THE ANNUNCIATION II
And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according
to thy word.
S. Luke I. 38
O God, who through the fruitful virginity of blessed Mary didst bestow
on mankind the rewards of eternal salvation: grant, we beseech thee,
that we may experience her intercession for us through whom we were made
worthy to receive the author of life, even Jesus Christ thy Son
our Lord.
Roman.
S. Mary's momentary hesitation had been due to the surprise that she
felt at the nature of the angelic message and the difficulty that there
was in relating it to her state of life. That she, a virgin, should bear
a son was vastly perplexing; but the answer of S. Gabriel speedily
cleared away the difficulty: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and
the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee."
Blessed Mary had no difficulty about the supernatural; she was not
afflicted with the modern disease that there are no things in heaven and
earth save such as are contained in our philosophy. She was not of those
who "cannot believe what they do not understand," It was enough for her
that a message had come from God: and no matter how little she was able
to understand the mode of God's proposed action within her, she was
willing to offer herself to be the instrument of the will of God. No
doubt that was an habitual attitude and not one taken up on the spur of
the moment. It is indeed very rarely that what seem spontaneous actions
are really such; and S. Mary's first word was nearer spontaneity than
the second. Her exclamation in answer to the angelic _Ave_ was the
natural expression of her surprise at so unexpected a message: its
variance from all her thought about her life was the thing that struck
her; and therefore her instinctive, "How can this be?"
In this second word we have a quite different attitude. Here is
revealed to us the profound and perfect humility of the Blessed Virgin.
This answer comes from the experience of her whole life. It is of such
utterances that we say that they are revealing. What we at any time say,
does in fact reveal what we are--what we have come to be through the
experience of our past life. And no doubt it is these instinctive
utterances which are called out by some unexpected occurrence that
reveal more of us than our weighed and guarded words. Back of every word
we utter is a life we have lived. We have been spending years in
preparing for that word. Perhaps when the time comes to speak it, it is
not the word we thought we were going to speak, it was not the prelude
to the action we thought that we were going to perform; it reveals a
character other than the character that we thought we had. How often the
Gospel brings that before us! We see the young Ruler come running with
his brave and perfectly sincere words about inheriting eternal life; and
then we see him going away when the testing of our Lord demonstrated
that he only partly meant what he said. It was not S. Peter's brave
words, "Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee," that
revealed the truth about the Apostle; but the words that were called out
by the accusation that he was of the company of Jesus: "Then began he to
curse and swear, saying, I know not the man." We have no doubt that he
knows himself better when he catches the eye of the Master turned upon
him and goes and weeps bitterly. And it is true, is it not, that it is
through words called out and thoughts stirred by the unexpected that we
often get new insight into our real state. A sudden temptation reveals a
hidden weakness, and we go away shamed and crushed, saying, "I did not
suppose that I was capable of that."
But, thank God, the revelation is sometimes the other way; the testing
uncovers unexpected strength. Of many a man, after some strong trial, we
say, "I did not know that he had so much courage, or so much patience."
The quiet unassuming exterior was the mask of an heroic will of which
very likely not even the possessor suspected the true quality. The
annals of martyrdom are full of these revelations of unsuspected
strength. Here in the case of Blessed Mary the quality revealed is that
of humility so perfect that it dreams not of revolt from the most
searching trial. It reveals the character of our Mother better than
pages of description can do. What we see in response to the bewildering
messages brought by S. Gabriel is the instinctive movement of the soul
toward God. There is utter absence of any thought of self or of how she
may be affected by the purpose of God; it is enough that that purpose is
made plain.
It seems well to insist on this instinctive movement of the soul in
Blessed Mary because it is one item of the evidence that the Catholic
Church has to offer for its belief in her sinlesssness. Any momentary
rebellion, no matter how soon recovered from, or how sincerely
regretted, against the will of God, would be evidence of the existence
of sin. But where sin is not, where there is an unstained soul, there
the knowledge of the will of God will send one running to its
acceptance; there will be active acceptance and not just submission to
God's will. Submission implies a certain effort to place ourselves in
line with the will of God; it often seems to imply that we are accepting
it because we cannot do anything else. But with Blessed Mary there is a
glad going forth to meet God; the word "Behold" springs out to meet the
will of God half-way. It is as though she had been holding herself
ready, expectant, in the certainty of the coming of some message, and
now she offers herself without the shadow of hesitation, as to a purpose
which was a welcome vocation: "Behold the Handmaid of the Lord; be it
unto me according to thy word." How wonderful is the humility of
obedience!
