Читать книгу Our Lady Saint Mary - J. G. H. Barry - Страница 14

Table of Contents

And the angel came in unto her, and said,

Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is

with thee; blessed art thou among women.

S. Luke, I. 28

Oh God, whose will it was that thy Word should take flesh, at the message of the Angel, in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, grant to us thy suppliants that, we who believe her to be truly the Mother of God, may be assisted by her intercession with thee. Through &c.

ROMAN.

hen we attempt to reconstruct imaginatively any scene of Holy Scripture it is almost inevitable that we see it through the eyes of some great artist of the past. The Crucifixion comes to us as Dürer or Guido Reni saw it; the Presentation or the Visitation presents itself to us in terms of the imagination of Raphael; we see the Nativity as a composition of Corregio. So the Annunciation rises before us when we close our eyes and attempt to make "the composition of place" in a familiar grouping of the actors: a startled maiden who has arisen hurriedly from work or prayer, looking with wonder at the apparition of an angel who has all the eagerness of one who has come hastily upon an urgent mission. The surroundings differ, but artists of the Renaissance like to think of a sumptuous background as a worthy setting for so great an event.

We keep close to the meaning of Scripture if we set the Annunciation in a room in a cottage of a Palestinian working man. And I like to think of S. Mary at her accustomed work when Gabriel appeared, not with a rush of wings, but as a silent and hardly felt presence standing before her whom the Lord has chosen to be the instrument of His coming. Wonder there would have been, the kind of awe-struck wonder with which the supernatural always fills men; and yet only for a moment, for how could she who was daily living so close to God fear the messenger of God? The thought of angels and divine messengers would be wholly familiar to her. They had been the frequent agents of God in many a crisis of her people's history, and appeared again and again in the story of her ancestors on whose details she had often meditated. Yet in her humility she could but think it strange that an angel should have any message to bear to her.

It is a striking enough scene, as the artists have felt when they tried to put it before us. But no artist has ever been able to go below the surface and by any hint lead us to an appreciation of the vast implications of the moment. This moment of the Annunciation is in fact the central moment of the world's history. No moment before or since has equalled it in its unspeakable wonder, in its revelation of the meaning of God. Not the moment of the creation when all the Sons of God sang together at the vision of the unfolding purpose of God; not the morning of the Resurrection when the empty tomb told of the accomplished overthrow of death and hell. This is the moment toward which all preceding time had moved, and to which all succeeding ages will look back--the moment of the Incarnation of God.

It is well to ask ourselves at this point what the Incarnation means, because our estimate of Blessed Mary as the chosen instrument of God's grace will be influenced by our estimate of that which she was chosen to do. One feels the failure to grasp her position in the work of our redemption often displays a weak hold upon that which is the very heart of God's work--the fact of God made man. The moment of the Annunciation is the moment of the Incarnation: God in His infinite love for mankind is sending forth His Son to be born of a woman in the likeness of our flesh. God the Son, the second Person of the ever adorable Trinity, is entering the womb of this maiden, there to wrap Himself in her flesh and to pass through the common course of a human child's development till He shall reach the hour of the Nativity. When we try to grasp the reach of the divine Love, its depth, its self-forgetfulness, we must stand in the cottage in Nazareth and hear the angelic salutation. And then surely our own hearts cannot fail to respond to the revelation of the divine love; and something of our love that goes out to our hidden Lord, goes out too to the maiden-mother who so willingly became God's instrument in His work for our redemption. In imagination I see S. Gabriel kneeling before her who has become a living Tabernacle of God Most High, and repeating his "Hail, thou that art highly favoured," with the deepest reverence.

"Hail, thou that art full of grace." We linger over this Ave of S. Gabriel, and often it rises to our lips. Perhaps it is with S. Luke's narrative, almost naked in its simplicity, in our hands as we try once more to push our thought deep into the meaning of the scene, that we may understand a little better what has resulted in our experience from the Incarnation of God, and our thought turns to S. Mary whom God chose and brought so near to Himself. Perhaps it is when, with chaplet in hand, we try to imagine S. Mary's feelings at this first of the Joyful Mysteries when the meaning of her vocation comes clearly before her. Hail! thou that art full of grace, of the Living Grace, the very Presence of the divinity itself. The plummet of our thought fails always to reach the depth of that mystery of Mary's Child. It was indeed centuries before the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit thought out and fully stated the meaning of this Child; it was centuries before it fully grasped the meaning of Mary herself in her relation to her divine Son: and after all the centuries of Spirit-guided statement and saintly meditation it still remains that many fail to understand and to make energetic in life the fact of the Incarnation of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

And what was S. Mary's own attitude toward the announcement of the Angel? Her first instinctive word--the word called out by her imperfect grasp of the meaning of the message of S. Gabriel, is: How can this be seeing I know not a man? Are we to infer from these words, as many have inferred, that in her secret thoughts S. Mary had resolved always to remain a virgin, that she had so offered herself to God in the virgin state? Possibly when we remember that such was God's will for her it is not going too far to assume that she had been prompted thus to meet and offer herself to the divine will. Be that as it may there is an obvious and instantaneous assumption that the child-bearing which is predicted to her lies outside the normal and accustomed way of marriage. She clearly does not think that the archangel's words look to her approaching union with S. Joseph, even if the nominal nature of that marriage were not agreed upon. It is clear that her instantaneous feeling is that as the message is supernatural in character, so will its fulfilment be, and the wondering how arises to her lips.

