THE ANNUNCIATION I
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.
When 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.
PART TWO