WE HAVE RECEIVED visitors from distinguished persons on their way to and from the Vatican Council sessions. From our talks with them, we surmised that the majority of the bishops who figured in the sessions have made up their minds about the Legion of Mary, and to rely on it the tasks which lie ahead. They deemed the tasks familiar with the various items of Legion history and were particularly appreciative of their capacity to put courage and toughness into its members so that they stand up to ill usage instead of retreat from it.
One of the bishops (of a South American diocese) placed his entire reliance upon the Legion for the special reason that the Legion has backbone and is able to communicate to the people. The bishop was discerning and saw that all the other qualities, without strength, are of doubtful value. For any virtue, to be worthwhile, must possess strength.
The Legion’s strength lies in having Christian motives, so present in their minds that they automatically gear themselves into every action. Action that is motivated by good asserts itself and results in holding in check the baser side of human nature and, therefore, stimulates the nobler elements into supremacy.
Mary plays a special part in this process because it is she who gave us Jesus Christ and, along with Him, every other good. She holds every good in her gift and passes it on to those willing to receive it. In order, however, to receive it, we must be united to her.
This union is real only if we will to continually act on it; by an effort that does not cease. Not by establishing an act of consecration which could be merely a passing thing but keeping it alive by frequently paying attention to her.
To do that, we must aim at knowing her, familiarize ourselves with her life by reading and thought; by this will be set before us various episodes of her life: the great and the little. The Gospels will supply some of these, others by spiritual writers, and some we may have to spiritually imagine for ourselves. Think of the Rosary and her seven sorrows.
It is essential to read about her, with a view to establishing intimacy between her and us. If we doubt her, we will not find ourselves turning to her confidently. It is crucial that we must read, and then think over what we have read. What is said about her in the Gospels is of immense importance but not very great in quantity and, as food for our minds, we must have substance, which should be spiritual.
I suggest few works for study. Anne Catherine Emmerich, an Augustinian nun, has produced Revelations of Visions which are mainly about the life of our Lord and include our Lady. The work is one which every Catholic should read for meditation because it describes in detail the circumstances and happenings briefly summarized in the Gospels. Out of the knowledge emerges in living detail the persons of our Lord and His mother.
Another book is by Mary of Agreda, a Spanish Franciscan Abbess. It has no special authority but fulfills the vital purpose of supplying food for our meditations and rendering real and vivid to us those august lives upon which our whole lives depend.
Another work of great excellence, written by the Abbé Orsini, a French writer, is “The Life of the Blessed Virgin.” It is an English translation of the idea that what you cannot tell about our Lady by absolute knowledge, you can deduce by relating her to the circumstances of her time and the way in which a girl of her age and condition would have lived.
Orsini proceeds on the principle that Mary would be faithful to the approved usages, religious and customary, of her people. On this basis, he gives in detail an account of the way our Lady spent her day; the prayers she would say; how she was dressed and so forth.
When you have familiarized yourself with those three books, you will have provided yourself with some knowledge of her. Your mind must play on that knowledge constantly in order to know her. She is your mother: more so than your earthly mother. She is the custodian of your life and your soul, the person who is referred to as the Woman into whose hands God placed salvation.
I refer to the Dolors and the Rosary. Each of the mysteries teaches its own essential lesson. I will pick for present purposes one, which I think has not been called upon to yield its full lesson on us, which bears upon my subject that is of strength.
I speak of the Gospel picture of our Lady at the foot of the Cross: “There stood by the Cross of Jesus His mother.” What force in a few words! The Evangelist insists that she was standing. Not only did she stand erect in her body, but her mind and her heart stood up unflinchingly also. The Church calls her the strong Woman of all time, an ideal of strength in its purity, without the admixture of any of those other things that would amount to dross. She is the strong Woman, and the episode of Calvary is the special presenting of that to us. Therefore, it is that moment of the consummation of Redemption, when suffering reached its maximum point and when, according to the ordinary rules of humanity, weakness also asserts itself most. If we live this lesson, the twofold operation of grace and nature will accomplish itself in us. Strength will rise up in us and we will meet the crisis in what I might call an important, positive way. We usually face a difficulty in a negative way; that is, we yield a little interiorly. Our first reaction is of weakness. We ought instead to make an effort to mobilize our resources and try to be positive. For in that moment of hesitation, we might have invited defeat. At best, we have lost ground, which we may not recover. So we must aim at doing better – at not surrendering at all. If we succeed, the trial turns into triumph.