The answer to the how is that what is worked in her is by the power of the Holy Spirit: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."

As so often in the dealing of God with us, that which is put forward as an explanation actually deepens the mystery. It was no abatement of Mary's wonder, nor did it really put away her how when she was told that the Holy Ghost should come upon her and that the child should be the Son of the Highest. And yet this was the only answer to such a question that was possible. Our questions may be met in two ways: either by a detailed explanation, or by the answer that the only explanation is God--that what we are concerned with is a direct working of God outside the accustomed order of nature and therefore outside the reach of our understanding. Such acts have no doubt their laws, but they are not the laws in terms of which we are wont to think.

The question of S. Mary was not a question which implied doubt. It is therefore the proper question with which to approach all God's works. There is a stress with which such questions may be asked which implies on our part unbelief or at least hesitation in belief. It is a not uncommon accent to hear to-day in questions as to divine mysteries. Our recitation of the creed is not rarely invaded by restlessness, shadows of doubt, which perhaps we brush aside, or perhaps let linger in our minds with the feeling that it is safer for our religion not to follow these out. I am afraid that there are not a few who still adhere to the Church who do so with the feeling that it is better for them to go on repeating words that they have become used to rather than to raise questions as to their actual truth; who feel that the faith of the Church rests on foundations which in the course of the centuries have been badly shaken, but that it is safer not to disturb them lest they incontinently fall to pieces.

In other words there is a wide-spread feeling that such stories as this of the Annunciation and of the Virgin birth of our Lord are fables. When we ask, why is there such a feeling? the only answer is that the modern man has become suspicious of the supernatural. Has there anything been found in the way of evidence, we ask, which reflects upon the truth of the story in S. Luke? No, we are told; the story stands where it always did, its evidence is what it always was. What has changed is not the story or the evidence for it but the human attitude toward that and all such stories. The modern mind does not attempt to disprove them, it just disapproves of them, and therefore declines to believe them. It sets them aside as belonging to an order of ideas with which it no longer has any sympathy.

It is no doubt true that we reach many of our conclusions, especially those which govern our practical attitude towards life, from the ground of certain hardly recognised presuppositions, rather than from the basis of thought out principles. The thought of to-day is pervaded by the denial of the supernatural. It insists that all that we know or can know is the natural world about us. It rules out the possibility of any invasions of the natural order and declines to accept such on any evidence whatsoever. All that one has time to say now of such an attitude is that it makes all religion impossible, and sets aside as untrustworthy all the deepest experiences of the human soul. If I were going to argue against this attitude (as I am not able to now) I should simply oppose to it the past experience of the race as embodied in its best religious thought. I should stress the fact that what is noblest and best in the past of humanity is wholly meaningless unless humanity's supposition of a life beyond this life, and of the existence of spiritual powers and beings to whom we are related, holds good. No nation has ever conducted its life on the basis of pure materialism, save in those last stages of its decadence which preluded its downfall.

But without going so far as to reject the supernatural and reject the truth of the immediate intervention of God in life, there are multitudes of men and women whose whole life never moves beyond the natural order. They have no materialistic theory; if you ask them, they think that they are, in some sense not very well defined, Christians. But they have no Christian interests, no spiritual activities of any sort. For all practical purposes God and the spiritual order do not exist for them. They are not for the most part what any one would call bad people; though there seems no intelligible meaning of the word in which they can be called good. The best that one can say of them is that they have a certain usefulness in the present social order though they are not missed when they fall out of it. They can be replaced in the social machine much as a lost or broken part can in an engine. And just as the part of an engine which has become useless where it is, can have no possible usefulness elsewhere, so we are unable to imagine them as capable of adaptation to any other place than that which they have filled here. Perhaps that is what we mean by hell--incapacity to adapt oneself to the life of the future.

All this implies a temper of mind and soul that has rendered itself incapable of vision. For just as our ordinary vision of the beauty of this world depends not only on the existence of the world but on a certain capacity in us to see it, so that the beauty of the world does not at all exist for the man whose optic nerve is paralysed; so the meaning and beauty, nay, the very existence of the supernatural order depends for us upon a capacity in us which we may call the capacity of vision. The sceptic waves aside our stories of supernatural happenings with the brusque statement, "Nobody to-day sees angels. They only appear in an atmosphere of primitive or mediæval superstition, not in the broad intellectual light of the twentieth century." But it may be that the fact (if it be a fact) that nobody sees angels in the twentieth century is due to some other cause than the non-existence of the angels. After all, in any century you see what you are prepared to see, what in other words, you are looking for. It is a common enough phenomenon that the man who lives in the country misses most of the beauty of it. In his search for the potato bug he misses the sunset, and disposes of the primrose on the river's brim as a common weed. It is true that in order to see we need something beside eyes, and to hear we need something beside ears. When on an occasion the Father spoke from heaven to the Son many heard the sound, and some said, "It thundered"; others got so far as to say, "An Angel spake to him."

