Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

Hail! Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, hail! Our life, our
sweetness, our hope, all hail. To thee we cry, poor exiled
children of Eve. To thee we send up our cries, weeping and
mourning in this vale of tears. Turn, then, Most gracious
Advocate, thy merciful eyes upon us, and now, after this
our exile, show unto us the blessed Fruit of thy womb,
Jesus. O gracious, O merciful, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Anthem from the breviary. Attributed to Hermann Contractus, 1013-54.

here is nothing more wonderful or beautiful, nothing that brings to us a more perfect revelation of our Lord's mind, than this prayer which is recorded for us by S. John. There is in it a complete unfolding of that sympathy and love which we feel to underlie and explain our Lord's mission. As we come to know what God is only when we see Him revealed in Jesus; when we enter into our Lord's saying, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father," so in the revelation of Jesus we understand God's attitude toward us. In Jesus the love of God shows itself, not as an abstract quality, a philosophical conception, but as a burning, passionate eagerness to rescue, an outgoing of God to individual souls. There is a deep personal affection displayed in this final scene in the Upper Chamber. This is our Lord's real parting from His disciples. He will see them again, but under conditions of strain and tragedy, or under such changed circumstances that they cannot well enter into the old intimacy. But here there is no bar to the expression of love. Here He gives them the final evidence of His utter union with them in the humility of the foot-washing. Here He marvellously imparts Himself in the Breaking of the Bread, wherein is consummated His personal union with them. This is the demonstration, if one were needed, that having loved His own, He loved them unto the uttermost.

It is inconceivable that passionate love such as this should ever end. It is a personal relation which must endure while personality endures. It is really the demands of love which more than anything else outside revelation are the evidence of immortality. We are certain that the love of God which in its fulness has been made known in Christ cannot be annihilated by death. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness have I drawn thee." Love such as that must draw men, not only in this world, but in all worlds. If it can draw men out of sin to God, it must create an enduring bond. If it can draw God to men, it must be the revelation of a permanent attitude of God to man. It is a love that goes out beyond the world, that love of which S. Paul says: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Our instinctive thought of the Judgment seems to be of it as condemnation, or, at best, as acquittal. But why not think of it as consummation? Why not think of it as setting the seal of God's approval upon our accomplishment of His will and purpose for us? The final Judgment is surely that,--the entrance of those who are saved into the full joy of their Lord. There once more will our humanity be complete because it is the whole man, not the soul only, but the soul clothed with the body of the resurrection, once more clothed upon with its "house from heaven," which is filled with the joy of the Beatific Vision. The thought of the particular judgment may fill us with dread; but if we are able to look beyond that to the general Judgment at the last day, we shall think only of our perfect bliss in the enjoyment of God.

The belief in the Assumption of our Lady is a belief that in her case that which is the inheritance of all the saints, that they shall rise again with their bodies and be admitted to the Vision of God, has been anticipated. In her, that which we all look forward to and dream of for ourselves, has been attained. She to-day is in God's presence in her entire humanity, clothed with her body of glory.

This teaching, one finds, still causes some searching of hearts among us, and is thought to raise many questions difficult to answer. And it may be admitted at the outset that it is not a truth taught in Holy Scripture but a truth arrived at by the mind of the Church after centuries of thought. Unless we can think of the Church as a divine organism with a continuous life from the day of Pentecost until now, as being the home of the Holy Spirit, and as being continuously guided by Him into all the truth; unless we can accept in their full sense our Lord's promises that He will be with the Church until the end of the world, we shall not find it possible to accept the assumption as a fact, but shall decline to believe that, and not only that but, if we are consistent, many another belief of the Christian Church. But if we have an adequate understanding of what is implied in the continuity of the Church as the organ of the present action of the Holy Spirit, we shall not find that the fact that a given doctrine is not explicitly contained in Holy Scripture is any bar to its acceptance. We shall have learned that the revelation of God in Christ, and our relation to God in Christ, are facts of such tremendous import and inexhaustible content that it would be absurd to suppose that all their meaning had been understood and explicitly stated in the first generation of the Christian Church.

We shall not, then, find it any bar to the acceptance of belief in the assumption of our Lady that its formal statement came, as is said, "late." We simply want to know that when it came it came as the outcome of the mature thought of the Church, the Body of Christ, the Fulness of Him that filleth all in all.

It is to be noted that the assumption is not a wholly isolated fact. There are several cases of assumption in the Old Testament though of a slightly different character in that they were assumptions directly from life without any interval of death. Such were the assumptions of Enoch and Elijah. Moses, too, it has been constantly believed, was assumed into heaven,--in his case after death and with his resurrection body. A case which is more strangely like what is believed to have taken place in the experience of blessed Mary is that closely connected with our Lord's resurrection and recorded by S. Matthew. "And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." Although it is not asserted that these were assumed into heaven, it seems impossible to avoid the inference; and if "many saints which slept" were raised from the dead and assumed into the heavenly world, there can be no a priori difficulty in believing the same thing to have taken place in the Blessed Mother of God. Nay if such a thing as an assumption is at all possible for any human being one would naturally conclude from the very relation of S. Mary to our Lord that the possibility would be realised in her.

And there were elements in her case which were lacking in all the other cases which suggest a certain fitness, if not inevitability, in her assumption. She was conceived without sin,--never had any breath of sin tainted her. Was it then possible that she should be holden by death? Surely, in any case, it was impossible that her holy body should see corruption: we cannot think of the dissolution of that body which had no part in sin. If ever an assumption were possible, here it was inevitable--so the thought of the Church shaped itself. The compelling motives of the belief were theological rather than historical. The germ out of consideration of which was evolved the belief in the assumption was the relation of Blessed Mary to her Son. That unique relation might be expected to carry with it unique consequences, and among these the consequence that the body which was bound by no sin should be reunited to the soul which had needed no purgation, but had passed at once to the presence of its God and its Redeemer who was likewise Son. It is well to stress the fact that the assumption is not only a fact but a doctrine. Fact, of course, it was or there could be no doctrine; but the truth of the fact is certified by the growing conviction in the mind of the Church of the inevitability of the doctrine.