EGYPT
The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and
take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt.
S. Matt. II, 13.
Deliver us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, from all evils past, present, and
to come: and at the intercession for us of Blessed Mary who brought
forth God and our Lord, Jesus Christ; and of the holy apostles Peter,
and Paul, and Andrew; and of blessed Ambrose Thy confessor, and bishop,
together with all Thy saints, favorably give peace in our days, that,
assisted by the help of Thy mercy, we may ever be both delivered from
sin, and safe from all turmoil. Fulfil this, by Him, with Whom Thou
livest blessed, and reignest God, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for
ever and ever.
AMBROSIAN.
Those who live in intimate union with God, the peace of whose lives is
untroubled by the constant irruption of sin, are peculiarly sensitive to
that mode of the divine action that we call supernatural. I suppose that
it is not that God wishes to reveal Himself to souls only at crises of
their experience or under exceptional conditions, but that only souls of
an exceptional spiritual sensitivity are capable of this sort of
approach. Communications of the divine will through dream or vision of
inner voice are the accompaniment of sanctity; one may almost say that
they are the normal means in the case of advanced sanctity. Most of us
are too much immersed in the world, are too much the slaves of material
things, to be open to this still, small voice of revelation. Our eyes
are dimned by the garish light of the world, and our ears dulled by its
clamour, so that our powers of spiritual perception are of the
slightest. This is quite intelligible; and we ought not to fall into the
mistake of assuming that our undeveloped spirituality is normal, and
that what does not happen to us is inconceivable as having happened at
all. If we want to know the truth about spiritual phenomena we shall put
ourselves to school to those whose spiritual natures have attained the
highest development and in whose experience spiritual phenomena are of
almost daily happening.
To the man "whose talk is of oxen," whose whole life is absorbed in the
study of material things, a purely spiritual manifestation comes as a
surprise. His instinctive impulse is to deny its reality as a thing
obviously impertinent to his understanding of life. But one whose life
is based on spiritual postulates, who is, however feebly, attempting to
shape life in accordance with spiritual principles, though he may never
have attained anything that can be interpreted as a distinct revelation
from God by vision or voice or otherwise, yet must he by the very basic
assumptions of his life be ready to regard such manifestations of God as
intelligible, and indeed to be expected. So far from regarding divine
interventions in life as impossible, we shall regard the Christian life
which has no experience of them as abnormal, as not having realised its
inheritance. The degree and kind of such intervention in life will vary;
but it is the fact of the intervention that is important: the mode in a
special case will be determined by the needs of that case. As we think
along these lines we reach the conclusion that what we call the
supernatural is not the unnatural or the abnormal, but is a higher mode
of the natural.
We are not surprised therefore to find that those whose spiritual
development was such as to make it possible for God to choose them to
fulfil special offices in relation to the Incarnation; who could be
chosen to be, in the one case, the Mother of God-incarnate, and in the
other, to be the guardian of the divine Child and His Blessed Mother,
have the divine will in regard to the details of the trust committed to
them, imparted to them in vision and in dream. So far from such vision
and dream suggesting to us "a mythical element" in the Gospel
narratives, they rather confirm our faith in that they harmonize with
our instinctive conclusions as to what would be natural under the
circumstances. We are prepared to be told that at this crisis in the
Holy Child's life "the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream,
saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into
Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word; for Herod will seek
the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child
and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt."
Thus early in our Lord's life is the element of tragedy introduced. The
Incarnation of God stirs the diabolic powers, the rulers of "this
darkness" to excited activity. The companion picture of the Nativity, of
the Holy Child lying in Mary's arms, of the wondering shepherds, of the
Magi from a far country,--the shadow of all this idyllic beauty is the
massacre of the Innocents, the wailing of Rachel for her children. It
is, as it were, the opening of a new stage in the world-old conflict
where the powers of evil appear to have the advantage and can show the
bodies of murdered infants as the trophies of their victory.
