THE HOME OF S. JOHN
And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.
S. John XIX, 27.
But now we unite to praise thee, O Pure and Immaculate One, blessed
Virgin and sinless Mother of thy great Son and the God of all. O
perfectly spotless and altogether holy, thou art the hope of despairing
sinners. We bless thee as most full of grace, who didst give birth to
Christ, God and Man. And we fall down before thee. We all invoke thee
and implore thy help. Deliver us, O Virgin, holy and undefiled, from
every pressing strait and from all temptations of the Evil One. Be thou
our peacemaker in the hour of death and judgment. Do thou save us from
the future unquenchable fire and from the outer darkness. Do thou render
us worthy of the glory of thy Son, O Virgin and Mother, most sweet
and clement.
A PRAYER OF S. EPHREM THE SYRIAN.
There is no scene in the whole range of Scripture narrative which is
more full of pathos than this scene of the Cross. Two agonies meet: the
agony of the nailing, the lifting, the dying; and the agony that looks
on in silent helplessness. But while our Lord's physical agony was in
some sort swallowed up in the intensity of the love which was the motive
for enduring it, overpassed in the vision of the need of those for whom
He was dying, S. Mary's agony was the pain of a love concentrated upon
the Sufferer Who hangs dying before her eyes. If there be anything that
can lighten the pain of such love it is that it feels itself answered,
that its object is conscious of it and is helped by it. And S. Mary had
that consolation: the love poured to her from the Cross, and revealed
itself when the suffering Son turned His eyes upon her agony and,
understanding what her desolation would be, committed her to His beloved
disciple: "Behold thy Mother; behold thy son." These two great loves
which had been our Lord's human consolation were thus committed to one
another. And when the darkness fell, and death relieved the agony, and
the Sacred Body had been cared for, then the mother found refuge with S.
John: "and from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home."
From the day of Pentecost on, S. Mary is no more heard of in the history
of the Church. As so often, the Scriptures are silent and decline to
answer our interested questions. They go on with the essentails of their
story, the founding of the Church of God, and leave other things aside.
So we do not know any of the last years of the life of Blessed Mary.
Where did she live? How long did she live? The traditions, in any case
of quite an untrustworthy nature, are contradictory. Jerusalem and
Ephesus contend for the honour of our Lady's residence. Jerusalem must
have been the site of that "home" to which S. John took her after the
crucifixion. Did she remain there, or did she follow S. John, and at
length come to live with him in Ephesus? Ephesus puts forward the claim,
and we feel that it would be well founded in the nature of the relation
between these two, if S. Mary lived until the settlement of the last of
the apostles in the Asian city. Our Lord's committal of His Mother to
the beloved disciple implies their personal association as long as S.
Mary lived: if till S. John was settled in Ephesus, then we may be sure
that she was there. She would be with S. John as long as she lived, but
can we think of her as living long? Would not a great love draw her to
another world and the presence of her triumphant Son?
Let us, however think, as one tradition bids us, of our Lady as living
some time with S. John at Ephesus. We can understand the situation
because it is so much like our own. These Asia Minor cities of the
imperial period were curiously like the great centers of population in
the Western world of to-day--London, Paris, New York, Chicago. There was
the same over-crowding of population, the same intense commercial
activity, the same almost insane thirst for amusement and excitement,
the same degeneracy of moral fibre. The sins that sapped the life of
Ephesus are the same that degrade contemporary life. In some ways
Ephesus was, possibly, more frankly corrupt; but on the other hand it
had no daily press to advertise and promote sin and social corruption.
There is more of Christianity and of Christian influence in the modern
city, but even here there is a curious resemblance between the two. The
Christian Religion had but recently been introduced into Ephesus, but
already it had precisely that touch of ineffectiveness that seems to us
so modern. The message of the risen Lord to the angel of the Church in
Ephesus is: "Nevertheless I have this against thee, that thou hast left
thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and
repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly,
and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."
The things that hearten us are sometimes strange; but I suppose that
there is a feeling of encouragement in our present day distress and
spiritual ineffectiveness in the thought that even under S. John the
Church in Ephesus was not wholly ideal. The conditions which baffle us,
baffled him. The converts who were so promising and enthusiastic
declined in zeal and fell back under the spell of worldliness. Zeal is a
quality which is maintained with great difficulty, and the pull of the
world, whether social or business, is steadily exercised. Converts in
Ephesus, like converts in New York, felt that their friends were right
who declared that they were quite unnecessarily strict, and that in
order to serve Christ it was not necessary to turn their backs
absolutely on Diana.