And humility--we must stress this--is not a virtue of youth; it is not
one of the virtues which ripen quickly, but is of slow development and
delayed maturity. Modesty we should expect in a maiden, and lack of
self-assertion; and perhaps obedience of a sort. But those do not
constitute the virtue of humility. We are humble when we have lost self;
and Mary's wondering answer reveals the fact that she is not thinking of
herself at all, but only of the nature of the divine purpose. That that
purpose being known she should at all resist it would seem to her a
thing incredible, for all her life she had had no other motive of
action. Her will had never been separated from the will of God.
This state of union which was hers by divine election and privilege, we
achieve, if we achieve it at all, by virtue of great spiritual
discipline. We are, to be sure, brought into union with God through the
sacraments, but the union so achieved is, if one may so express it, an
unstable union; it is union that we have to maintain by daily spiritual
action and which suffers many a weakening through our infidelity, even
if it escape the disaster of mortal sin. We sway to and fro in our
struggle to attain the equilibrium of perfection which belonged to
Blessed Mary by virtue of the first embrace of God which had freed her
from sin. Our tragedy is that we have almost universally lost the first
engagements of the Spiritual Combat before we have at all understood
that there is any combat. The circumstances of life of child and youth
are such that we become familiar with sin before we have the
intelligence to understand the need of resisting, even if we are
fortunate enough to have such an education as to awaken a sense of sin
as opposition to God. There is nothing more appalling than the tragedy
of life thus defiled and broken and put at a disadvantage before it even
understands the ideals that should govern its course. When the vision of
perfection comes and we face life as the field where we are to acquire
eternal values, we face it with a poisoned imagination and a depleted
strength. Our battle is not only to maintain what we have, but to win
back what we have lost.
Under such conditions there is much consolation in learning that we do
not fight alone but have the constant help and sympathy of those who are
endued with the strength of perfect purity. Their likeness to us in
that they have lived the life of the flesh assures us of their
understanding, and it assures us too of their active co-operation. We
cannot understand the saints standing outside human life and from the
vantage point of their achievement looking on as indolent spectators.
The spectacle offorded by the Church Militant must call out the active
intercession of all the saints; but especially do we look for helpful
sympathy from her who is our all-pure Mother, whose very purity gives
her intercession unmeasured power. She is not removed from us through
her spotlessness, but by virtue of her clearer understanding of the
meaning of sin and of separation from God that it brings her, she is
ready to fly to the help of all sinners by her ceaseless intercession.
The difficulty of our spiritual lives rises chiefly out of the clash of
wills. A disordered nature, a tainted inheritance, a corrupt environment
conspire to make the life of grace tremendously difficult. It is only in
a very limited sense that we can be said to be free, and there is no
possibility at all of overcoming the handicap of sin, except firm and
careful reliance on the grace of God. That grace, no doubt, is always at
our disposal as far as we will use it. Grace moves us, but it does not
compel us; and we are free always to reject the offer of God. We have
only to open our eyes upon the world about us to see how rarely is the
grace of God accepted in any effective way. Even in convinced Christians
the attempt to live the divided life is the commonest thing possible. It
sometimes seems as though the prevalent conception of the Christian
life were that it is sufficient to offer God a certain limited
allegiance and that the remainder of the life will be thereby ransomed
and placed at our disposal to use as we will. We find the theory well
worked out in the current attitude of Christians toward the observance
of the Lord's Day. It appears to be held that an attendance at Mass or
Matins is a sufficient recognition of the interests of religion and that
the rest of the day may be regarded, not as the Lord's Day, but as
man's--as a day of unlimited amusement and self-indulgence. The notion
of consecration is abandoned. The only possible outcome of such theories
of life is what we already experience, spiritual lawlessness and moral
degradation. I suppose that it will only be through social disaster that
society will come (as usual, too late) to any comprehension that the
will of God is what it is because it is only by following the road that
it indicates that human life can reach a successful development. God's
laws are not arbitrary inflictions; they are the expression of the
highest wisdom in the guidance of human life.
Our elementary duty therefore as sane persons is to find what is the
will of God in any given circumstances; there should be no action until
there has been an effort to ascertain that will. It were as sensible to
set about building a house without ascertaining what strength of
foundation would be needful, or without knowing the sort of material we
were going to use. One has heard of a house being built in which it
turned out that there was a room with no doorway, or floor to which no
stair led up; but we do not commend such exploits as the last word in
architecture, nor would we commend a farmer who planted his crops
without attention to the nature of the soil. There are certain
elementary principles of common sense which we pretty uniformly hold to
in every matter with the exception of religion; that seems to be held to
be a separate department of human activity with laws of its own, and in
which the principles which govern life elsewhere do not hold. We do not
profess this theory, of course, but we commonly act upon it, while we
still profess to respect the will of God. It is strange too that after
having habitually neglected that will, we are greatly disappointed, not
to say indignant, when after a life of disobedience and scorn of God's
thought for us we do not find ourselves in possession of the fruits of
righteousness. If it were not so tragic it would be amusing to hear men
declaim against the justice of a God whose existence they have
habitually disregarded.
