Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

And how else than as Queen of the heavenly host should we expect her to be represented? What does the Church teaching as to sanctity imply?

It implies the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision. The normal Christian life begins in the sacramental act by which the regenerate child is made one with God, being made a partaker of the divine nature, and develops through sacramental experience and constant response to the will of God to that spiritual capacity which is the medium of the Beatific Vision and which we call sanctity or purity. "The pure in heart shall see God."

But the teaching of the Church also implies that there is a marvellous diversity in the sanctity of the members of the Body of Christ. Each saint retains his personal characteristics, and his sanctity is not the refashioning of his character in a common mould but the perfecting of his character on its own lines. We sometimes hear it said that the Christian conception of heaven is monotonous, but that is very far from being the fact. It is only those conceptions of heaven which have excluded the communion of saints, and have thought of heaven as the solitary communion of the soul with God; which have in other words, excluded the notion of human society from heaven, which have appeared monotonous. As we read any series of the lives of the saints, and realise that it is these men and women and multitudes of others like them, that make up the society of heaven, we get rid of any other notion than that of endless diversity. And thus studying individual saints we come to understand that not only is the sanctity of them diverse in experience but different in degree. All men have not the same capacity for sanctity, we infer; all cannot develop to the same level of attainment. We may perhaps say that while all partake of God, all do not reflect God in the same way or in the same degree.

But if there be a hierachy of saints it is impossible that we should think of any other at its head than Blessed Mary. Whatsoever diversity there may be in the attainments of the saints, there is one saint who is pre-eminent in all things, who,--because in her case there has never been any moment in which she was separate from God, when the bond of union was so much as strained,--is the completest embodiment of the grace of God. That is, I think, essentially what is meant by the Coronation of our Lady,--that her supremacy in sanctity makes her the head of the heirarchy of saints, that in her the possibilities of the life of union have been developed to the highest degree through her unstained purity and unfailing response to the divine will.

It is of the last importance, if the Catholic conceptions are to be influential in our lives, that we should gain such a hold on the life of heaven, the life that the saints, with Saint Mary at their head, are leading to-day, as shall make it a present reality to us, not a picture in some sort of dreamland. Our lives are shaped by their ideals; and although we may never attain to our ideals here, yet we shall never attain them anywhere unless we shape them here. Heaven must be grasped as the issue of a certain sort of life, as the necessary consequence of the application of Christian principles to daily living. It is wholly bad to conceive it as a vague future into which we shall be ushered at death, if only we are "good"; it must be understood as a state we win to by the use of the means placed at our disposal for the purpose. Those attain to heaven in the future who are interested in heaven in the present.

And a study of the means is wholly possible for us because we have at hand in great detail the lives of those whom the Church, by raising them to her altars, has guaranteed to us as having achieved sanctity and been admitted to the Beatific Vision. They achieved sanctity here--that is, in the past. They achieved it under an infinite variety of circumstanies,--that is the encouragement. They now enjoy the fruits of it in the world of heaven,--that is the promise.

And nowhere can we better turn for the purpose of our study than to the life of Blessed Mary. There is the consummate flower of sainthood; and therefore it it best there that we can study its meaning. And for two principal reasons can we best study it there. In the first place because of its completeness: nowhere else are all the elements of sanctity so well developed. And in the second place because of the riches of the material for understanding Blessed Mary that is placed at our disposal by the labour of many generations of saints and doctors. All that devout meditation can do to understand the sanctity of Blessed Mary has been done.

Our limit is necessarily reduced, our selection partial and our accomplishment fragmentary. We cannot however miss our way if we follow in the steps of Holy Revelation in making love the central quality. S. Mary's greatness is ultimately the greatness of her love. It began as a love of the will of God. She appears as utterly selfless, as having devoted herself to the will of God as He shall manifest that will. And therefore when the time comes she makes the great sacrifice that is asked of her without hesitation and without effort: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." And all her life henceforth is loving response to what is unfolded as the content of the accepted revelation. That is a noteworthy thing that I fancy is often missed. It is not uncommon for one to accept a vocation as a whole, and then subsequently, as it unfolds, shrink from this or that detail of it. But in the case of S. Mary the acceptance of the vocation meant the acceptance of God, and there was no holding back from the result of that.

That must be our guide in the pursuit of the heavenly life: we must understand that we are not called to accept this or that belief or practice, but are called to accept God--God speaking to us through the revelation He has entrusted to His Catholic Church. We do not, when we make our act of acceptance, know all or very much of what God is going to mean; but whatever God turns out to mean in experience, there can be no holding back. The note of a true acceptance of vocation is precisely this limitless surrender, a surrender without reservation. S. Mary could by no means understand what was to be asked of her: she only knew it was God Who asked it. She could not foresee the years of the ministry when her Son would not have where to lay His head, followed by the anxiety of Holy Week and the watch by the Cross on Good Friday; but as these things came she could understand them as involved in her vocation, in her acceptance of God.

And cannot we get the same attitude toward life? In the acceptance of the Christian Religion what we have accepted is God. We have acknowledged the supremacy of a will outside ourselves. We say, "we are not our own, we are bought with a price," the price of the Precious Blood. But if our acceptance is a reality and not a theory it will turn out to involve much more than we imagined at the first. The frequent and pathetic failures of those who have made profession of Christianity is largely accounted for by this,--that the demands of the Christian Religion on life turn out to be more searching and far-reaching than was supposed would be the case. Religion turns out to be not one interest to be adjusted to the other interests of life, but to be a demand that all life and action shall be controlled by supernatural motive. Those who would willingly give a part, find it impossible to surrender the whole. The world is full of Young Rulers who are willing "to contribute liberally to the support of religion," but shrink from the demand that they "sell all." "I seek not yours, but you," S. Paul writes to the Corinthians; and that is also the seeking of God--"Not yours but you." And because the limit of our willingness is reached in contribution and does not extend to sacrifice, we fail.