Our Lady Saint Mary Part 18

And since we have obtained thy help and thy meditation, O, thou holy, pure, and perfect one!

We fear not but that we shall put our enemies to flight and scatter them.

We have taken unto us the shelter of thy mighty help in all things like a shield.

And we pray, and beseech thee that we may call upon thee, O Mother of G.o.d, so that thou deliver us through thy prayers.

And that thou mayest raise us up again from the sleep of darkness, to offer praise through the might of G.o.d Who took flesh in thee.

COPTIC.

There would be no doubt of the finality of our Lord's physical withdrawal this time. As the group of disciples stood on the hilltop in Galilee and watched the clouds close about Him, they would feel that this was the end of the kind of intercourse to which they had been accustomed. The past Forty Days would have done much to prepare them for the separation. Their conception of our Lord's work as issuing in the establishment of an earthly Kingdom had been swept away; the changed terms of their intercourse with Him in the resurrection state had emphasised the change that had taken place; His teaching during these weeks which was centered on the work of the future in which they were to carry on the mission He had initiated; all these elements prepared them for the definite withdrawal of the ascension. Nevertheless we can understand the wrench that must have been involved in His actual withdrawal. We face the dying of some one we love. We know that it is a matter of weeks; the weeks shorten to days, and we are "prepared" for the death; but what we mean is that the death will not take us by surprise. However prepared we may be, the pain of parting will be a quite definite pain; there is no way of avoiding that.

We know that there was no way for the disciples to avoid the pain of the going of Jesus. It was not the same sort of pain that they felt now, as they gazed up from the hill top to the cloud drifting into the distance, as the pain that had been theirs as they hurried trembling and affrighted through the streets of Jerusalem on the afternoon of the Crucifixion. This pain had no sting of remorse for a duty undone, or of fear for a danger to be met. It was the calm pain of love in the realisation that the parting is final.

We know that among the group that watched the receding cloud the eyes that would linger longest and would find it hardest to turn away would be those of the Blessed Mother. Her mission about our Lord during all these past years had been a very characteristically womanly mission, a mission of silence and help and sympathy. She was with the women who ministered to Him, never obtrusive, never self-a.s.sertive; but always ready when need was. It was the silent service of a great love. That is the perfection of service. There are types of service which claim reward or recognition. We are not unfamiliar in the work of the Kingdom with people who have to be cajoled and petted and made much of because of what they do. Verily, they have their reward. But the type we are considering, of which the Blessed Mother is the highest expression, is without thought of self, being wholly lost in the wonder of being permitted to serve G.o.d at all. To be permitted to give one's time and personal ministry to our Lord in His Kingdom and in His members is so splendid a grace of G.o.d that all thought of self is lost in the joy of it. We know that S. Mary could have had no other thought than the offering of her love in whatever way it was permitted to express itself; and we know that the quality of that love was such that the moment of the ascension would have left her desolate, watching the cloud that veiled Him from her eyes.

All of which does not mean that we are wrong when we speak of the ascension as one of the "Glorious Mysteries" of S. Mary. There we are viewing it in its wide bearing as S. Mary would come to view it in a short while. When the meaning of the ascension became plain, when under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, S. Mary was able to view her Son as "the One Mediator between G.o.d and man, the man Christ Jesus," when she was able to think of the human nature that G.o.d had taken from her as permanently enthroned in heaven,--then would all this be to her creative of intense joy. We, seeing so clearly what the ascension essentially meant, can think of it as a mystery of intense joy, but as our Lord pa.s.sed away from sight the pa.s.sing would for the moment be one last stab of the sword through this so-often wounded heart.

There would be no lingering upon the hill top. The angel messengers press the lesson that the life before them is a life of eager contest, of energetic action. Jesus had indeed gone in the clouds of heaven, but they were reminded that there would be a reappearance, a coming-again in the clouds of heaven, and in the meantime there was much to do, work that would require their self-expenditure even unto death. Back must they go to Jerusalem and there await the opening of the next act of the drama of the Kingdom of G.o.d.

As we turn to the Epistles of the New Testament and to the slowly shaping theology of the early Church, we find set out for us the nature of our Lord's heavenly activity; we see the full meaning of His Incarnation. The human nature which the Son of G.o.d a.s.sumed from a pure Virgin, He a.s.sumed permanently. He took it from the tomb on the resurrection morning, he bore it with Him from the Galilean hill to the very presence of uncreated G.o.d. When the Gates lift and admit the Conqueror to heaven, what enters heaven is our nature, what is enthroned at the Right Hand of G.o.d is man, forever united to G.o.d. And when we ask, "What is the purpose of this?" The answer is that it is the continual purpose of the incarnation, the purpose of mediatorship between the created and the uncreated, between G.o.d and man. The constant purpose of the incarnation is mediation--of the need of mediation there is no end.

