PROLOGUE
Our Untainted Boast
WE OF
THE HUMAN RACE feel it in our bones, and in our soul, that a belittlement
has overtaken us. Our mind clings to the ideal, as to a lost right, that
every man or woman should walk the earth a paragon. We cannot get rid of
the notion. We instinctively crave that unflawed nobility of person
which, in our first parents, commanded the respect of even the beast.
Human unsightliness of character or body
offends. It depresses. It mocks the original dignity we do not have but
feel we should have and cannot help desiring to have. "Every goose would
be a swan" and since the goose cannot, the frustration finds a vicarious
relief in hero worship. Whenever there comes along in whatever
environment one of those rare throwbacks to that lost dignity, though only
partially and very imperfectly so, the person is sure of a popular
welcome.
We have need of such. The vogue of idolizing
our celebrities rather shows that we have. The trouble is, they
disappoint. The classic assertion, "an Aristotle is but the rubbish of an
Adam", has only told the truth. The model physique weakens with age. The
beauty queen outgrows her charm. The saint, eminently noble in character,
still has faults. There remains a crying need for a superior to these, a
paragon of absolute perfection.
The demand has been better supplied than is
commonly realized. The crying need, thanks be to heaven, did not go
unheeded. It found its answer at Nazareth, all of two thousand years ago,
when the grandparents of Jesus Christ were granted a child. The sensitive
who despair of humanity have not been cheated in their demand. They only
think they have. They may find the perfect fulfillment of it, if they but
knew, in a creature of their kind whom the angels serve, the glorious
Mother of God.
But just a moment! We must get the truth in
focus. Her Divine Son, not she—who would be the first to insist on it—has
brought to us our supreme distinction. She wouldn't want her clients to
honor her prerogatives at his expense, to his neglect. It would offend
her. In her appearances at Carmel, Guadalupe, La Salette, Lourdes,
Fatima, wherever else, she only draws attention to herself to direct it to
him, her Savior as well as her Child. Outside the intercommunicative
Trinity, not even from his angels does Christ receive so perfect an
adoration as from his mother. She who became hers to be identified with
our fallen race in order to redeem it, glorify it, and turn the curse of
original sin into a greater blessing than ever it was an evil.
The few words that Mary is reported to have
said at the marriage feast of Cana tell more than they say. They suggest
a creatural respect for Jesus, an abiding trust in his mastery over
nature. They clearly indicate that she had been thinking as she looked
around at the crowd: "You good neighbors must get it out of your heads
that he's just from Nazareth. The angel knew him in heaven, calling him
God's son before ever he was mine. How could he be confounded by an
insignificant shortage of wine?" Hurrying to the waiters, she broke the
silence of her thoughts to advise them: "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn.
2:5). The words hold her implicit grandeur of faith.
As much a human being as his mother, as much
God as his Father, Christ by assuming human nature gave it a dignity the
angels lack. They find none of their kind adorable. But they do adore a
Man, whom they know to be of the Holy Trinity. Nor is that all. The
angels have with them now as an object of their veneration the glorified
form of their queen, a native of Nazareth, next to God in grandeur, yet
herself not divine, entirely one of ours. It is a permissible boast,
being the truth: she is all human.
Because she would bear the sinless Redeemer,
the Virgin of Nazareth was preordained to be herself conceived in the
purity of grace. There was to be no taint in her. God saw to that. He
wasn't of a mind to allow the mother, from whom her Child would take every
drop of his Precious Blood, to fall for a moment under the sway of Satan.
He, the Omnipotent, had the power to preserve Mary at her conception from
the curse; it was seemingly the proper thing for him to do under such holy
circumstances; and so, argues Duns Scotus, he did do it. And the
Church has reacted, in a full use of her authority, with a resounding
"that's the truth!"
The Church followed her decree with another to
the honor of Mary. It wasn't enough that, exempt from the curse, she
preserve her flawless beauty of soul through life into eternity; no, not
having incurred the penalty of death, her sacred body must escape the
decay of the tomb. And it did. "We pronounce, declare and define it to
be a divinely revealed dogma," spoke out Pope Pius XII to a crowded St.