But, it is often said, it is not by any means easy to find out God's
will. You talk about it as though it were as easy to know God's will as
it is to know the multiplication table. Well, at least it can be said
that one does not get to know the multiplication table without effort!
What objections as to the obscurity of the will of God will seem to mean
is that it does take effort to ascertain it. I do not know of any reason
for regarding that as unjust. If the will of God is what religion
maintains that it is, of primary importance to our lives, we might well
be glad that it is ascertainable at all, at the expense of
whatever effort.
An Almighty God has implanted within every human heart the knowledge
that His will exists and is important; that is, He has endowed every man
with a conscience which is the certainty of the difference between right
and wrong, and the conviction that we are responsible for our conduct to
some power outside ourselves; that we are not at liberty to conduct life
on any lines we will. Having so much certainty, it surely becomes us to
set about ascertaining the nature of the power and the details of the
will. The very nature of conscience, as a sense of obligation, rather
than a source of information, should create a desire for a knowledge of
what God's will is in detail, that is, what is the content of the notion
of right and wrong.
And while it is true that such content can only be ascertained by work,
it is not true that the work is a specially difficult one. The
Revelation of God's mind made through Holy Scripture and through the
life of His Incarnate Son is an open book that any one can study; and to
any objection that such study has led chiefly to difference of opinion
and darkness rather than light, the answer is that such disaster follows
for the most part only when the guidance of the Catholic Church is
repudiated; when, that is, we pursue a course in this study which we
should not pursue in relation to any other. If we were studying geology
we should not regard it as the best course to scorn all that preceding
students have done, and betake our unprepared selves to field work! But
that is the "Bible and the Bible only" theory of spiritual knowledge. If
we want to know the meaning of the Biblical teaching, we must make use
of the helps which the experience of the Church has richly provided.
But the nature of the divine will and the particulars of our obligation
are not merely, perhaps one ought to say, not chiefly, to be assimilated
through our brains. The best preparation for the doing of the will of
God and the progressive entering into His mind, is an obedient life.
Purity of character will carry us farther on this path than cleverness
of brains. Our Lord's own rule is: _He that doeth the will shall know of
the doctrine._ In other words, we understand the mind of God and attain
to the illumination of the conscience, through sympathetic response to
the will so far as we have seen it. And each new response, in its turn,
carries us to a deeper and clearer understanding of the will. That is to
say, our conscience, by habitual response to God's will, so far as it
knows it, is so illumined as to be able to make trustworthy judgments on
new material submitted to it.
This is, of course, to be otherwise described as the working of God the
Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit that dwelleth in us and directs us to
right judgments if we will listen. Our danger is that self-will
constantly crops up and complicates the case by representing that the
line suggested by the Holy Spirit is not in reality in accord with our
interests. This opposition between the seeming interests suggested by
self-will, which indeed often contribute to our immediate gratification,
and our true interests as indicated by the monitions of the Holy
Spirit, constitutes the real struggle of the life during the period of
probation. The will of God in every circumstance is usually plain
enough; but it is silenced by the clamour of the passions and desires
demanding immediate gratification: and we are all more or less children
in our insistence on the immediate and our incapacity to wait. But I
must insist again that it is not knowledge that is wanting but sympathy
with the course that knowledge directs. We pursuade ourselves that we do
not know, when the real trouble is that we know only too well. One feels
that much that is put forward as inability to understand religion is at
bottom merely disinclination to obey it.
Not that there is not room for genuine perplexity. Often it happens that
we are not at all certain in this or that detail of conduct. In that
case it is well to consider whether it is necessary to act before we can
attain certainty through study or advice. But if act we must, we can at
least act with honesty, not making our will the accomplice of our
passions or interests.
I do not believe that there are many cases in which we shall go wrong if
we make use of all the means at our disposal. A diligent doing of the
will of God does undoubtedly bring light on unknown problems and
unexpected situations in which we from time to time find ourselves. If
our constant attitude has been one of free and glad obedience we need
not fear to go astray. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," Blessed Mary
said; and such an attitude has never failed to meet the divine approval
and call out the help of God. Just to put ourselves utterly at God's
disposal is the clearing of all life. "Into Thy hands," is the solution
of all difficulties.
I sing a maiden
That is matchless;
King of all kings
To her Son she ches.
He came all so still
To His Mother's bower,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flower.
Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well might such a lady
God's Mother be.
English, Fifteenth Century.
PART TWO