Chapter Talk
A Free Person says 'YES' to Life
In the scene of the Annunciation, Gabriel stands before Mary; Mary stands before the living God in His representative. She interrogates; Gabriel explains, or at least he places before her the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God and her integral part in it. Without her, God cannot become man. St Bernard makes the whole cosmos hold its breath while she ponders. She is free; there is a sense in which she could refuse, just as, analogously, Jesus underwent temptation to refuse suffering, for our sake, not as a charade but in some real way. Mary is free but she is also sinless; there is no impediment to her choosing rightly, no imperfection clogging her vision or her will. Free to choose, she is also free from self. The sign given her by Gabriel of her aged cousin’s conception is not given to sway a wavering decision but to strengthen and encourage one already taken. Thus she will exercise her perfect freedom to choose God’s will, to choose the divine life. She will be mother of God, mother of life.
A free person says ‘yes’ to life. The freest person says ‘yes’ to the life of God. This is no easy matter, for God is overwhelming. Yet He will adapt to our weakness. He will come upon Mary through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit as softly as a dove hovering over the waters at the beginning of Creation. Nothing obviously cataclysmic here but nonetheless an action of the omnipotent Trinity, achieving its end fortiter et suaviter.
Mary says her fiat to God’s Word before the Father through the Holy Spirit. To see her acceptance entirely in terms of her own vocation and destiny is too narrow a perspective, though it is that as well. God expands Mary’s soul, so that her destiny is identified with that of the human race and becomes inseparable from the destiny of her Son. On the personal level, it will determine the rest of her life. She could not foresee in detail what the future held any more than we can, when we say our ‘yes’ to God’s call. Says Geoffrey Preston OP: ‘How strange it is that there are future tenses of verbs, how queer it is that we can make coherent utterances that bind tomorrow.’ As Mary committed her future to the Word of God which Gabriel represented, so any one of us can enter into a covenant with God and with others.
This does not mean that, as a result, we, any more than Mary, enter into a quiet harbour forever, ‘out of the swing of the sea’ (cf G M Hopkins). We enter further into life when we say ‘yes’ to life; we commit ourselves to a process of endless change, not restless change but, rather, constant transformation. It is an interior work, as unpredictable as life itself. Like Mary, we put ourselves at the service of the Kingdom, that is of Christ and His Church. This process cannot be charted, because we are not in charge. God is. Yet, says Geoffrey Preston again, “Our promises and commitments to the Lord’s will in saying that Marian ‘yes’ create in our lives islands of certainty.” This is the true anchorage, even if we do not feel the ground beneath us. In fact, it is not advisable to be too rooted in terra firma, for we are no less pilgrims because of our commitments and security in God. Like Abraham, we are always setting out interiorly, not knowing where we are going, but trusting in God’s Providence. Mary received life when she said her ‘yes’; she did not proceed to carve it out for herself, like a career. In gathering up in herself the past of Israel and handing it over into God’s Hands, she became ready to receive.
All the other reported events in her life flow from this traditio, this handing over of herself to God. At the Visitation, it is she who brings life to Elizabeth and her unborn child. The life of the Spirit of Jesus within her communicates itself to them, so that they, too, receive it with joy. There is thus a mutual interchange of life between the two women and their babies. Elizabeth recognises the Spirit in Mary; Mary recognises it in her. It is a form of perichoresis, to use the Greek term for a being-in-one-another through the Spirit and therefore an image of the life in the Blessed Trinity.
On Holy Night, it is the shepherds’ turn to stand in the presence of the living God, represented by the angelic choir. ‘The glory of the Lord shone round about them’ (Luke 2:9). Their reaction is one of godly fear, recalling Mary’s reverential, even troubled demeanour before Gabriel. It is the reaction of man before God, even of God-made-man in His human nature. In Hebrews, Jesus, too, is ‘heard for his godly fear’ (5:7). The angel gives a word of reassurance to the shepherds, followed by the message of God to man, the word which is always deed. It brings joy and yet it is also an enigmatic word. Who would expect this Word to be incarnated as a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger? As if to lend unquestionable credence to this strange message, there is suddenly a multitude of the heavenly host lighting up the night-sky and making it resound with praise. Angels and men unite to give glory to the living God.
The encounter with the divine makes them go ‘with haste’ in search of the word that has come to pass, the same phrase used of Mary at the Visitation, straight after the Annunciation. Not the feverish haste of impatience but the desire and zeal of anyone who has heard a divine word and is impelled to action.