Our Lord's work was not finished, though there are those who appear to believe that it was finished, when, as a Galilean Preacher He had taught men of the Father: nor was it finished when He bought redemption for us on the Cross, and triumphing over death in the resurrection, returned to heaven at the ascension. There is a very real sense in which we can say that all those acts were the preliminaries of His work, were what made the work possible. We then mean by His work the age-long work of building the Kingdom of Heaven, and through it bringing souls to the Father. To insist perhaps over-much: We are not saved by the memory of what our Lord did, we are saved by what He now does. We are saved by the present application to us of the work that was wrought in the years of His earthly life.

We need to grasp this living and present character of our Lord's work if we will understand the meaning of His mediation. There is a gulf between the divine, the purely spiritual, and the human, which needs some bridge to enable the human to cross it. That bridge was thrown across in the incarnation when G.o.d and man became united in the Person of the second Person of the ever blessed Trinity. When G.o.d the Son became incarnate, G.o.d and man were forever united and the door of heaven was about to swing open. Henceforth from the demonstrated triumph of our Lord in the Ascension the Kingdom of Heaven is open to all believers, and there is an ever-ready way of approach to G.o.d the Blessed Trinity by the Incarnate Person of the Son Who is the One Mediator between G.o.d and man.

Whoever approaches G.o.d, whoever would reach to the Divine, must approach by that path, the path of Jesus Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

He is the Way to G.o.d: and that Way is one that we follow by partic.i.p.ation in His nature, by being taken up into Him. We do not reach G.o.d by thinking about our Lord, or by believing about our Lord: thinking and believing are the preliminaries of action. There are wonderful riches in the King's Treasury, but you do not get them because you think of them or because you believe that they are there. You get them when you go after them. And you get the ends of the Christian Religion not because you believe them to exist, but because you go after them in the way in which Christ directed. Inasmuch as He is the Way to the Father, we reach the Father by being made one with the Son, by being made a member of Him, by being taken into Him in the life of union. "No man cometh unto the Father but by me," He says. And the process of coming is by believing all that He said and acting upon His Word to the uttermost.

Those who by partaking of the Sacraments are in Christ have pa.s.sed by His mediation to the knowledge of the Father.

For a road can be travelled in either direction. Christ is the road by which we come to the Father, to partic.i.p.ation in the life of the Blessed Trinity; but also we can think of Him as the road by which the Father comes to us. We can think of ourselves as drawing near to G.o.d in His Beloved Son: I love to think the other way of the road, of G.o.d drawing near to me, of G.o.d pouring of His riches into human life and elevating that life to His very Self. I like to think of the Christian life as a life to which G.o.d continually communicates Himself, till we are filled "with all the fulness of G.o.d." Can we imagine any more wonderful expression of the life of holiness to which we are called than that? We "grow up into Him in all things." That is the true account of the Christian life, not some thin and dull routine of moral duty, but the spiritual adventure of the road that travels out into the infinite pursuit of spiritual accomplishment till it is lost in the very heart of G.o.d.

This was the starting point of Blessed Mary. She was filled with all the fulness of G.o.d from the moment of her conception, and was never separated from the joy of the great possession. We are born in sin and have to travel the road to the very end. Yet we, too, begin in union, because we are born of our baptism into Christ soon after our natural birth, and our problem is to achieve in experience the content of our birthright. In other words: our feet are set in the Way from the beginning, and our part is to keep to the Way and not wander to the right hand or to the left; that this may be possible for us Christ lived and died and to-day is at the Right Hand of the Father where He ever liveth to make intercession for us. We need never walk without Christ.

The weariness of the journey is sustained by His constant and ready help. The way is lighted by the Truth which is Himself, and the life that we live is His communicated life. "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." There are those who find the road G.o.dward, the road of the Christ-life, wearisome because they keep their eyes fixed on the difficulties of the way and treat each step as though it were a separate thing and not one step in a wonderful journey. The way to avoid the weariness of the day's travel is to keep one's eye fixed on the end, to raise the eyes to the heavens where Jesus sitteth enthroned at the Right Hand of the Father. The day's song is the Sursum Corda,--"Lift up your hearts unto the Lord!"

