THE VISITATION I
And Mary arose in those days, and went into
the hill country with haste, into a city of Judah;
and entered into the house of Zacharias, and
saluted Elizabeth.
S. Luke I. 39, 40.
Grant, we beseech thee, O Lord God, to us thy servants, that
we may evermore enjoy health of mind and body, and by the
glorious intercession of blessed Mary, ever a virgin, be
delivered from present sorrows and enjoy everlasting
gladness. Through.
ROMAN.
Those who were faithful in Israel and were looking forward to the
fulfilment of God's promises would be drawn together by close bonds of
sympathy. It oftentimes proves that the bonds of a common ideal are
stronger than the bonds of blood. It was to prove so many times in the
history of Christianity when in accordance with our Lord's words the
closest blood relation would be broken through fidelity to Him, and a
man's foes be found to be those of his own household. But also it is
true that the possession of common ideals becomes the basis of relations
which are stronger than race or family. We may be sure that the members
of that little group of which we catch glimpses now and then in the
progress of the Gospel story found in their expectation of the Lord's
deliverance of Israel such a bond. We feel that S. Mary and S. Joseph
must have been members of this group and that they were filled with the
hope of God's manifestation. Another family which shared the same hope
was that of the priest Zacharias whose wife Elizabeth was the cousin of
Mary of Nazareth. It is to their house in the hill country of Judah we
now turn our thoughts.
It was a part of the angelic message to S. Mary that her cousin
Elizabeth had "conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth
month with her who was called barren." Overwhelmed as S. Mary was by the
vocation which had come to her, perplexed as to what should be her next
step, she may well have seized upon the words of the angel as a hint as
to her present course. She must confide in some one, and that some one,
we instantly feel, must be a woman. In her own great joy she would need
some one with whom to share it. In her unprecedented case she would need
a counselor, and who better could afford aid than her cousin whose case
was in so many respects like her own, who was already cherishing a child
whose conception was due to the intervention of God? We understand
therefore, why it is that without waiting for the further development of
events, Mary arises, and goes "with haste" to the home of her cousin.
It is just now a house full of joy. For many years there had been
happiness there, but a happiness over which a cloud rested. The
affliction of barrenness was their sorrow. To the Hebrew there was no
true family until the love of the father and the mother was incarnated
in the child; and through many weary days Zacharias and Elizabeth had
waited until hope quite failed as they found themselves beyond the
possibility of bearing a child to cheer them and to hand on their name.
We may be sure that they were reconciled to the will of God, for it is
written of them that they were righteous, and the central feature of
righteousness is the acceptance of the divine will. But though one
cheerfully accepts the divine will there may still remain a
consciousness of a vacancy in life; and therefore we can understand the
joy that came to Zacharias when the angel appeared to him in the temple
when he was exercising the priest's office and offering the incense of
the daily sacrifice with the message that he should have a son. It was a
joy that would be unclouded by the God-sent dumbness which was at once a
punishment for his lack of immediate faith and a sign of the
faithfulness of God. It was a joy that would hasten his steps homeward
with the glad tidings, a joy that would fill the heart of Elizabeth when
she heard the message of God. Soon the consciousness of the babe in her
womb would be a growing wonder and a growing happiness. There would be a
new brightness in the house where the aged mother waits through the
months and the dumb father with his writing tablet at his side meditates
upon the meaning of the providence of God and upon the prophecies of the
angel as to his child's future. But what that future would be he could
hardly expect to witness; he was too old to live to the day of his
child's showing unto Israel.
It is to this house that we see S. Mary hastening, sure of finding there
a heart in which she can confide. She "entered into the house of
Zacharias and saluted Elizabeth." We are not told what the words of her
salutation were, but no doubt it was the customary Jewish salutation of
peace. There could have been no more appropriate salutation exchanged
between these two in whose souls was abiding the peace of a perfect
possession of God. The will of God to which they had been accustomed to
offer themselves all their lives was being accomplished through them in
unexpected ways; but it found them as ready of acceptance as they had
been in any of the ordinary duties of life wherein they had been
accustomed to wait upon God. We may seem sometimes to go beyond Holy
Scripture in our interpretations of feelings and thoughts which we are
sure must have been those of the actors in the drama of salvation
unfolded to us in the Scriptures; but are we not entitled to infer from
God's actions a good deal of the nature of the instruments He uses? Are
we not quite safe in the case of S. Mary in the deduction from the
nature of her vocation of the spiritual perfection to attribute to her?
