Getting to the Point: Mary

Showing posts with label Mary. Show all posts

Saturday, August 15, 2015

'Whoever God Loves Never Ceases To Be'

Happy Feast of the Assumption, everyone. Mary is assumed body and soul into heaven as the first fruits of the Resurrection, and heaven and earth rejoice at the sight. We are celebrating the day in full Madonna House festive style, which I will tell you about tomorrow, God willing.

Meanwhile, I thought for my blog today I would share a bit of my licentiate thesis on the theme of the Assumption. It’s a bit longer than usual, and just a bit ‘high brow’, but it’s a while since I had anything like that on the blog, and highbrow or not, it’s really such a beautiful dogma of our faith, ancient in origin, recent in infallible promulgation, entirely joyful and lovely. So, after the jump, here it is:

How Do You Respond?

This weekly commentary on the Mass has taken us to the Responsorial Psalm, coming after the Old Testament reading. Last week I talked about how the O.T. as a whole in a sense signifies the entire experience of humanity ‘B.C.’, before Christ, the natural state of man in all his messy jumbled-up pastiche of good and evil, sickness and health, strength and weakness, virtue and sin.

And all of this is met throughout the Old Testament, and throughout our life, by the intervention of God, the action of God finding us where we are, however bloody and brutal it may be, to take us step by step to where He is. This is the whole meaning of grace in our theological language and in our lives.

Grace is the healing hand of God extending outwards to the human race, individually and communally, ultimately and essentially in the action of Jesus Christ made present by the gift of the Spirit. It finds us where we are now—whatever aspect of ‘B.C.’ there is yet in us, to bear us and sustain us into the life of the kingdom, the innermost communion of the Trinity.

I have been pondering quite a bit this summer that our capacity to receive and benefit from this constant outreach of God’s grace into our lives hinges largely upon this word that we are at in the liturgy. Namely, the word response. God is acting, always. But His action only finds a home in us and is effective in us in the measure with which we respond to it.

And so we have in the liturgy, after the reading, the responsory. There is a basic pattern of Christian life laid down here. God’s truth, and our response. God’s action, and our answering action. Our belief, of course, is that even this answering action is itself only possible by grace, but there is nonetheless the innermost core of human freedom (mystery of mysteries, truly) where we have to choose what our fate will be in these matters.

I am doing a whole series on the psalms, of course, on this blog every Monday, so won’t say too much about them specifically here. The response offered in them, though, is telling—the psalms contain every possible shade of human response to God: supplication, praise, thanksgiving, lamentation, complaint, sober reflection, submission.

The key thing here is that they, and we, respond. And this needs to be the fundamental shape of our life, then. God is acting each day upon us and on our behalf. There are graces flowing down upon and all around us continually, right now as I write this and you read it. God is doing something, right now.

Our entry into and cooperation with whatever God is doing right now hinges upon our capacity to respond to it. This is the deep meaning of the Madonna House spirituality of the ‘duty of the moment’, that as we attend to whatever love is asking of us at any given moment we enter an encounter with God in Christ and so His work in us advances to completion.

It is also the deep significance of prayer in our life, not a constant ‘gimme, gimme, gimme’ of selfish wants, but our fundamental response to what has already been ‘given, given, given.’ Our praise, our gratitude, our surrender, our yes to all of it. Like Mary at the Annunciation, God continually sends an ‘angel’, a messenger announcing to us the deed He is doing right now in our lives, in the duty of the moment. But our response, like hers, is necessary.

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum—let it be done to me according to Thy Word. Call, and response; action, and answering action. The work of God, and the work of man in cooperation with it. Jesus, and Mary. This is the pattern of life, and it is expressed liturgically in this moment of the Responsorial Psalm.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Our Not-So-Sacred History

In my weekly commentary on the Mass I have now reached the First Reading, the Old Testament reading. Now remember, the basic point I am making in this commentary is that the Mass is the pattern for how we are to live our life, that everything we need to know about living as a Christian can be found in the very structure of the rite of the Eucharist.

