate their understanding so that they could put the experiences of the last three years in order, if one may put it in that way. He enabled them to draw out the meaning of what they had gone through. We are at once impressed with the reality of the work of the Spirit when we listen to the sermon of S. Peter to those who have witnessed the miracle of Pentecost. Here is another miracle of which we have, perhaps, missed something of the wonder. This man who in answer to the mockeries of the crowd--"these men are full of new wine"--stands forth to deliver this exposition of Jesus is the same man who but a few days before had denied his Lord through fear; he is the same man who even after the Resurrection was filled with such discouragement that he could think of nothing to do but to return to the old life of a fisherman, who had said on a day, "I go a-fishing." If we wish to understand the meaning of the coming of the Spirit, let us forget for the moment the tongues of fire, which are the symbol, and read over the words of S. Peter which are the true miracle of Pentecost.

And this action of the Spirit is not sporadic or temporary. We follow the annals of the Church and we find the constant evidence of the Spirit's power and action in the Christian propaganda. The courage with which the Christians meet the opposition of Jews and Romans, in their resourcefulness in dealing with the utterly unprecedented problems they are called on to face, in the intellectual grip of the Apologists who have to meet the criticism of very diverse sets of opponents, in their rapidly growing comprehension of what the Incarnation means, and of all in the way of action that our Lord's directions involve,--all these, when we recall the antecedents of these men, lead us to a clearer apprehension of the nature of the Spirit's work in the Church. As our Lord had promised, He is bringing "all things to their remembrance" and "leading them into all the truth." If we need proof of the constant supernatural action of God in the Church, we get all we can ask in the preaching of Jesus by His followers in these opening years of their ministry.

I said that our Lord's work in the time of His ministry was intensive, the preparing of instruments for the founding of the Kingdom. With Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit it passes into a new stage; it becomes extensive in that it now reaches out to gather all men into the Kingdom. To this end there is now a vast development of the machinery (so to call it) of the Gospel, a calling into existence of the means whereby Christ is to continue His action in men's souls. For there must continue a direct action of Christ or the Gospel will sink to the condition of a twice-told tale: it will be the constant repetition of the story of Jesus of Nazareth Who went about doing good: and it will have less and less power to be of any help to men as it receeds into the past. Without the means which are called into existence to produce continual contact between the Redeemer and the Redeemed we cannot conceive of the Gospel continuing to exist as power.