As one tries to reconstruct the situation in Ephesus, one feels that our
Lady would have had no prominence in the Church in the way of an
actively exercised influence. One thinks of her as living in retirement,
as not even talking very much. If she lived long she would be an object
of increasing interest and even of awe to the new converts, and an
object of growing love to all those who were admitted to any sort of
fellowship with her. But one cannot imagine a crowd about her, inquiring
into her experiences and her memories of her divine Son. Once she told
of her experience, for it was necessary that the Church should know of
the circumstances of the coming of the Son of God into the world, but
beyond that necessary communication of her experience we cannot think of
her as speaking of her sacred memories. Silence and meditation, longing
and waiting, would have filled the years till the hour of her release.
But in the quiet hours spent with S. John it would be different. Between
the Blessed Virgin and S. John there was perfect understanding and
perfect sympathy, and we love to think of the hours that they would have
spent together in deep spiritual intercourse. Those hours would not be
hours of reminiscence merely; they would rather be hours in which these
two would attempt with the aid of the Spirit Who ruled in them so fully
to enter deeper and ever deeper into the meaning of Incarnate God.
Jesus would be the continual object of their thought and their love, and
meditation upon His words and acts would lead them to an ever increasing
appreciation of their depth and meaning.
We have all felt, in reading the pages of S. John, how vast is the
difference both in attitude toward his subject and in his understanding
of it from that of the other Evangelists. The earlier Evangelists seem
deliberately to keep all feeling out of their story, to tell the life of
our Lord in the most meagre outline, confining themselves to the
essential facts. Anything like interpretation they decline. In S. John
all this is changed. The Jesus whom he presents is the same Jesus, but
seen through what different eyes! The same life is presented, but with
what changes in selection of material! The Gospel of S. John seems
almost a series of mediations upon selected facts of an already familiar
life rather than an attempt to tell a life-story. And so indeed we think
of it. When S. John wrote, the life of our Lord as a series of events
was already before the Church. The Church had the synoptic Gospels, and
it had a still living tradition to inform it. What it needed, and what
the Holy Spirit led S. John to give it, was some glimpse of the inner
meaning of the Incarnation, some unfolding of the spiritual depths of
the teaching of Jesus.
We know how it is that different people listening to the same words get
different impressions and carry away with them quite different meanings.
We hear what we are able to hear. And S. John was able to hear what the
other disciples of our Lord seem not to have heard. What dwelt in his
memory and was worked up in his meditations and was at length
transmitted to us, was the meaning of such incidents as the interview
with Nicodemus, and the talk with the woman of Samaria, the discourse on
the Holy Eucharist and the great High-priestly prayer. Men have felt the
contrast between S. John and the other Evangelists so intensely that
they have said that this is another Christ who is presented by S. John,
and the influences which have shaped the author of the Fourth Gospel are
quite other than those which shaped the men of the inner circle of
Jesus. But no: it is the instinctive, or rather the Spirit-guided,
selection of the material afforded by those years of association with
Jesus for the purpose of transmitting to the Church a spiritual depth
and beauty, a spiritual significance in our Lord's teaching, that the
earlier Gospel had hardly touched.
Which perhaps they could not touch because when they wrote there was not
yet in the Church the spiritual experience which could fully interpret
our Lord. Through the life of union with the risen Jesus and all the
spiritual experience, all the illumined intelligence that that life
brought, S. John was enabled to understand and interpret as he did.
Writing far on toward the end of the first century he was writing out of
the personal experience of Christian living of many years, which brought
with it year by year an increased power of spiritual vision opening to
him the depth and wonder of the fact of God made man. It is to an
experience of our Lord that he appeals as the basis of his teaching.
"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have
seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, of the Word of life: (for the life was manifested, and we have
seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which
was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have
seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship
with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and His Son Jesus
Christ." And as we read on in S. John's Epistles we cannot fail to see
how deeply the years of meditation have influenced his understanding of
our Lord and His teaching, and how much his past experience of our Lord
has been illumined by the experience of the risen Jesus which has
followed. At no time, we are certain, has S. John been out of touch with
his Master.
