Our Lady Saint Mary Part 21

Whoe is shee that a.s.sends so high Next the heavenlye Kinge, Round about whome angells flie And her prayses singe?

Who is shee that adorned with light, Makes the sunne her robe, At whose feete the queene of night Layes her changing globe?

To that crowne direct thine eye, Which her heade attyres; There thou mayst her name discrie Wrytt in starry fires.

This is shee, in whose pure wombe Heaven's Prince remained; Therefore, in noe earthly tombe Cann shee be contayned.

Heaven shee was, which held that fire Whence the world tooke light, And to heaven doth now aspire, Fflames with fflames to unite.

Shee that did so clearly shyne When our day begunne, See, howe bright her beames decline Nowe shee sytts with the sunne.

Sir John Beaumont, 1582-1628.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CORONATION

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

Rev. XII, I.

To-day the Angel Gabriel brought the palm and the crown to the triumphant Virgin. To-day he introduced to the Lord of all, her, who was the Temple of the Most High, and the dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

FOR THE a.s.sUMPTION. ARMENIAN.

The heaven which S. John the Evangelist shows us is the continuation of the earthly Church. As we read his pages we feel that entrance there would be a real home-coming for the earnest Christian. We are familiar enough with presentations of heaven which seem to us to be so detached from Christian reality as to lack any human appeal. We think of philosophic presentations of the future with entire indifference. It is possible, we say, that they may be true; but they are utterly uninteresting. It is not so in the visions of S. John. Here we have a heaven which is humanly interesting because it is continous with the present life, and its interests are the interests that it has been the object of our religion to foster. The qualities of character which the Christian religion has urged upon our attention are presented as finding their clear field of development in the world to come. There, too, are unveiled the objects of our adoration, the ever-blessed Three who yet are but one. Love which has striven for development under the conditions and limitations of our earthly life, which has tried to see G.o.d and has gone out to seek Him in the dimness of revelation, now sees and is satisfied. Whom now we see in a mirror, enigmatically, we shall then see face to face.

And it is a heaven thronged with saints, with men and women who have gone through the same experiences as those to which we are subjected, and have come forth purified and triumphant. We sometimes in discouragement think of life as continuous struggle. It is perhaps natural and inevitable that we should thus concentrate attention upon the present, but if we lift our eyes so as to clear them from the mists of the present we see that it is far from a hopeless struggle, but rather the necessary discipline from which we emerge triumphant. Those saints whom we see rejoicing about the throne of G.o.d, those who go out to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, pa.s.sed through the struggle of persecution to their triumphant attainment of the Vision. It is our eternal temptation to expect to triumph here; but it is only in a very limited sense that this can be true: our triumph is indeed here, but the enjoyment of it and all that is implied in it is elsewhere. Here even our most complete achievement is conditioned by the limitations of earth: there the limitations are done away and life expands in perfectness.

So we look eagerly through the door that is opened in heaven as those who are looking into their future home. That is what we all are striving for--presumably. We are consciously selecting out of life precisely those elements, are centering on those interests, which have eternal significance and are imperishable values. As we travel along the Pilgrim Way it is with hearts uplifted and stimulated by the Vision of the end.

We advance as seeing Him Who is invisible. We live by hope, knowing that we shall attain no enduring satisfaction until we pa.s.s through the gates into the City, and mingle with the throng of worshippers who sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb. Therefore our life is always forward-looking and optimistic: because we are sure of the end, we wait for it with patience and endurance, thankful for all the experience of the Way. As the years flow by we do not look back on them with regret as the unrenewable experiences of a vanished youth, but we think of them as the bearers of experiences by which we have profited, and of goods which we have safely garnered, waiting the time when their stored values can be fully realised.

Over all the saints whom the Church has seen rejoicing in the heavenly life, rises the form of Mary, Mother of G.o.d. S. John's vision of the "great sign in heaven" in its primary meaning has, no doubt, reference to the Church itself; but the form of its symbolism would be impossible if there were not a secondary reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the thought of her and of her office as Mother of the Redeemer that has determined the form of the vision. The details are too clear to permit of doubt, and such has been the constant mind of Catholic interpreters.

And how else than as Queen of the heavenly host should we expect her to be represented? What does the Church teaching as to sanct.i.ty 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 G.o.d, being made a partaker of the divine nature, and develops through sacramental experience and constant response to the will of G.o.d to that spiritual capacity which is the medium of the Beatific Vision and which we call sanct.i.ty or purity. "The pure in heart shall see G.o.d."