But are we to think of the death of a child as a disaster? Has any
actual victory redounded to the Prince of Power of the Air? One
understands of course the grief and sense of loss that attends the death
of any child, the breaking of the dreams which had gathered about its
future. What the father and the mother dreamed over the cradle and
planned for the future does not come to pass--all that is true. But in a
consideration of the broader interests involved, does not the death of a
baby have a meaning far deeper than a disappointment of hopes and
dreams? It is true, is it not? that the coming of the child brought
enrichment into the life of its parents? There was a new love born for
this one child which is not the common property of all the children of
the family, but is the peculiar possession of this child and its
parents. Life--the life of the parents--is better and nobler by virtue
of this love. They understand this, because when they stand by the side
of the child's coffin they never feel that it had been better that this
child had not come into existence. And more than that: as they commit
this fragile body to the grave they know that there is no real sense in
which they can say that they have lost this child. Rather, the child is
a perpetual treasure, for the moment contemplated through tears, but
presently to be thought of with unclouded joy. It is so wonderful a
thing to think of this pure soul caught back to God; to think of it
growing to spiritual maturity in God's very presence; to think of it
following the Lamb withersoever He goeth. Yes: to think of it also as
our child still, with our love in its heart, knowing that it has a
father and a mother on earth, and, that, just because of its early
death, it can be to them, what otherwise they would have been to it--the
guard and helper of their Jives. In God's presence are the souls of
children as perpetual intercessors for those whom they have left on
earth; and they may well rejoice before God in that what appeared the
tragedy of their death was in fact a recall from the field of battle
before the testing of their life was made. We wept as over an
irreparable loss,
While into nothingness crept back a host
Of shadows unexplored, of sins unsinned.
The artists have imagined the souls of those who first died for Jesus
attending Him on the way to Egypt as a celestial guard. In any case we
are certain that the angels who watched about Him so closely all His
life were with the Holy Family as they set out upon the way of exile. It
would have been a wearisome march but that Jesus was there. His presence
lightened all the toils of the desert way. Egypt, their place of refuge,
would not have seemed to them what it seems to us, a land of wonder, of
marvellous creations of human skill and intelligence, but a place of
banishment from all that was dear, from the ties of home and religion.
The religion which lay wrapped in the Holy Child was to break down
barriers and hindrances to the worship of God; but the time was not yet.
For them still the Holy Land, Jerusalem, the Temple, were the place of
God's manifestation, and all else the dwelling place of idols. They must
have shuddered in abhorrence at those strange forms of gods which rose
about them on every hand. We cannot ourselves fail to draw the contrast
between the statues which filled the Egyptian sanctuaries and before
which all Egypt, rich and poor, mighty and humble, prostrated
themselves, and this Child sleeping on Mary's breast. The imagination of
the Christian community later caught this contrast and embodied it in
the legend that when Jesus crossed the border of Egypt, all the idols of
the land of Egypt fell down.
We cannot follow the thought of the Blessed Mother through these strange
scenes and the experiences of these days. No doubt in the Jewish
communities already flourishing in Egypt there would be welcome and the
means of livelihood. But there would be perplexing questions to one
whose habit it was to keep all things which concerned her strange Child
hidden in her heart, the subject of constant meditation. Why, after the
divine action which had been so constant from His conception to His
birth, and in the circumstances which attended His birth, this reversal,
this defeat and flight? Why after Bethlehem, Egypt? Why after
Gabriel, Herod?
It brings us back again to the primary fact that the Incarnation is
essentially a stage in a battle, and that the nature of God's battles is
such that He constantly appears to lose them. He "goes forth as a giant
to run His course"; but the eyes of man cannot see the giant--they see
only a Babe laid in a manger. We are tricked by our notion of what
is powerful.
"They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam'st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry."
The battle presents itself to us as a demand that we choose, that we
take sides. The demand of Christ is that we associate ourselves with
Him, or that we define our position as on the other side. "The
friendship of the world is enmity with God" is a saying that is true
when reversed: The friendship of God is enmity with the world. An open
disclosure of the friendship of God sets all the powers of the world
against us. This may be uncomfortable; but there does not appear to be
any way of avoiding the opposition.
Our Lord, in His Incarnation, not only stripped Himself of His glory,
took the servant form, and in doing so deliberately deprived Himself of
certain means which would have been vastly influential in dealing with
men, but He also declined, in assuming human nature, to assume it under
conditions which would have conferred upon Him any adventitious
advantage in the prosecution of His work. He would display to men
neither divine nor human glory: He would have no aid from power or
position, from wealth or learning. He undertook His work in the strength
of a pure humanity united with God. He declined all else. And He found
that almost the first event of His life was to be driven into exile.
And they who are associated with Him necessarily share His fortunes.