How does this thesis apply to the reading of the Old Testament in our liturgy? The O.T. is a complex series of books, after all—stories, prophecies, law codes, wisdom literature, lamentations and exaltations. Parts of it appal us—mass slaughters and crude primitive justice. Parts of it baffle us—the obscure parts of the Law, prophetic passages filled with references to obscure places and long extinct tribes and nations.

It is way beyond my scope to provide a sweeping explanation for the O.T. and its place in our lives—Scripture scholars spend their lives on such things. I would say, though, that in this context of the Mass and its structuring of our life, we can say that the O.T., in general, is all about the past. It is about life before Christ, B.C. And as such, of course it is equal parts baffling, appalling, radiantly beautiful, but always flawed by human weakness and sin.

The O.T. is, basically, humanity. It is us, and we are equal parts appalling, baffling, beautiful, flawed. But the O.T. is more than that. It is humanity continually met by God—a God who at times is just as mysterious and baffling and whose actions can appal us, but God nonetheless. At every turn of the O.T., we meet man in all his moods and caprices, odd flashes of virtue and tragic lapses into villainy.

And at every turn in the O.T. we see God coming to man, veiled in mystery and hard to make out, for sure, but God nonetheless, coming to redeem, to teach, to heal, to lead, to rebuke, to punish, but always taking us somewhere, always seeming to have a plan to bring us somewhere, somehow.

The whole history of the O.T., of God’s people and their comings and goings to and from Him, only finally makes sense when we see that He was bringing them to a very fine and exact point, a point who is a person, a person who is young woman in a village called Nazareth who would finally and definitively say the great ‘yes’ of humanity to the great ‘Yes’ of divinity—and so Christ is born in human flesh. Everything from Adam and Eve to the last prophetic utterance is brought to its real meaning, its divine purpose and import, in this one young girl and her conversation with the angel Gabriel.

Well, what about you and me and the First Reading and the Mass? Well, each of us has a past, don’t we? Each of us has our own life ‘B.C.’, so to speak. Each of us has our baffling, appalling, beautiful, ugly, good, bad history, self, life. We all have baggage—the entire history of humanity is the baggage carried in the O.T. as a whole; but you and I have our own baggage, our own not-so-sacred history.

And the Church’s insistence from the very beginning to keep this messy business of the O.T., first in the canon of Scripture, but also in the liturgy of the Mass, is deeply meaningful for us. It means that God can redeem everything. It means that nothing, even the ugliest and most horrifying parts of our human life, is beyond the reach of redeeming love.

It means that everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone—all of it, without exception!—whatever else it might mean, whatever else entered into it, has one final divine purpose and import. Everything in our lives is meant to bring us to the point and the place where we can say, as Mary did, “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your will.” And in that, Christ is born in us. Christ lives in us. Christ suffers and dies in us. And Christ is risen in us, and we are raised up in Him.

The Old Testament in all its raw, earthy humanity, presents to us both a great promise and a great challenge (funny how those two things usually go together). Our real life is really taken up into the Real Life of God. Consoling, but also very challenging indeed. A call to Christian responsibility; a call to deep spiritual maturity; a call to look at everything that has been and that is in our life and to respond in Marian simplicity of heart to it, to open our innermost recesses of our being to the grace of Christ so that all of it, every particle of our being, every last second of our lives, can be met and transformed by redeeming love, so that the Old Testament of our lives can yield to the New Testament of grace and mercy, forever.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

It's All About Wine

I had the great joy yesterday of officiating at a wedding of two of my directees. They are an older couple, both previously married, and so with all their adult children in attendance. My homily was well received by all in attendance, and someone suggested it would be good for my blog. The Gospel was the wedding feast at Cana, and I essentially meditated upon that story for a few minutes.

I will change the names of the couple, for their own privacy. But here it is, after the break: a few thoughts about wine and weddings, banquets and what it all means.

Not a Devotion, But a Reality

Happy feast of the Annunciation to you all! In lieu of my usual blog post, I thought in honour of the feast and of Our Lady that I would share this snippet of my book The Air We Breathe: The Mariology of Catherine Doherty, which seems to me to summarize the main theme and spiritual focus of this day. So... here it is!