Peter's Square and to the world, "that the Immaculate Mother of God, the
ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was
assumed body and soul into heavenly glory." Arriving there, let it be
said again, the noblest of the daughters of men enriched heaven by her
single presence more than all the angels together had done. And the
angels, in the joy of their welcome to her, knew it.
The tragedy is, that so grievously many of our
generation remain ignorant of her, and that their ignorance is all the
more regrettable for being entirely unnecessary. Women liberationists
never mention the supreme glory of their sex, who transcends the world of
men – all men save the Child of her flesh. They raise such a fuss
decrying the lack of women in the sanctuary, that they have no time to
think of the prerogatives which only the Queen of the Apostles and Model
of Saints and Mother of the Church enjoys. Whereas the priest speaks for
Christ and not for himself when he pronounces the words of consecration,
Mary, from whom the Savior took his flesh, might truly have said of his
dying form on the cross, meaning the statement not literally but
derivatively: "This is my Body. This is my Blood."
But not all of her alienated children behave as
though their spiritual mother does not exist. In the past, as at present,
many a voice has called to her from an estrangement that emphasizes the
need of her. Wordsworth, in a burst of joy, addresses her as "Mother!"
Then follows his perfect statement of the truth:
Woman! Above all
women glorified,
Our tainted
nature's solitary boast.
Cornelia Otis Skinner got her estranged longing
into a lyric which holds the bereavement of countless millions. The great
actress does not impersonate. She speaks from her own heart, the heart of
a deprived child, when she prays:
Mary, most
serenely fair,
Hear
an unbeliever's prayer.
Nurtured in an
austere creed,
Sweetest Lady, she has need
Of the solace of
your grace;
See
the tears that stain her face
As she kneels to
beg your love –
You
whom no one told her of.
Henry Adams, student of civilization, traveler
around the world, for the last eighteen years of his life carried with him
in a special wallet his sublime "Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres." He
didn't want to be without those forty stanzas of sheer beauty, which he
wrote from the urging of a disillusioned soul, and which he kept on his
person as another might wear a scapular or a miraculous medal. The great
poem, invoking the Blessed Mother, speaks to her of her tender power, her
majesty, her radiance like the sun. It decries the drifting away of
modern civilization from her influence to an enslavement to science
without God. It foresees the threat of science, within the decision of
infidels, to blow up the world. It so consistently bemoans the worship of
the sordid to the neglect of the ennobling religion of Chartres that the
accumulated whole becomes a chef-d'oeuvre of nostalgia for a lost faith.
Such expressions of loss could fill an
anthology. They tingle with their authors' embarrassment that it took
them so long to discover the importance of their spiritual mother in the
economy of salvation. They suggest, these poems do, what an influence
Mary will exert in bringing the many denominations of Christians and even
the estranged pagan to a unity of faith, once she is better known, when
the blur of prejudice has vanished and she stands revealed in all her
splendor and in all her yearning love for them.
Especially pathetic are the deprived who do
indeed recognize the need, yet from a misunderstanding are afraid to avail
themselves of its realization. They would like to be hers, but do not
dare approach their spiritual mother because of a false notion that she is
not meant for them. Speaking as one of these, Nathaniel Hawthorne does
not mince his beautiful words: "I have always envied the Catholics that
sweet Virgin Mother who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting
somewhat his awful splendor, but permitting his love to stream on the
worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension through the medium of
a woman's tenderness." What a noble misunderstanding! Why did not
someone in New England inform the envier that the mother of mankind
belonged as much to him as to the envied? The difference was, they knew
it and he did not know a truth which his education had failed to include.
Mary fulfills an urgent need. A mother of
unfailing benevolence, she is at the same time a model of human perfection
who shares our creaturehood. She is God's lovely reminder to us of what
our nature should have remained and, by cooperation with grace, can
become. She never disappoints. No sin ever cheapened her beauty. She
lived out her years gracefully, showing none of that deterioration of
spirit which age normally brings. The mother who stood at the cross bore
her grief with the dignity of an unselfish poise, so much the more
touching for the heartbreak it covered. Michelangelo has wrought into the
maternal figure of his Pieta a perfect interpretation, which the world
cannot get done admiring. It sees in his effort an unerring fidelity to
his subject, the mother it would at least cherish as a fond ideal; which
rather indicates its need of her.