In the Nativity scene, we are truly coram Deo viventi. The Jewish people in the shepherds, the gentile nations in the Magi; Mary and Joseph, the individuals chosen by God to give life to Life and to protect it – all congregate before the new-born child. The response is silence and adoration, the squandering of gifts, Mary’s pondering in her heart, therefore the enlargement and enrichment of memory.
Another congregation gathers at the Presentation of the Child in the Temple, where Mary offers him before the Father. She is now continually present to her Son as He is to her. Adoration, while no less profound, passes into the simple actions that any mother will do for her baby and which flow from her love and instinct. Something similar happens to us in the seamless passage between contemplation and activity, prayer and work. Yet in this episode, it is Simeon who takes prominence as prime adorer. He is moved to the core of his being to stand before the salvation of God in the person of this Child. He has been looking for this; now he has seen it; he can depart in peace, but not before revealing to Mary another level of the mystery of her Child’s being. He will be a sign of contradiction; and a sword will pierce her own heart. He places her before the truth that God-made-man will suffer and she with Him.
Afterwards, states Luke, “they returned to Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. And the child grew …” (Luke 2:39). Mary and Joseph watch the growth of Jesus, like any parents. They are His guides, protectors and teachers, recipients of His little confidences and insights, delighting in the evident favour of God upon Him. This is the normality of God; how He is present in the ordinary. Nothing is beneath Him; instead, everything is blessed and sanctified by His use.
At the Finding in the Temple, however, something out of the ordinary occurs. The Child who is so obedient goes absent without leave; the docile son states unequivocally that God is His Father and that His business takes precedence. Here, Mary and Joseph stand perplexed before God. If He is to be found in the ordinary, He remains nonetheless incomprehensible. Again, the response is silence and deeper reflection for Mary.
She will meet the same mystery in His response to her request at the Wedding at Cana, but now she seems on surer ground. It is as if she knows better what is in her Son, or who her Son is. She has faith in His power to transform even matter and trusts in the compassion of His Heart for all the disadvantaged.
If all the events in Mary’s life follow from her part in the Annunciation, this is especially true of her presence at the Crucifixion. Here is the profoundest paradox, because she stands at the foot of the Cross, coram Deo morienti, before the dying God. Stabat Mater dolorosa iuxta crucem. The Mother of life sees life slipping away before her eyes. Yet everything here is also consent, fiat. She is, in a sense, consenting to His death, because she can never not consent to God’s will; she can never be out of harmony with her Son’s voluntary acts: “I lay my life down of my own accord” (John 10:18) and “I have a baptism with which I must be baptised and how I am constrained until it is accomplished” (Luke 12:50). She consents to His suffering, not to the agony itself which is abhorrent to her, but to His embracing of redemptive suffering. How much of our suffering at the sight of another’s pain is because it is painful to us. Mary’s suffering is pure, because she is selfless; it is a share in Jesus’ suffering, which, we have to remember, He desired out of love for man. Identified with Him, with His will, she drinks from the same cup. Thirdly, she consents to let Him go where she cannot follow, where she can no longer suffer with Him. This may have been the hardest of her personal sufferings. Nevertheless, even if she shared His sense of the Father’s abandonment on the Cross, she could never have lost her faith and trust. “Into Your Hands” must have been her prayer also.
We are not told what was in her heart when she stood before the resurrected Lord, yet we know implicitly that she must have felt her trust fully vindicated beyond all her hopes. Even the purest creature comes out of the great tribulation washed in the Blood of the Lamb and clad in whitest linen, since finite purity continues to grow in clarity in the infinite purity of Christ. Every soul who consents to let the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die recovers greenness. There is new lightness and fresh joy in the Lord.
At Pentecost, she is once more coram Sancto Spiritu. She has come full circle from the Annunciation and how changed she must have felt herself to be since the quiet scene in the house at Nazareth; what a terrain she had covered in following her fiat. She is no longer the simple girl of her youth but the tried and tested Mother of the Son of God. The Holy Spirit, too, comes in a different way, no longer in an almost imperceptible overshadowing, but in a mighty wind and flame of fire. She is able to stand before Him and to withstand the power of His divinity. She is at the heart of the fledgling Church, the Body of Christ, which must be filled with the glory of God and the Spirit of Jesus.
In the Rosary we reflect also on the Assumption and Coronation of Mary. These mysteries tell us, in conclusion, that Mary remains forever coram Deo viventi as the Mother of the King, invested with all the honour due to her unique rôle in the redemptive work of her Son. As Jesus, our Advocate, displays before the Father His glorified wounds in side, hands and feet, the signs of His sacrifice propter nos, Mary continues to utter her fiat, the expression of her own sacrifice, for all eternity.