And can we for a moment think that the years of intercourse with our
Lady meant nothing in the spiritual development of S. John? On the
contrary, may we not think that much of the spiritual richness which is
the outstanding feature of his writings was the outcome of his
association with the blessed Mother? No one has ever shown the
sympathetic understanding of our Lord, has been so well able
convincingly to interpret Him, as the beloved disciple. I myself have no
doubt that much of his understanding came by way of S. Mary. Her
interpretative insight would have been deeper than any one else's, not
only because of her long association with Jesus, but because of her
sinlessness. No two lives ever touched so closely; and there was not
between them the bar that so blocks our spiritual understanding and
clouds our spiritual vision, the bar of sin. I suppose it is almost
impossible for us to appreciate the effect of sin in clouding vision and
dulling sympathy. Our every day familiarity with venial sin, our easy
tolerance of it, the adjustment of our lives to habits that involve it,
have resulted in a lack of spiritual sensitiveness. Much of the meaning
of our Lord's life and words passes over us just because of this dimness
of vision, this insensitiveness to suggestion. And therefore we find it
difficult to imagine what would be the understanding, the insight, the
response to our Lord, of one between whom and Him there was no shadow of
sin. And such an one was the blessed Mother. With unclouded vision she
looked into the face of her Son. As His life expanded she followed with
perfect sympathy; indeed, sometimes, as at Cana, her understanding of
what He was made her precipitate in concluding as to His necessary
action. When He became a public teacher and unfolded largely in parable
His doctrine, it was her sinless soul which would see clearest and
deepest, and with the most ready response. And therefore I am sure that
we cannot go astray in thinking that S. John's relation to S. Mary was
not simply that of a guardian of her from the pressure of the world, but
was indeed that of a son who listened and learned from the experience of
his Mother. No doubt S. John himself was of a very subtle spiritual
understanding; notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding his exceptional
opportunities of learning, we may still believe that there are many
touches in his Gospel which are the result of his association with his
Lord's Mother.
Is it not possible for us to have our share in that pure insight of
blessed Mary? When we try to think out the lines of our own spiritual
development and the influences that have contributed to shape it, do we
not find that the presence or absence of devotion to our Lady has been a
factor of considerable importance? Devotion to her injected an element
into our religion which is of vast moment, an element of sympathy, of
gentleness, of purity. You can if you like, in condemnatory accents,
call that element sentimentalism, although it is not that but the
exercise of those gentler elements of our nature without whose exercise
our nature functions one-sidedly. You may call it the feminine element,
if you like; you will still be indicating the same order of activity.
Surely, an all around spiritual development will bring out the feminine
as well as the masculine qualities. And it seems to be historically true
that those systems of religion which represent a revolt against the
cultus of our Lady and carefully exclude all traces of it from their
worship, show as a consequence of this exclusion a hardness and a
barrenness which makes their human appeal quite one-sided. And when
those same systems have realised their limitations and their lack of
human appeal, and have tried to supply what is lacking, they have again
failed, because instead of reverting to historical Christianity they
have taken the road of humanitarianism, basing themselves on our Lord's
human life and consequent brotherhood with us, rather than upon His
supernatural Personality as operative through His mystical Body. Stress
is laid upon charitable helpfulness rather than upon the power of grace.
The modern man tries to reform life rather than to regenerate it.
And, I repeat, I cannot help associating with a repudiation of the
cultus of the saints, and especially of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a
consequent failure to understand the Christian life as a supernatural
creation. If one leaves out of account the greater part of the Kingdom
of Heaven, all the multitudes of the redeemed, and their activities, and
fastens one's attention exclusively upon that small part of the Kingdom
which is the Church on earth, one can hardly fail to miss the
significance of the earthly Church itself. Religion understood in this
limited way may well drift more and more toward Deism and
Humanitarianism, and further and further from any supernatural
implications. This is no theory; it is what has happened. It was the
course of Protestantism from the Reformation to the eighteenth century;
and, after a partial revival of supernaturalism, is once more the rapid
course of Protestantism to-day. Protestantism has lost or is fast losing
any grip on the Trinity or the Incarnation: to it God is more and more a
barren unity, and Jesus a good man. And this largely because all
interest in the world of the Redeemed has been abandoned and all
intercourse with the inhabitants of that world denied.
It is therefore of the last importance that we, infected as we are with
Protestantism, should stress the revival of the cultus of the saints,
and should insist upon our right and privilege to pay due honour to the
Mother of God and ask our share in her prayers. We must do all we can to
make her known to our brethren. We need her sympathy, her aid,
her example.