Does not God's use of a person imply qualities in the person used? It is
on this ground that I feel that we are quite safe in inferring the
spiritual attitude of S. Mary and of S. Elizabeth from the choice God
made of them to be the instruments of His purpose of redemption.
But we are not inferring, we have the record with us, when we think of
the joy of the mothers transcended in the joy of the children. The
unborn Forerunner becomes conscious of the approach of Him of whom he is
to say later: "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the
world"; and there is an instantaneous movement that can only be that of
recognition and worship. The movement of the child is at once understood
and translated by S. Elizabeth: "And she spake out with a loud voice,
and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy
womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come
to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine
ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy."
In the presence of such joy and such sanctity we feel that our proper
attitude is the attitude of adoring wonder that S. Elizabeth expresses.
We worship our hidden Lord as the unborn prophet worships Him. We have
no question to ask, nor curiosity at the mode of God's action. We are
quite content to accept His action as it is revealed to us in Scripture;
a revelation of the divine presense in humanity which has been
abundantly verified in all the history of the Church. That verification
in experience--a verification that we ourselves can repeat--is worth
infinitely more than all the argument that the centuries have seen.
"Blessed art thou among women," S. Elizabeth cries; and in doing so she
is but repeating the words of the angel of the Annunciation. This word,
too, we presently hear S. Mary taking up, and under the inspiration of
the Holy Ghost saying: "From henceforth all generations shall call
me blessed."
And so they have. All generations, that is, that have been faithful to
the Gospel teaching and have assimilated in any degree the consequences
of S. Mary's nearness to God. When we speak of "Blessed" Mary we are but
doing what angels and holy women have done, and it is great pity if in
doing so we have to make a conscious effort, if the words do not spring
spontaneously from our lips. Surely, we have not gone far toward the
mastery of God's coming in the Incarnation if we have not felt the
purity of the instrument through whom God enters our nature. The outward
and visible sign of our understanding is found in our ability to
complete the _Ave_ as the Holy Spirit has taught the Church to complete
it: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour
of our death."
This reiterated attribution of blessedness to Mary our Mother calls us
to pause and ask just what blessedness means. It is of course the
characteristic Scripture locution for those who in some way enjoy the
special favour of God. Blessedness is the state of those who have
received special divine gifts of favour. A characteristic scriptural
description of the blessedness of the righteous in contrast with the
disaster of the unrighteous may be studied in the first Psalm. In the
New Testament we naturally turn to the Sermon on the Mount where the
Beatitudes give us our Lord's thought about blessedness. I think that we
can describe the notion of blessedness there presented as being the
state of those who have taken God at His word and chosen Him, and by
that act of choice, while they have forfeited the world and the world's
favour, have attained to the spiritual riches of the Kingdom of God.
They are those to whom God is the Supreme Good, in whose possession they
gladly count all things but loss. These are they who here in the pilgrim
state have already attained to the enjoyment of God because they want
nothing other or beside Him.
Supremely blessed, therefore, is Mary our Mother, who never for a moment
even in thought was separate from God. From the earliest moment of her
existence she could say, "My beloved is mine and I am His." We try to
think out what such a fact may mean when translated into terms of
spiritual energy, and it seems to mean more than anything else boundless
power of intercession such as the Church has attributed to S. Mary from
the earliest times. We see no other way of estimating spiritual power
save as the power of prayer. It is through prayer that we approach
God--for we remember that sacrifice is but the highest form of prayer.
The blessedness of S. Mary, that peculiar degree of blessedness which
seems signalized by the reiterated attribution of the quality to her,
must for our purposes to be understood as "power with God," power of
intercession. It means that our Lord has chosen her to be a special
medium of approval to Him, and that through her prayers He wills to
bestow upon men many of His choicest gifts. Naturally, her prayers, like
our prayers, are mediated by the merits of her divine Son; nevertheless
they have a peculiar power which is related to her peculiar blessedness
in that she is the mother of Incarnate God, and by special privilege is
herself without sin. Of all those to whom we are privileged to turn in
the joys and tragedies of our lives for the sympathy which helps through
enlightened, loving prayer, we most naturally resort to her who is all
love and all sympathy, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, blessed among
women forever.
