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Our
Lord and our Lady
- by Hilaire Belloc
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They
warned Our Lady for the Child
That was Our Blessed Lord,
And She took Him into the desert wild,
Over the camel's ford.
And
a long song She sang to Him
And a short story told:
And She wrapped Him in a woolen cloak
To keep Him from the cold.
But
when Our Lord was grown a man
The Rich they dragged Him down,
And they crucified Him in Golgatha,
Out and beyond the Town.
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They
crucified Him on Calvary,
Upon an April day;
And because He had been her little Son
She followed Him all the way.
Our
Lady stood beside the Cross,
A little space apart,
And when She heard Our Lord cry out
A sword went through Her Heart.
They
laid Our Lord in a marble tomb,
Dead, in a winding sheet.
But Our Lady stands above the world
With the white Moon at Her feet.
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Editorial
The
sword smitten heart of Mary, this year celebrated on a Saturday,
should move all devout Catholics to pity and devotion. "We
must choose, therefore, among all the devotions to the Blessed
Virgin, the one which draws us most toward this death to
ourselves, inasmuch as it will be the best and the most
sanctifying. For we must not think that all that shines
is gold, that all that tastes sweet is honey, or that all
that is easy to do and is done by the greatest number is
the most sanctifying." -True Devotion to Mary, by St.
Louis de Montfort. Meditation on our Lady's sufferings is
not an amusement for our pleasure; it is a strengthening
of the love of our heart for spiritual treasures, and a
means to detach us from the transitory joys of this world.
I
wish this blessing on all of us who pray the rosary: May
seven swords of sorrow also pierce our hearts, as they once
touched the inmost recesses of our Blessed Mother. So
may we be brought to the love and service of God, not for
the sake of consolations in this world (which God grants
to us only for a time), but in a more perfect manner may
we come to love God when He sends us sufferings, as He has
granted to His greatest saints.
United
to you in devotion to the Blessed Virgin, I am,
Fr.
E. Herkel
Mater
Dolorosa
Mary's
sorrow attracts our heart and enlists our sympathy. O, indeed
if we who "pass by the way attend and see" we
will be convinced that there "is not any sorrow like
unto hers." There may be natures so stolid and insensible
as not to be moved to rejoice at another's happiness, but
there are few who are not moved to sadness at sight of it
in others. It is a tribute that nature seems to demand of
us, even against our will; and what heart is so hard as
to refuse a tear or sigh in sympathy when our own sweet
Mother is the object of it? Let us, then, accompany her
through a few of those dolors of her mortal life, which
culminated in that hour when the sad, disconsolate Mother
turned away from the sepulcher wherein reposed all that
was dearest to a mother's heart.
In
speaking of Mary, or of any of her prerogatives, as the
object of our devotion, we must never lose sight of the
ineffable relation between her and Jesus. For it is only
in view of this relation - because Mary is the Mother of
God, and Jesus is her Son - that we offer her that homage
which we pay her. While reflecting on the present subject,
it is especially necessary that we bear in mind this their
intimate union. As Christ as God had from all eternity proceeded
from the Father alone, so did He, in time, as man, take
His human nature from Mary alone. He was literally "
flesh of her flesh, and bone of her bone;" no other
mortal could claim any part of Him. Aided by the mysterious
influence of the Holy Ghost only, Mary gave to Jesus a body
out of her pure substance: so that she is called, and is,
His Mother, by a title more appropriate than that by which
ordinary women are called the mothers of the children whom
they bear. Never before were two hearts more perfectly united;
never were two pure souls so perfectly in accord as were
the soul of Mary and the human soul of her Son. Bearing
these facts in mind, we shall the more readily understand
how the sorrows of the Man-God must have touched a corresponding
chord in His Mother's heart, and how intensely they must
have been felt therein.
Holy
Church, much as she reveres the memory of her departed and
glorified servants, bestows on her saints no empty titles.
She designated them only by those virtues and distinguishing
characteristics to which, in this life, they had acquired
a just and well-founded right. In addressing the Holy Virgin
as "Queen of martyrs," she is moved by reasons
similar to those by which she addressed her as the "Queen
of virgins;" and as Mary is by pre-eminence the
virgin, the queen, the type and model of all who aspire
to that angelic virtue, so is she by excellence the martyr,
the queen, the type and model of all Christians who would
testify their love for Him, and for His doctrines, who is
the "author and finisher of their faith."