The mediatorial office of our Lord is exercised chiefly through His Sacrifice. He ever liveth to make intercession for us; and this intercession is the presentation of the Sacrifice that He Himself offered once for all in Blood upon the Cross, and forever presents to the Father in heaven "one unending sacrifice." This heavenly oblation of our Lord which is the means wherethrough we approach pure Divinity, is also the Sacrifice of the Church here on earth. The heavenly Altar and the earthly Altar are but one in that there is but one Priest and one Victim here and there. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the Church's presentation of her Head as her means of approach to G.o.d, as the ground of all her prayers. These prayers make their appeal through Jesus Who died and rose again for us and is on the Right Hand of Power. We know of no other way of approach, we plead no other merit as the hope of our acceptance. Let us be very clear about this centrality of our Lord's mediation because I shall presently have certain things to say which are often a.s.sumed to be in conflict with his Mediatorial Office, but which in reality do not so conflict, but exist at all because of the Office.

We approach Divinity, then, through our Lord's humanity; and we at once see how that teaching, so common to-day, which denies the Resurrection of our Lord's Body, and believes simply in the survival of His human soul strikes at the very heart of the Catholic Religion. If Revelation be true, our approach to G.o.d is rendered possible because there is a Mediator between G.o.d and man, the MAN Christ Jesus. All our prayers have explicitly, or implicitly, this fact in view. All our Ma.s.ses are a pleading of this fact.

How great is our joy and confidence when we realise this! We come together, let us say, on Sunday morning at the High Ma.s.s. We are coming to offer the Blessed Sacrifice of our Lord's Body and Blood. But who, precisely, is to make the offering? When we ask what this congregation is, what is the answer? The congregation is the congregation of Christ's Flock: it is the Body of Christ gathered together for the worship of Almighty G.o.d. The act that is to be performed is the act of a Body, not primarily of individuals. Our partic.i.p.ation in the act of worship in the full sense of partic.i.p.ation is conditioned upon our being members of the Body. If we are not members of the Body we have no recognised status as worshippers. No doubt we each one have our individual aspirations and needs which we bring with us, but they are the needs and aspirations of a member of the Body of Christ, and our ability to unite them with the act that is to be performed grows out of our status as members of the Body; as such, we join our own intention to the sacrificial act and make our pet.i.tions through it. But we are here as offerers of the Sacrifice, and may not neglect our official significance, and attempt to turn the Ma.s.s into a private act of worship.

We, then, the Body of Christ in this place, offer the Sacrifice of Christ. What is the status of the priest? He is a differentiated organ of the Body, not created by the Body, but created by G.o.d in the creation of the Body. He is not separate from the Body, an official imposed upon it from the outside, nor is he a creation of the Body set apart to act upon its behalf. He is one mode of the expression of the Body's life--the Body could not perfectly perform its functions without him any more than a physical body can perfectly function without a hand or an eye. But neither has the priest any existence apart from the Body of which he is a function. The Sacrifice that he offers is not his on behalf of the Body, but the Body's own Sacrifice which is made through his agency.

But a complete body has a head; and of the Body which is the Church the Head is Christ. We, the members, have our life from Him, the Head; we are able at all to act spiritually because of our union with Him. He is our life; and the acts of the Body are ultimately the acts of the Head.

The Sacrifice which the Body offers as the means of its approach to Divinity is One Sacrifice of the Head: and the priestly function of the Body has any vitality because it is Christ Who is its life, Who functions through the priest, Who is, in fact, the true Priest. He Himself is both Sacrifice and Priest; and that which is offered here is indentical with that which is offered there.

Our life flows from our Head, is the life of Christ in us. So closely are we a.s.sociated with Him that we are called His members, the instrument through which His life expresses itself, through which He acts. By virtue of the life of Christ of which all we are partakers, we are not only members of Christ, but members one of another. Our spiritual life is not our own affair, but we have duties one to another, and all the members of the Body are concerned in our exercise of our gifts, have, in fact, claims on the exercise of them.

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 G.o.d" 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 G.o.d? 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 G.o.d?" 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d.

And in none is there such sympathetic understanding because in none is there such nearness to G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s, Without a break, through shining gla.s.s, 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 Sh.o.r.eham's translation from the Latin, or French of Robt. Grosseteste; C. 1325.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

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 G.o.d, Virgin ever blessed, glorious and n.o.ble, chaste and inviolate, O Mary Immaculate, chosen and beloved of G.o.d, endowed win singular sanct.i.ty, 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, G.o.d 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.

"When 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d had begun when the Holy Ghost had come upon her, and she had conceived that "Holy Thing" which was called the Son of G.o.d. And we cannot think that the Spirit Who is the Spirit of sanct.i.ty 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d.