Although we are told nothing of these days that S. Mary spent with her
cousin Elizabeth, we do gather that she remained with her until her
child was born and that she saw S. John in his mother's arms, and was a
partaker in the joy of the aged parents. She was present when Zacharias,
his speech restored, uttered the _Benedictus_ in thanksgiving for the
birth of his son. It was then, having seen her own Son's Forerunner that
S. Mary went back to Nazareth filled more than ever with the sense that
God's hand was in the events that were taking place, and of the approach
of some crisis in her nation's history. It must have been that she
talked intimately with Zacharias and Elizabeth and with them tried to
imagine what was the future in which these two children were so closely
concerned. When we consider the _Magnificat_ and the _Benedictus_ not as
the "Gospel Canticles" to be sung in Church but as the utterances of
pious Israelites under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, we feel how
very vivid must have been their expectation of God's action in the
immediate future, and with what intense love and interest they thought
of the parts to be taken by their children in the deliverance God was
preparing. How often they must have pondered the God-inspired saying:
"He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the
Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David; and he
shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there
shall be no end." "And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the
Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his
ways; to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of
their sins, through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the Dayspring
from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way
of peace."
We think too of a more intimate sympathy that there would have been
between these two women, drawn now so close together, not only by the
blood bond, but by the bond of a common experience. What wonderful
hours of communing during these three months! The peace of the hills of
Judah is all about them and the peace of God is in their souls. What
ecstatic joy, what ineffable love was theirs in these moments as they
thought of the children who were God's precious gift to them. I fancy
that there were many hours when they ceased to think of the mystery that
hung over these children's destiny, and became just mothers lost in love
of the coming sons.
As we try to think out their relation to each other it presents itself
to us as a relation of sympathy. Sympathy is community of feeling; it is
maimed and thwarted when there is feeling only on one side. We speak of
our sympathy in their affliction for others whom we do not know and who
do not know us, but that is a very imperfect rendering of the perfect
thing. No more than love does sympathy reach its perfection in solitude.
But here in this village of Judah we know that we have the perfect
thing--sympathy in its most exquisite form.
This capacity for sympathy is one of the greatest of human endowments,
and, one is glad to think, not like many human endowments, rare in its
manifestation. In its ordinary manifestation it is instinctive, is
roused by the spectacle of need calling us to its aid. There come to our
knowledge from time to time instances of what seem to us very grievous
failures in sympathy, but investigation shows that ignorance is very
commonly at the bottom of them. When human beings are convinced of a
need they are quite ready to respond. Indeed this readiness to respond
makes them the easy victims of all sorts of impostures, of baseless
appeals which play upon sentiment rather than convince the
understanding. And just there lies the weakness of sympathy in that it
is so easily turned to sentimentality. But the sentimentalist who gushes
over ills, real or imaginary, can commonly be brought to book easily
enough. For one thing the sentimentalist is devoted to publicity. He
loves to conduct campaigns and drives, to "get up" a demonstration or an
entertainment. I do not mean that he is a hypocrite but only that he
loves the lime-light. When any tragedy befalls man his impulse is to
organise a dance in aid of it. It is extraordinary how many people there
are who will aid a charity by dancing to whom one would feel it quite
hopeless to appeal for the amount of the dance tickets. And yet they are
not wholly selfish people; there does lie back of the dance a certain
sympathetic impulse. We easily deceive ourselves about ourselves, and it
is well to be sure that we have true sympathy and not just sentiment. It
is not so difficult to find out. We can test ourselves quickly enough by
examining our giving. Do we give only when we are asked? Do we yield to
spectacular appeals or only to those that we have examined and found
good? Do we put the spiritual interests of humanity first? Is there any
appreciable amount of quiet spontaneous giving which is known to no one?
Do we prefer to be anonymous? Such tests soon reveal what we are like.
One who never gives spontaneously, without being asked, we may be sure
is lacking in sympathy.
But of course one does not mean that sympathy is so closely related to
what we call charity as what I have just said, if left by itself, would
seem to imply. That is indeed the common form assumed by sympathy which
has to be called out. But the best type of sympathy is the expression of
our knowledge of one another; it is based on our knowledge of human
nature and our interest in human beings. Because it is based on
knowledge it is not subject to be swept away by the sweet breezes of
sentimentalism. To its perfect exercise it is needful to know
individuals not merely to know about them. The ordinary limitations of
sympathy come from this, that we do not want to take time and pains to
know one another. That, for example, is where the Church falls short in
its mission to constitute a real brotherhood among its members--they
have no time nor inclination really to know one another, or they find
the artificial walls that society has erected impassable. It is, in
fact, not very easy to know one another, and it is impossible to develop
the complete type of sympathy with a crowd. For one must insist that
this highest type of sympathy requires, what the word actually does
mean, mutual sharing in life, the participation in the lives of our
fellows and their partaking in our lives.