For Catherine, Mary was simply a reality: ‘you don’t have devotion to reality, you embrace it.’ So what was this ‘embraceable’ reality of Mary? While Catherine had come to know Mary so deeply through the circumstances of her life and how Mary had come to help her in them, the reality of Mary was much deeper than her own subjective experience. More fundamental to her was the objective and awesome fact of Mary’s role in salvation:

I don’t think I have a “devotion” to Mary. I have something far greater, more immense, far more beautiful. I have an unshakable faith that she is the Mother of God, and hence, the Mother of men. I believe that she fashioned the body that has become to me the Body of her Son in the Eucharistic Sacrifice… Mary said one little word: fiat. She said it in faith, in God. She asked one or two questions, but immediately she accepted the will of God. She accepted without understanding…[i]

This is the heart of Marian reality according to Catherine: Mary gave her flesh to Jesus, and this Flesh is truly the salvation of the world. She did this by saying fiat – let it be done to me according to Thy will. She did not understand, at least not fully, what she was saying yes to.

This basic Marian fact, which is a simple fact of scripture available to anyone who believes in Jesus, is utterly central to the life of the Christian disciple. For we too are to give our flesh to God. Christ wills to be born in our souls by faith and come to maturity there through hope and love, the work of his Spirit in us who comes to us through the sacramental life of the Church. Our fiat is essential to this giving over of our flesh to en-flesh the Word in the world today.

And we too do not understand much at all what our choice of saying yes (or no) will mean for us, what it will cost us and what the stakes are for ourselves and for others. Mary did what we are to do. Certainly she did it in a unique way and with a perfection and beauty that we can only admire, but nonetheless, Mary’s life and mission is precisely that of the Christian in the world.

For Catherine, Mary stands as the shining icon of the Christian, the clearest and best picture of what it means to be a follower of Christ. The awesome dignity of it, the mysterious depths of it, the frightening totality of it, the beautiful fruit of it—Mary is the figure who reveals all of this. But she does not reveal it to us simply as an exemplar.

Mary is not just a symbol or pattern of Christian discipleship. She is not merely the sum total of some list of qualities that we are to memorize and imitate. She is not only a beautiful picture that we can admire.

Mary comes to each one of us, personally. Mary ‘takes us on’ individually, teaching us and helping us. Mary is really the spiritual director of the whole human race. She gives us courage when the way is dark, guidance when the way is twisted and confusing, joy when the way is sorrowful. She whispers in our ears, constantly, the word of hope and consolation that we need if we are to persevere in our own fiat. She can do this because she walked every step of this way, knows every inch of it, and knows the glory to which it leads.

[i] “I Live on an Island,” in Restoration, June 1968.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Madonna House Movie V - Our Lady's House

It is Thursday, and time for the next instalment in the MH film festival. This one needs little words to introduce it. Madonna House is just that, Our Lady's house, and her presence here is the silent, hidden life that shapes and nurtures everything we are and do here.
Please note that not only do I have a cameo in this video, but so does my flyaway, floppy hair. I'm also not really that short--I look like a hobbit next to Scott there. I happen to be standing right where the ground falls away. At any rate, here is this lovely video on the Woman who is behind it all:

Noteable Quotes:

"People sometimes come to the statue and begin to weep and not know why. Why are they weeping? Because there’s something very deep, beyond the rational beyond the visible that’s happening. Loved – I think they feel loved."

"She’s our example, par excellence. She’s our model, because her yes had incredible profound world-changing ramifications. Christ, God Himself, became man within her womb, just because she said yes. If you look at her life, she didn’t do extraordinary works, but that changed everything."
"O Mary, you desire so much to see Jesus loved. Since you love me, this is the favour which I ask of you: to obtain for me a great personal love of Jesus Christ. You obtain from your Son whatever you please; pray then for me, that I may never lose the grace of God, that I may increase in holiness and perfection from day to day, and that I may faithfully and nobly fulfil the great calling in life which your Divine Son has given me. By that grief which you suffered on Calvary when you beheld Jesus die on the Cross, obtain for me a happy death, that by loving Jesus and you, my mother, on earth, I may share your joy in loving and blessing the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit forever in Heaven. Amen."

Getting to the Point