But the teaching of the Church also implies that there is a marvellous diversity in the sanct.i.ty of the members of the Body of Christ. Each saint retains his personal characteristics, and his sanct.i.ty 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 G.o.d; 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 mult.i.tudes 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 sanct.i.ty of them diverse in experience but different in degree. All men have not the same capacity for sanct.i.ty, we infer; all cannot develop to the same level of attainment. We may perhaps say that while all partake of G.o.d, all do not reflect G.o.d 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 G.o.d, when the bond of union was so much as strained,--is the completest embodiment of the grace of G.o.d. That is, I think, essentially what is meant by the Coronation of our Lady,--that her supremacy in sanct.i.ty 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 sanct.i.ty and been admitted to the Beatific Vision. They achieved sanct.i.ty here--that is, in the past. They achieved it under an infinite variety of circ.u.mstanies,--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 princ.i.p.al reasons can we best study it there. In the first place because of its completeness: nowhere else are all the elements of sanct.i.ty 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 sanct.i.ty 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 G.o.d. She appears as utterly selfless, as having devoted herself to the will of G.o.d 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 _G.o.d_, 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 G.o.d--G.o.d 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 G.o.d is going to mean; but whatever G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

And cannot we get the same att.i.tude toward life? In the acceptance of the Christian Religion what we have accepted is G.o.d. 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 G.o.d--"Not yours but you."

And because the limit of our willingness is reached in contribution and does not extend to sacrifice, we fail.

But Blessed Mary did not fail because there was no limit to her willingness to sacrifice. Her will to sacrifice had the same limitless quality as her love; and because of the limitless quality of her self-giving her growth in the life of union was unlimited, or limited only by the limitations of creaturehood. When therefore we think of her to-day as Queen of Saints we are not thinking of an arbitrarily conferred position; we are thinking of a position which comes to her because she is what she is. She through the unstinting sacrifice of her love came into more intimate relations with G.o.d than is possible for any other, and through that relation came to know more of the mind of G.o.d than any other. The power of her intercession is the power of her understanding, of her sympathy with the thoughts of G.o.d. When we come to her with our request for her intercession we feel that we are sure of her sympathy and her understanding. Her experience of human life, we think, was not very wide: can she whose life was pa.s.sed under such narrow conditions understand the complex needs of the modern man or woman? It is true that her actual experience of human life was not very wide; but her experience of G.o.d is very wide indeed, and she is able to understand our experience better than we can understand it ourselves because of her understanding of G.o.d's mind and will. It is seeing life through G.o.d's eyes that reveals the truth about it.

Hence the blunder and the tragedy of those who seek to know life by experience, when they mean experience gained by partic.i.p.ation in life's evil as well as in its good. They succeed in soiling life rather than in understanding it; for partic.i.p.ation in evil effectually prevents our understandings of good. It is on the face of things that the farther a man goes into sin, the less is righteousness intelligible to him. Our Lord's rule "He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine" is not an arbitrary maxim, but embodies the deepest psychological truth. There is but one path to full understanding, and that is the path of sympathy. And therefore are we sure of our Lady's understanding and come to her unhesitatingly for the help of her intercession. She understands our case because she sees it revealed in the mind of her Son.

It cannot be questioned that much of the weakness of religion to-day is due to the fact that Christian ideals make but faint appeal. By many they are frankly repudiated as impossible of attainment in a world such as this, and as weakening to human character so far as they are attained. Christians, of course, are unable to take this point of view, and, therefore, they treat the ideals with respect, but continue to govern their lives by motives which are not harmonious with them. It is tacitly a.s.sumed on all sides that a consistent pursuit of Christians ideals will a.s.sure failure in social or business life. This, of course, is tantamount to a confession that social and business life are unchristian, and raises the same sort of grave questions as to the duty of a Christian as were raised in the early days of the Church under the heathen empire. With that, however, we may not concern ourselves now. We are merely concerned to note and to emphasise the fact that, whatever may be true of society or business, our religion is lamentably ineffective because of its failure to emphasise the ideals of sanct.i.ty and to present those ideals as the ideals of _all_ Christian life, not as the ideals of a select few. While religious teachers asquiesce in the present set of compromises as an adequate expression of Christian character, we may expect a decline in the Church as a spiritual force, whatever may be true of it as a social force.

If Christian ideals are to resume their appeal to the membership of the Church as a whole it is requisite that they be studied by the clergy and intelligently presented. But little is to be hoped in this direction so long as our theological training ignores religion and concentrates its attention on something that it takes for scholarship. The raw material that is sent by our parishes to the seminaries to be educated for Holy Orders is commonly turned out of the seminary with less religion that it entered. The outlook for the presentation of Christian ideals is not hopeful. We seem destined to drift on indefinitely in our habitual compromises.

All the more is it necessary that we should lift our eyes to the heavens where humility and meekness, where sacrifice and obdience, are, in the person of Blessed Mary, crowned as the most perfect expression of sanct.i.ty, as the qualities that raise man nearest G.o.d. And what consoles us in the present depressing circ.u.mstances of the Church is that we are permitted to look through S. John's eyes into the world of heaven, and there see "a great mult.i.tude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and with palms in their hands." Somehow, we feel, under whatever distressing and discouraging circ.u.mstances, the work of G.o.d in the regeneration of souls goes on. No doubt it is a work that is largely hidden from our eyes, from those eyes which are blinded to the reality of spiritual things. Humility and meekness are the qualities of a hidden life; they do not flaunt themselves before men's eyes. But in their silence and obscurity great souls are growing up, growing to the spiritual status of the saints of G.o.d. In our estimate of values we shall do well to lay to heart the utterances of WISDOM: "Then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness before the face of such as have afflicted him, and made no account of his labours. When they see it, they shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the strangeness of his salvation, so far beyond all that they had looked for. And they repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit shall say among themselves, This is he, whom we had sometime in derision, and a proverb of reproach: we fools accounted his life madness, and his end without honour: how is he numbered among the children of G.o.d, and his lot is among the saints! Verily we went astray from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness shined not unto us, and the sun of righteousness rose not upon us."