Unless they will abandon the Child, Mary and Joseph must set out on the
desert way. They had no doubt much to learn; but what is important is
not the size or amount of what we learn, but the learning of it. When we
are called, as they were, to leave all for Christ, it often turns out
as hard, oftentimes harder, to leave property as riches; and the reason
is that what we ultimately are leaving is neither poverty nor riches,
but self: and self to us is always a "great possession."
Therein, I suppose, lies the solution of the problem of the relation of
property and Christianity in the common life. Idleness is sin; every one
is bound to some useful labour, no matter what his material resources
may be. And if we work for our living, if our labour is to be such as
will support us, then there at once arises the problem of possessions.
Useful, steady labour will ordinarily produce more than "food and
raiment." Under present social arrangments accumulated property is
handed on to heirs. A man naturally wants to make some provision for his
family. Or he finds himself in possession of considerable wealth and the
impulse is to spend in luxuries of one sort or another,--modern
invention has put endless means of ministering to physical or aesthetic
comfort within his reach. He can have a motor car, a country house, an
expensive library; he can have beautiful works of art. And then he is
confronted with the picture of the Holy Family which can never have
lived much beyond the poverty line. He realises the nature of our Lord's
life of poverty and ministry. And though the plain man may not feel that
he can go very far in imitating this life, he does feel that there is a
splendour of achievement in those who take our Lord at His word and sell
all to follow Him.
But the literal abandonment of life to the ideal of poverty is clearly
not what our Lord contemplated for the universal practice of His
followers. He nowhere indicates that all gainful labour is to be
abandoned, or that having gained enough for food and raiment we are to
idle thereafter, or even give ourselves to some ungainful work. The
Kingdom of heaven does not appear to be society organised on the lines
of socialism or otherwise. Our Lord contemplated life going on as it is,
only governed by a new set of motives. It has as the result of the
acceptance of the Gospel a new Orientation; and as a result of that it
will view "possessions" in a new way. The acceptance of the Gospel means
the self surrendered utterly to the will of God, and all that self
possesses held at the disposal of that will. We may expect that God's
will for us will be manifested in the events of life and its
opportunities, and we shall hold ourselves alert and ready to embrace
that will. It may be that the call will come to sell all, and we need to
beware lest the thoroughness of the demand terrify us into the
repudiation of our Lord's service; lest the thought of the sacrificed
possessions send us away sorrowing. Ordinarily the call is less
searching than that; or perhaps the mercy of God spares us from demands
that would be beyond our strength. In any case, the truly consecrated
self will regard luxury as a dangerous thing, replete with entanglements
of all kinds, that it were well to avoid at the expense of any
sacrifice. One does well to hold "possessions" in a very loose grip,
lest the hold be reversed, and we become their servants rather than
they ours. And it is well to emphasise again that the mere size of
possessions is of small importance. There is a not very rational
tendency to think of this as being a matter of millions, for the man of
moderate income to think that there is no problem for him. The problem
is as pressing for him as for any man. His minimum of comfort may be as
tightly grasped as the other man's maximum. The only solution of the
problem will be found in the converted self. Those who have really given
themselves to God hold all things at His disposal. They are not thinking
how they can indulge self but how they can glorify God.
Egypt to many will stand for another sort of abandonment which much
perplexes the immature Christian: that is, the sort of isolation in
which the new Christian is quite likely to find himself when first he
attempts to put Christian principles into practice. We imagine one
brought up in the ordinary mixed circles of society, where there are
unbelievers and lax Christians mingled together, and where there are no
principles firmly enough held to interfere with any sort of enjoyment of
life which offers. Such an one--a young woman, let us suppose--in the
Providence of God becomes converted to our Lord, and comes to see that
the lax and indifferent Christian life she had been leading was a mere
mockery of Christian living. Speedily does she find when she attempts to
put into action the principles of living which she now understands to be
the meaning of the Gospel that a breach of sympathy has been opened
between her and her accustomed companions; that many things which she
was accustomed to do in their society and which made for their common
fund of amusement are no longer possible to her. The careless talk, the
shameless dress, the gambling, the drinking, the Sunday amusements--such
things as these she has thrown over; and she finds that with them she
has thrown over the basis of intimacy with her usual companions. It is
not that they are antagonistic but simply that their points of contact
have ceased to exist. Her own inhibitions exclude her automatically from
most of the activities of her social circle. She finds herself much
alone. Her friends are sorry for her and think her foolish and try to
win her back, but it is clear to her that she can only go back by going
back from Christ.