But Mary is not an unfounded ideal. She is a
rich reality: a woman who took to heaven with her a sensitive
understanding of our vicissitudes, having experienced them; a mother
bequeathed from the cross to the children of men, whose concern for them
never runs out of tenderness, even though they be so many. She is,
moreover, the queen of the angels whose glorified body serves notice to
the faithful on earth that beatitude awaits their own bodies, let death do
what it will.
Mary owes her prerogatives to God, her Creator,
her Son, her Sanctifier. To be sure, she does! But it must not be
supposed she had no voice in obtaining the prerogatives. Her divine
maternity brought her the others; because of whose mother she would be,
she was conceived without sin, she was pre-redeemed, and so on through the
litany of her honors. Nevertheless, it was not alone God's choice that
she bear the Infant Savior. It was hers as well.
God foreknew from all eternity when the right
girl would come along in the course of human history, who would do his
will to perfection, and when she did come into being and had grown to
adolescence the angel Gabriel was sent to her with the great invitation.
Foreseeing her choice, God did not force it. Mary remained free to accept
or reject. The angel waited ever so courteously for the chosen of the
Lord to make up her mind, not coercing, not suggesting. Her taking or
leaving the highest honor ever to be offered a woman since the creation of
the world, is what the Lord was asking the young virgin to decide. She
complied. If he wanted it so, so be it!
"All other creatures owe everything to God, but
God himself owes something to her" is the statement of a mystic that
elated Chesterton. He had been reading passively. Then came those
words. "And I started up," he writes, "as at the sound of a trumpet and
said almost aloud: 'But what a splendid thing to say!'" It seemed to him
that the paradox of the Incarnation could hardly have been better
expressed. It was the stunning truth.
That stunning truth lives in the fine arts.
Who of us can number all the masterpieces and less than masterpieces that
the Maid of Nazareth has inspired? But heaven can. It has the exact
count of all the cathedrals and churches and chapels built to her memory;
of all her statues and paintings and mosaics in the world; of every
stained-glass window depicting her blessed loveliness. Not a single
sculptured figure of the Madonna standing in the most neglected solitude
of a forest, nor a picture of her in the remotest corner of a museum, has
escaped the Omniscient. Her Son knows by heart every stanza from the
anthologies of verse to her honor. He does not miss a chord of the vast
repertoire of hymns addressed to the virgin who became his mother. More
directly than any other medium, yet no more sublimely than the harmony of
stone at Chartres, do the Ave Marias from composers of genius
glorify the handmaid of the Lord and in the most entrancing of melodies
contribute toward the continuous fulfillment of her own prophecy: "Behold,
henceforth all generations will call me blessed" (Lk 1:48).
Infidels or the prejudiced in any generation
since her time who have not called her "blessed" would have, were they not
blind to her true importance to them and to the human race. They in
common with others despise the vicious in conduct, feel a disgust for the
gross defects of the flesh, a dislike of its infirmities, an antipathy for
its corruptibility in the grave. A sense that none of this should be, is
natural to the human mind. But we have the answer to such an innate
craving for perfection, entirely human, yet without blemish. We have it,
I repeat for the joy of saying it again, in Mary. She has transcended the
curse of imperfection, moral and physical.
She is the creature closest to the Trinity,
nobler than the angel, the fairest of women, the superior of every man but
the Son she bore, the Queen of Creation whose glory by comparison would
pale to the feeble glow the splendor of the sun and reduce to a paltry
inferiority the magnificence of the universe. It is the truth. Let it
nourish our hope. Let it feed our pride. She who is all this, is one of
ours.
Of her prerogatives, her more significant
historic victories, her apparitions which reaffirm what the Church teaches
of her, and the miracles from her which confirm the doctrines, this book
will treat. The treatment cannot measure up to the subject. But it will
do its best. May she forgive its shortcomings and the reader find in it
an aid to a deeper appreciation of the Mother of God, whom the dying
Christ knowing her worth deigned to share with us. |