When we have attained to the point of view as to life's value which is expressed in the ideal of sanct.i.ty then we shall know how to estimate at their true worth the constant criticisms which are directed against those ideals and those who seek them. The saints, we are told, were no doubt estimable men and women, but they were weak, and for the purpose of the world's work, useless. But is this true, to keep to a specific example, of the Blessed Virgin Mary? What is there about her life that suggests weakness? And what can be the meaning of calling such a life useless to the world? Take but one aspect of it. It has for centuries furnished an ideal of womanhood. It is contended that the women who have taken Blessed Mary for their ideal have shown themselves weak and useless?--that those women are stronger in character and of more value to the world who have thrown over the ideals of sanct.i.ty and built their lives upon the social ideals prevalent at present? I no not care to attempt any characterisation of the feminine ideal which is commended to us at present; it is sufficient to say that it is difficult to understand how it can be considered socially valuable; still less how it can be considered an advance on the character qualities which distinguish the Christian ideal of sanct.i.ty.

In the midst of the present confusion of values it is for us of vast significance that we have in this matter the mind of Christ. There need be no confusion in our minds. What Christ commended has proved to be practical of accomplishment, the evidence of which is the great mult.i.tude which no man can number who to-day sing about the throne of G.o.d and of the Lamb. What G.o.d approves is evidenced by the Coronation of the Blessed Mother over all the mult.i.tudes of the saints of G.o.d. Blessed Mary is the embodied thought of G.o.d for humanity, the realised ideal of a human life. He that is mighty hath magnified her, till she shines resplendent in spiritual qualities over all the hosts of the elect.

But though so highly exalted she is not thereby removed to an inaccessible distance. She who is privileged to bear the incredible t.i.tle, MOTHER OF G.o.d is our Mother as well. Upon the Cross our Lord said to us in the person of His beloved Disciple, "Behold thy Mother"; and it is a mother's love that we find flowing to us from the heart of Mary. Have we been cold to her, and inappreciative of her love? Have we felt that we have no need of her in the conduct of our lives? If so, what we have been doing is to isolate ourselves from the divinely provided fount of human sympathy which ever flows from our star-crowned Mother. Is life so rich in sources of help and sympathy and love that we can afford to over-pa.s.s the eagerness of G.o.d's saints to help us, the willingness of the very Mother of G.o.d to intercede? Is not the life that shuts out from itself the society of heaven pitifully impoverished?

Too many of us are like the man who owned the field wherein was the buried treasure. Limitless aid is at our disposal, but on condition that we want it and will seek it. Let us try to understand what it is to have at our disposal the love and sympathy of the saints of G.o.d,--that they are not remote inhabitants of a distant sphere whose present interests have led to forgetfulness of what they once were, whose present joy is so intense as to make them self-centred, but that their very attainment of perfection implies the perfection of their love and the completeness of their sympathy. The perfection of G.o.d's saints and their attainment of the end of their course in the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, has but made them more sensitive of our needs and more eager to help.

The spiritual wisdom and power of the Mother of G.o.d is at our disposal to-day. To the feebleness of our prayers may be added the spiritual wisdom and strength of her intercession. He Whose will it is that we should pray for one another, wills too that the prayers of His Blessed Mother should be at the disposal of all who call upon her. Let us take the fact of the intercession of the Queen of Saints seriously as a source of power ever open to us.

Thou who art G.o.d's Mother and also ours, thou who lookst constantly into the Face of the Son, thou who art the fullest manifestation of the love of the Blessed Trinity, thou Mary, our Mother, pray for us now and in the hour of our death.

All hail, O Virgin crowned with stars and moon under thy feet, Obtain us pardon of our sins of Christ, our Saviour sweet; For though thou art Mother of any G.o.d, yet thy humility Disdaineth not this simple wretch that flies for help to thee.

Thou knowest thou art more dear to me than any can express, And that I do congratulate With joy thy happiness.

Thou who art the Queen of Heaven and Earth thy helping hand me lend, That I may love and praise my G.o.d and have a happy end.

And though my sins me terrify, yet hoping still in thee, I find my soul refreshed much when to thee I do flee; For thou most willingly to G.o.d pet.i.tions dost present, And dost obtain much grace for us in this our banishment.

The honour and the glorious praise by all be given to thee, Which Jesus thy beloved Son, ordained eternally; For thee whom he exalts in heaven above the angels all, And whom we find a Patroness when unto thee we call.

O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.

Dame Gertrude More, O.S.B.

Ob. 1633.