Above all, the example of her spotless purity. It is notorious that one
of the most marked features of our time is the virulent assault on
purity. We had long emphasised a certain quality of conduct which we
called modesty; it was, perhaps, largely a convention, but it was one of
those protective conventions which are valuable as preservative of
qualities we prize. It was protective of purity; and however artificial
it was, in some respects, it existed because we felt that purity was a
thing too precious to be exposed to unnecessary risk. Well, modesty is
gone now, whether in conduct or convention. One hears discussed at
dinner-tables and in the presence of young girls matters which our
mothers would have blushed to mention at all. The quality of modesty is
declared Puritanical and hypocritical. "Hypocritical virtue" is a phrase
one frequently meets; and we seem fast going on to the time when all
virtue will be regarded as hypocrisy. Customary standards are falling
all about us, overthrown in the name of personal liberty.
And by liberty, one gathers, is meant freedom to do as one pleases, and
especially as one sexually pleases. The assault is pushed hardest just
now against the sanctity of the sacrament of matrimony and the morals of
that sacrament as they have been developed by the Christian Church.
Protestantism long ago assented to the overthrow of Christian standards
in the marriage relation and has aided the sexual anarchy with which we
are faced to-day. To-day the chief attack is on the purity of marriage
in the interests, ostensibly, of humanity. A vigorous campaign in favour
of what is called birth-control is being carried on, and is being
supported in quarters which are professedly Christian. There are many
grounds for opposing the movement, social, humanitarian and other. We
are here concerned with it only as it is an attack on purity. From the
Christian point of view the marriage relation has for its end the
procreation of children for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God. If
circumstances are such, through reasons of health or economy, that
children seem undesirable, the remedy is plain, self control. The theory
that human beings have no more control over their appetites than beasts,
while it has much to support it in contemporary life, cannot be admitted
from the point of view of religion. Self-control is always possible, and
is constantly exercised by many men and women who choose to be guided by
principle rather than by passion. And in any case the Christian Religion
can become no partner, not even a silent one, in a conspiracy to murder,
or in the sort of compromise that turns marriage into a licensed sodomy.
If indeed the economic status of the modern world is such that the
average couple cannot support a family, then the Christian Church may
well aid in the bringing about of an economic revolution; but it can
hardly aid in the destruction of its own ideals of purity.
What is ultimately at stake in the modern world is the whole conception
of purity as a quality that is desirable. This attitude has become
possible among us for one reason because we have consented to the
suppression of ideals of life which were calculated to sustain it. To
sustain any moral or spiritual conception there must be maintained
certain appropriate ideals which, while out of the reach of the average
man, create and sustain in him an admiration and respect for the ideal
standard. So the standard of purity presented in Mary and protected by
the belief in her Immaculate Conception and her assumption, has the
effect, not only of commending the life of chastity in the sense of the
vows of religion, but also in the broad sense of the restraint and
discipline of appetite whether within or without the marriage relation.
It impresses upon us the truth that purity is not only a human quality
but a divinely created virtue, the result of the infusion of sanctifying
grace into the soul. Is it not largely because the young are taught
(when they are taught anything at all in the premises) that purity is a
matter of the _will_, that they so often fail? If they were taught the
nature of the _virtue_ and were led to rely more on the indwelling might
of the Holy Spirit would they not have better success? And if there were
held constantly before their eyes the example of the saints and
especially of Blessed Mary ever-virgin, would not they have an increased
sense of the value of purity?
The life and example of S. Mary are an inestimable treasure of the
Church of God, and her removal from the world has only enhanced that
value. To-day her meaning is clearer to us than ever. The spirit-guided
mind of the Church has through the centuries been meditating on the
meaning of her office as Mother of God. The words in which she accepts
her vocation, Behold the handmaid of the Lord, implying, as they do, an
active co-operation with the divine purpose, a voluntary association of
herself with it, imply, too, the perpetual continuance of that
association, and contain in germ all Catholic teaching in regard to her
office. She passed from this world silently, and to the world unknown;
but to the Church of God she ever remains of all human beings the
greatest spiritual force in the Kingdom of God.
Weep, living things, of life the Mother dies;
The world doth lose the sum of all her bliss,
The Queen of earth, the Empress of the skies;
By Mary's death mankind an orphan is.
Let Nature weep, yea, let all graces moan,
Their glory, grace and gifts die all in one.
It was no death to her, but to her woe,
By which her joys began, her griefs did end;
Death was to her a friend, to us a foe,
Life of whose lives did on her life depend:
Not prey of death, but praise to death she was.
Whose ugly shape seemed glorious in her face.
Her face a heaven; two planets were her eyes,
Whose gracious light did make our clearest day;
But one such heaven there was, and lo, it dies,
Death's dark eclipse hath dimmed every, ray:
Sun, hide thy light, thy beams untimely shine;
True light since we have lost, we crave not thine.
Robert Southwell, 1560-1595
PART TWO