Yes,
Mary was in the truest sense a martyr, and one whose sufferings
equaled the pain of all the martyrs combined. This seems
like exaggeration. But let us reflect. We know well what
effect sin has in hardening the heart, and rendering it
insensible to the ordinary pains of life. In fact, suffering
is in a direct ratio to the mode of life, according as it
has been good or bad. Have we not seen people rendered by
their dissolute, sinful habits, impervious and indifferent
to hardships, which, if they had not fallen from their high
estate of purity and innocence, would have crushed them
beneath their weight of disgrace and shame? In the Holy
Virgin's case - her supremely delicate sensibilities were
never weakened or blunted by sin; her tender compassion
for the miseries, the sorrows, and even the inconveniences
of others, as shown at the marriage feast in Cana, was never
impaired by contact with the world of sin. She was conceived
without stain; the days of her girlhood -spent in the quiet
seclusion of the temple - were scarce passed when she became
the legal wife of Joseph, the mystic spouse of the Holy
Ghost, and the Virgin Mother of the Incarnate Word. From
the moment that the angelic choirs, surrounding the crib
in the rock-hewn stable, intoned their "Gloria in
excelsis," until the Easter morning thirty-three
years after, she suffered, in every moment of her life,
a new martyrdom. She had an intimate knowledge of all the
trying ordeals her Child should have to pass through in
His self-imposed task of redeeming man; and just as the
entire weight of a ball or globe is concentrated at that
point where it touches or rests on a plane, so did the thirty-three
long years in her Son's life concentrate themselves in each
successive moment of His Mother's existence. What marvel,
then, that whether asleep or awake, whether in contemplation
or engaged in her ordinary household duties, whether in
the society of her few friends or pouring forth her soul
in prayer, those terrible scenes which beset her loved One's
path were ever present to her? But when she presented Him
in the temple, and when the holy old Simeon, taking his
infant God in his arms, pronounced that remarkable prophecy:
"And thine own soul a sword shall pierce," then
indeed, and in earnest, her life-long martyrdom began. Again,
if we follow her from the temple, we find her on her way
to Egypt, a fugitive and exile by the command of God Himself,
From behind her the wailing, of the mothers of Bethlehem,
over the wholesale massacre of their innocents, is borne
to her ears on the cold breeze of night; while before her
lie the trackless desert wastes, where so many of her ancestors
found a tomb during their wanderings after they had escaped
from bondage in that hostile land in which she is now about
to seek a shelter and an asylum from the jealousy of one
of her own country's rulers.
Who
is not touched with sympathy for the holy Mother, on reading
that when in His twelfth year, on their return from Jerusalem,
she found she had lost her boy, "His father and she
sought Him for three days sorrowing?" But who may tell
the pangs of that maternal heart during the remaining eighteen
years of great seclusion in Nazareth? Everything pointed
to the future. Even the humble artisan trade, in which her
husband and her Son employed themselves to earn a support
- even it, with its hammer and nails, and rough unhewn wood
- was terribly suggestive of scenes to be enacted at a future
day. If from her humble home she looks towards the "city
of David," those three, crosses with their victims
loom up before her. At length, when her Son went forth from
her a wanderer, not "having whereon to rest His head,"
and when His earthly career was drawing to a close, then
did her sorrows increase in intensity. Knowing well that
He merits them as never did man before, her mother's heart
draws some little consolation from the applause, with which
the people receive Him, and from the praise bestowed on
Himself and His teaching; but again her cup is dashed with
bitterness when she reflects that those same people will
one day make the air resound with quite different acclamations.
Soon she hears He has been betrayed by one of His own disciples,
that He is held a prisoner in the hands of His enemies,
and that His followers have abandoned Him. How her heart
yearns to fly to Him, to console Him; yet she knows He is
again "about His Father's business," and she is
resigned.
We
pass over the indignities to which she beheld Him subjected,
as we do the meeting during the procession up the hill of
Calvary, the stripping, the fastening to the cross, and
those other preparations for the execution, which few mothers
could look upon without emotion. What mother could listen
to the sounds of the hammer driving the long rough nails
through the feet and hands of her Son, without having her
very heart torn with anguish? If ordinary sinful mothers
are carried away in a state of frenzy or insensibility from
the final interview with their criminal sons, before expiating
the crimes and excesses of a life which was a disgrace to
the mothers who bore them, what must we suppose to have
been the anguish of Mary when she beheld her Son, after
three hours of unutterable agony, expire on the cross? A
pagan writer has said that "to have the same desires
and the same aversions is indeed the finest bond of friendship;"
- never, however, could this have been more fully realized
than in the case of Jesus and Mary. He loved and honored
His Mother as the dutiful son ought to love and honor his
parents; with all a mother's deep abiding affection, she
loved Him as her only Son she worshipped Him as her God.
This Son, then, the very perfection of manly beauty and
human comeliness, "in whom the plenitude of the divinity
dwelt corporally," this Son the sad Mother beholds,
- for no other crime than that "He loved the world
" - wrestling in the agony and throes of His death-struggle.
She beholds, too, the very people for whom His life's blood
is fast ebbing on the cross, and whom, all His life-long,
He yearned to save, revile and reproach Him whom she knows
to be the very perfection of innocence and gentleness and
love. All this was hard and cruel and afflicting - but the
sacrifice was not yet complete. When the soldier, snatching
the spear, inhumanly plunged it into the now pulseless heart
of her beloved Son, the sudden pang that caused her very
nerve to quiver proved that Simeon's prophecy was now at
length fulfilled: the sword of sorrow had indeed pierced
her inmost core, and nothing but a miracle prevented her
pure spirit from winging its way in company with His to
whom in death as in life she had been intimately united.
After this, the receiving Him from the cross and the subsequent
interment - agonizing though they were, could add but little
of pain to a heart already seared with so great sorrow.
All
those dolors of Mary were natural, but voluntary, -just
as the sufferings of Jesus were natural, but voluntarily
undertaken. She was as yet perhaps the only one who knew
with what designs God permitted wicked men to persecute
His Christ. She knew that His sacrifice was necessary in
order to restore peace between God and man. Therefore, as
much out of love for us as out of obedience to the will
and commands of God - who had given her the "Son of
the promise" - she was prepared - like Abraham of old
- freely to devote her Son as a sacrifice to God on the
altar of the cross. Not only did she offer Him to God in
expiation of the sins of the world, but she sacrificed herself
with Him mystically, thus adding her immense though finite
merits to the immeasurable, infinite merits of Jesus.
Need
we any further proof of that trite saying: "Whom God
loveth He chastiseth"? That, with thy example before
us "suffering with Christ, we may be also glorified
with Him" - "Queen of martyrs, pray for us."
-
from Ave Maria, May 22,1869