To achieve this to the fullness of its possibility, we should seek to enter intimately into Mary’s state of mind as she stood gazing on her Son. We must associate our own misery and despondency with hers. We must use our own suffering as a means of enabling us to appreciate hers. “Knowledge by suffering entereth, and life is perfected by deat.” says the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. If in the moment when intolerable grief and torment seize us, we turn out thoughts to her, we get a little insight into the extent of her sufferings – not as an exercise in theory but a failed practice in difficulty.
Associating our suffering and weakness with her, we throw the emphasis on her woe. Then we must struggle desperately to rise to the heroism of being even glad that we are suffering with her at that moment. The role we must aspire to is that of standing up and suffering in her in a sort of identity. There is strength in this, in supernaturalizing and sweetening our own emergency.
The technical term which is applied to Mary’s sufferings is ‘compassion.’Many words have suffered modification of meaning through the passage of time, and this word is one of them. ‘Compassion,’ thus applied to her, has no present conventional meaning, which is only to feel pity. The word ‘passion,’ which is similarly assigned to our Lord’s ordeal of suffering, means only anger today. Our Lord was not in a rage; neither was our Lady; she was merely pitying Him in His agony, and what mother would not. Her compassion meant her suffering His passion along with Him. “I have suffered with Him whom I saw suffer.” His very pains were transferred to her through her eyes and her exquisitely sensitive nervous system so that she endured His sufferings along with Him for our sakes.
A very suffering of death was in question. She felt the agonies of death along with her Son, and she would have died with Him but for the fact that she was miraculously preserved. For her time had not yet come: she had another task of mothering to do. Mankind, that is.
This idea of her compassion is an essential one in Christianity. It was the plan that she was to share in a real way in the mission of our Lord. She would imitate it, would be brought into it in such a pivotal way that, even though dependent on our Lord, she would help to earn Redemption, and afterwards share in His administration of grace. The Church has designated her the Mediatrix of all Graces in the sense that they are not given without her.
It is the will of God to exalt her to the maximum degree of which she was capable. She was prophesied at the time of the Fall as the Woman who would cooperate in Redemption. That prophecy all men looked forward to from the time of the Fall. All nations bore with them that image, which occurred in their religions in some shape or another, disfigured but recognizable: The Woman and her Child of Salvation.
So when our Lord stood up on His Cross and consummated Redemption, she was standing at its foot as the Gospels meaningfully insist. At that epochal moment, our Lord, speaking to her, cast the minds of all generations back to the original prophecy, indicating that she was the Woman who would help in Redemption, “Woman, behold thy Son.”
Mary was the most exquisite creature that could be. Therefore, she could suffer, one might say, almost infinitely beyond all others. Her feelings had an approximation of those of her Son. The Church places on her lips the words of Scripture: “All ye who pass by look and see if there is any sorrow like unto mine.” All generations have assigned to her the title: ‘the Woman of Sorrows.’ Just as Jesus encompassed the whole gamut of human woe, so also did Mary; though our limited understanding can never see how such could be. His sufferings and hers contained every possible component.
Her agony of mind communicates itself throughout her body so that, in one intense situation, she endures all possible torments. All of these, save despair, a feeling alien to her, she must have felt to the extreme.
Her own perfection enhanced her ordeal. She was immaculately conceived and, therefore, sensitive beyond ordinary nature. Only Jesus could feel more acutely than she. Likewise, her glorious intellect gave her insight into what was taking place. In these circumstances, her affliction reached a depth beyond our knowing. Yet there was joy in her. This may seen to entail contradiction. St. Bernard, referring tot his mysterious phenomenon, says that she had perfect faith and complete suffering together; that she acquiesced with all her heart in the Crucifixion, even if it broke her heart. She knew that she would see her Son again in a few days, and yet what was before her eyes represented the end of the world to her. To glimpse how such joy could exist in her side-by-side with such a degree and type of suffering, we have to realize that the faith, which was her supreme quality and consolation, made her feel to the full both the beauty and the horror of the Cross, which had as its victim the loveliest, the most innocent, the most exalted person that could ever be: her infinitely loved Child. In a word, her faith gave her exact appreciation of her position and accentuated every aspect of it, including what appears to be exact opposites.
With ideas and motives such as those made familiar to us by reflection and practice, we must seek to unite our own suffering with her as she stands at the foot of the Cross. Standing there with her – or rather in her – we must be worthy of her. We must not cower and cry and wish to be dead, for she was never like that. Neither must we indulge in self-pity, for she had no thought of herself. Nor must we lie down on the ground and abandon ourselves to despair, because despair was a stranger in her. If we want to be like her and to help her, we must summon up strength and courage in ourselves. This idea of helping her is a justified one; our help is a real help, just as our helping of our Lord is real, even to the point that He has made Himself dependent on it, requiring it, leaning on it, and being helpless without it, even if took a long time coming. Amen.