This is the common case of the young whether boy or girl to-day, and the
practical question is, Can they endure the isolation? It is easy to say:
Let them make Christian friends; but that is not always practical,
especially in the present state of the Church when there is no cohesion
among its members, no true sense of constituting a Brotherhood, of being
members of the same Body. We have to admit that the attempt to hold a
high standard usually ends in failure, at least the practical failure of
a weak compromise. But there are characters that are strong enough to
face the isolation and to readjust life on the basis of the new
principles and to mould it in accord with the new ideals. The period of
this readjustment is one of severe testing of one's grasp on principles
and one's strength of purpose. But the battle once fought out we attain
a new kind of freedom and expansion of life. We look back with some
amusement at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days
of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that
amused us in our childish hours. The desert of Egypt that we entered
with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as
we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we
resolutely tread the desert way.
These trials must be the daily experience of those who attempt to put
their religion into practice, and these perplexities must assail them so
long as the Christian community continues to show its present social
incompetence; so long, that is, as we attempt to make the basis of our
social action something other than the principles of the spiritual life.
A Christian society, one would naturally think, would spring out of the
possession of Christian ideals; and doubtless it would if these ideals
were really dominant in life, and not a sort of ornament applied to it.
Any social circle contains men and women of various degrees of
intellectual development and of varying degrees of experience of life;
what holds them together is the pursuit of common objects, the objects
that we sum up as amusement. Now the Christians in a community certainly
have a common object, the cultivation of the spiritual life through the
supernatural means offered by the Church of God. One would think that
this object would have a more constraining power than the attractions of
motoring or golf; but in fact we know that this is not so save in
individual cases. There is not, that is to say, anywhere visible a
Christian community which is wrought into a unity by the solidifying
forces of its professed ideals. Those very people whose paths converge
week by week until they meet at this altar, as they leave the altar,
follow diverging paths and live in isolation for the rest of their time.
One of the constant problems of the Church is that of the loss of those
who have for a time been associated with it--of those who have for a
time seemed to recognise their duty to God, and their privileges as
members of His Son. They drift away into the world. We pray and meditate
and worry over this and try to invent some machinery which will overcome
it. But it cannot be overcome by machinery, especially by the sort of
machinery which consists in transferring the amusements that people find
in the world bodily into the Church itself. It cannot and will not be
overcome until a Christian society has been created which is bound
together by the interests of the Kingdom of God, and in which those
interests are so predominant as to throw into the shade and practically
annihilate other interests. And especially must such spiritual interests
be strong enough to break down all social barriers so that the cultured
and refined can find a common ground with the uneducated and socially
untrained in the spiritual privileges that they share in common. When
the banker can talk with his chauffeur of their common experience in
prayer, and the banker's wife and her cook can confer on their mutual
difficulties in making a meditation, then we shall have got within
sight of a Christian society; but at present, while these have no
spiritual contact, it is not within sight. The primitive Christian
community in Jerusalem made the attempt at having all things in common.
Their mistake seems to have been that they, like other and more modern
people, by "all things" understood money. You cannot build any society
which is worth the name on money, a Church least of all. It is
unimportant whether a man is rich or poor; what is important is his
spiritual accomplishment: and it is common spiritual aims and
accomplishments which should make up the "all things" which possessed in
common will form the basis of an enduring unity. But not until
accomplishment becomes the supreme interest of life can we expect to get
out of the impasse in which we at present find ourselves; in which, that
is, the person can be converted to Christianity and enter into union
with God in Christ and become a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, and
wake to find himself isolated from his old circle by his profession of
new principles; but not, by his new principles, truly united to his
fellow citizens in the Kingdom of God! One is tempted to write, What a
comedy; but before one can do so, realises that it is in fact a tragedy!
Mother of God--oh, rare prerogative;
Oh, glorious title--what more special grace
Could unto thee thy dear Son, dread God, give
To show how far thou dost all creatures pass?
That mighty power within the narrow fold
Did of thy ne'er polluted womb remain,
Whom, whiles he doth th' all-ruling Sceptre hold,
Not earth, nor yet the heavens can contain;
Thou in the springtide of thy age brought'st forth
Him who before all matter, time and place,
Begotten of th' Eternal Father was.
Oh, be thou then, while we admire thy worth
A means unto that Son not to proceed
In rigour with us for each sinful deed.
John Brereley, Priest (Vere Lawrence Anderton, S.J.) 1575-1643
PART TWO