So we understand why perfect sympathy is conditioned on spirituality.
Unless we are spiritually developed and spiritually at one we cannot
share in one another's lives fully. Where there are lives separated by a
gulf of spiritual differences the completest sympathy is impossible. And
we understand why Incarnate seems so much nearer to us than God
unincarnate. It is true that "the Father Himself loveth you"; it is
true that it is the love of the Blessed Trinity that is expressed in the
Incarnation. The Incarnation did not create God's love and sympathy, it
only reveals it. Yet it is precisely the Incarnation that enables us to
lay hold on God's sympathy with a certainty and sureness of grasp that
we would not otherwise have. The sight of "God in Christ reconciling the
world unto Himself" is more to us in the way of proof than any amount of
declaration can be. To be told of the sympathy of God is one thing, to
see how it works is another.
Our personal need in this matter is to find the sympathy that will help
us in something outside ourselves, outside the limitations of human
nature. Much as we value human sympathy, precious as we find its
expression, yet we do find that it has for the higher purposes of life
serious limitations. It has very little power to execute what it finds
needs to be done. A man may understand another's weakness and may
utterly sympathise with it; he may advise and console, but in the end he
finds that he cannot adequately help. The case is hopeless unless he can
point the sufferer to some source outside himself on which he can draw,
unless he can lead him to the sympathy of God. God can offer not only
consolation, not only the spectacle of another life which has triumphed
under analogous circumstances, but He can give the power to this present
weak and discouraged life to triumph in the place where it is. He can
"make a way of escape."
But there is another form of sympathy which we crave and need which is
just the communion of soul with soul. We are not asking anything more or
other than to show ourselves. We are overwhelmed with the loneliness of
life. It comes upon us in the most crowded places, this sense of
separation from all about us. Oh, that I might flee away and be at rest,
is our feeling. It is here that we specially need our Lord. Blessed are
we if we have learned to find in Him the rest we need for our souls, if
we have learned to open the door that leads always to Him; or, perhaps
to knock appealingly at that door which He will never fail to open. It
is then that we find the joy of the invitation "Come unto me all ye that
are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest."
But Christ, the perfect Sympathiser, has associated others with Himself.
If we can go to him, so can others; the Way is open to all. And those
who go and are associated with Him are gathered into a family. Here
among those who have followed the interests which are ours, and have
pursued the ends that we are pursuing, and cultivated the qualities
which we value, we feel sure of that sympathetic understanding of life
which we seek. And especially among those members of the Body who have
gone on to the end in fidelity to the ideals of the life which is hid
with Christ in God shall we look for understanding and help. It is from
this point of view that the Communion of Saints will mean so much to us.
We value the strength of mutual support which inevitably grows out of
associated life. We cannot think of the saints of God as having passed
beyond us into some place of rest where they are content to forget the
problems of earth: rather we are compelled to think of them as still
actively sharing in those interests which are still the interests of
their divine Head. Until, Jesus Himself cease to think of us who are
still in the Pilgrim Way, and cease to offer Himself on our behalf, we
cannot think of any who are in Him as other than intensely interested in
us of the earthly Church, or as doing other than helping by prayer for
us that we with them may attain our end. And especially shall we feel
sure that at any moment of our lives we may turn to the Mother in
confident expectancy of finding most helpful sympathy and most ready
aid. Her life to-day is a life of intercession, of intercession which
has all the power of perfect understanding and perfect sympathy. Let us
learn to go to her; let us learn that as God is praised and honoured in
His saints, as our Lord choses to work through those who are united to
Him, so it is His will that great power of prayer shall be hers of whom
He assumed our nature, that nature through which He still distributes
the riches of His grace.
As I lay upon a night,
My thought was on a Lady bright
That men callen Mary of might,
Redemptoris Mater.
To her came Gabriel so bright
And said, "Hail, Mary, full of might,
To be called thou art adight;"
Redemptoris Mater.
Right as the sun shineth in glass,
So Jesus in His Mother was,
And thereby wit men that she was
Redemptoris Mater.
Now is born that Babe of bliss,
And Queen of Heaven His Mother is,
And therefore think me that she is
Redemptoris Mater.
After to heaven He took His flight,
And there He sits with His Father of might,
With Him is crowned that Lady bright,
Redemptoris Mater.
English, Fifteenth Century.
PART TWO