Let us then in the presence of narratives of supernatural happenings ask our how with a good deal of reverence and a good deal of modesty, not as implying a sceptical doubt on our part, but as a wish that we may be admitted deeper into the meaning of the event. Scepticism simply closes the door through which we might pass to fuller knowledge. The questioning of faith holds the door open. To those who have not closed the door upon the supernatural it is evident that it is permeated with forces and influences which are not material in their origin or their effects; that God acts upon the world now as He has ever acted upon it. If we cannot believe this I do not see that we can believe in God at all in any intelligible sense. There is to me one attitude toward the supernatural that is even more hopeless than the attitude of materialistic scepticism which says, "Miracles do not happen"; and that is the attitude which says, "Miracles happened in Bible times, but have never happened since." As the one attitude seems to imply that God made the world, but after He had made it left it to go on by itself and no more expresses any interest in it; so the other implies that after God put the Christian religion in the world He left that to go on by itself and no longer pays any attention to it. Either to me is wholly unintelligible and inconceivable.

And what is worse, is wholly out of touch with the revelation of God made in Holy Scripture. That displays God working in and through the material universe, and it displays God working in and through the spirit of man; and it in no place implies that either the material world or the human order is so perfect as to need no further divine action. Revelation implies the constant presence and action of God in nature and in the Church; it implies that both have a forward look and are not ends in themselves but are moving on toward some ultimate perfection. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth … waiting for the adoption, that is, the redemption of our body." We look for a new heaven and a new earth; and human society looks to a perfect consummation in the fellowship of the saints in light.

Looking out on life from the spiritual point of vantage, we may hopefully ask our how, and there will be an answer. To blessed Mary S. Gabriel replied: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."--An answer that was full of light and of deepest mystery. The immediate question--the mode of her conception--was cleared up; it would be through the direct action of God the Holy Spirit: but the nature of the Child to be born is filled with mystery. We can imagine S. Mary in the days to come finding her child-bearing quite intelligible in comparison with the mystery that brooded over His nature.

This is the common fact in our dealing with God. We express it when we say that we never get beyond the need of faith. We pray that one thing may be made clear, and the result of the clearing is the deepened sense of the mystery of the things beyond, just as any increase in the power of the telescope clears up certain questions which had been puzzling the astronomers only to carry their vision into vaster depths of space, opening new questions to tantalize the imagination. We find it so always. The solution of any question of our spiritual lives does not lead as perhaps we thought it would lead to there being no longer any questions to perplex us and to draw on our time and our energy; rather such solution puts us in the presence of new and, it may well be, deeper and more perplexing questions. "Are there no limits to the demands of God upon us," we sometimes despairingly ask? And the answer is, "No: there are no limits because the end of the road that we are travelling is in infinity." The limit that is set to our perfecting is the perfection of God, and if we grow through all the years of eternity we shall still have attained only a relative perfection.

So the successful passing of one test cannot be expected to relieve us from all tests in the future. It is the dream of the child that manhood will set it free; and he reaches manhood only to find that it imposes obligations which are so pressing that he reverses his dream and speaks of his childhood as the time of his true freedom. The meeting of spiritual tests is but the proving of spiritual capacity to meet other tests. To our Lady it might well seem that the acceptance of the conditions of the Incarnation was the severest test that God could assign her; that in the light of the promise she could look on to joy. But the future concealed a sword which should pierce her very heart. The promise contained no doubt wonderful things--this wonder of God's blessing that she was now experiencing in the coming of the Holy Ghost, in the very embrace of God Himself: this is but the first of the Joyful Mysteries which were God's great gifts to her. But her life was not to be a succession of Joyful Mysteries, ultimately crowned with the Mysteries of Glory. There were the Sorrowful Mysteries as well. They were as true, and shall we not say, as necessary, as valuable, a part of her spiritual training as the others. She, our Mother, was now near God, with a nearness that was possible for no other human being, and it is one of the traditional sayings of our Lord: "He that is near Me is near fire." And fire burns as well as warms and lights. She is wonderful, the Virgin of Nazareth, in this moment when she becomes Mother of God: and we share in the rapture of the moment when in the fulness of her joy she hardly notices S. Gabriel's departure: but we feel, too, a great pity for her as we think of the coming days. So we kneel to her who is our Mother, as well as Mother of God, and say our Ave, and ask her priceless intercession.

Gabriel, that angel bright,

Brighter than the sun is light,

From heaven to earth he took his flight,

Letare.

In Nazareth, that great city,

Before a maiden he kneeled on knee,

And said, "Mary, God is with thee,

Letare."

"Hail Mary, full of grace,

God is with thee, and ever was;

He hath in thee chosen a place.

Letare."

Mary was afraid of that sight,

That came to her with so great light,

Then said the angel that was so bright,

"Letare."

"Be not aghast of least nor most,

In thee is conceived of the Holy Ghost,

To save the souls that were for-lost.

Letare."

Fifteenth Century.