The Feast of Human Dignity

The gift of God is God – He who as the Holy Spirit is communion with us. ‘Full of grace’ therefore means, once again, that Mary is a wholly open human being, one who has placed herself in God’s hands boldly, limitlessly, and without fear for her own fate.

It means she lives wholly by and in relation to God. She is a listener and a prayer, whose mind and soul are alive to the manifold ways in which the living God quietly calls to her. She is one who prays and stretches forth wholly to meet God; she is therefore a lover…

When man’s relationship to God, the soul’s open availability to him, is characterized as ‘faith’, this word expresses the fact that the infinite distance between Creator and creature is not blurred in the relation of the human I to the divine Thou. 

It means that the model of ‘partnership’, which has become so dear to us, breaks down when it comes to God, because it cannot sufficiently express the majesty of God and the hiddenness of his working. It is precisely the man who has been opened up entirely into God who comes to accept God’s otherness and the hiddenness of his will, which can pierce our will like a sword. 

Joseph Ratzinger, Mary, the Church at the Source

Reflection – Happy Feast Day! It is the great and glorious day of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the great feast of the Incarnation, when the will of God and the fiat of Our Lady brought forth into the world this most miraculous event since the creation of the world: God becoming man for love of us and for our salvation.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger reflects so very deeply on this here in this luminous passage from a luminous book. It is such a beautiful passage, written with his trademark lucid clarity that I have little to add to it, really. It is the openness of Mary that, perhaps, is the fit object of our meditation this day. Mary as the wide open space for God, a human heart, finite, frail, poor, and yet she holds nothing back, refuses God nothing.

We see in Mary, then, just what humanity is made of, what our true capacity is, undiminished by sin and stagnation, refusal and artificial self-limitation. The human person unfettered and free, totally given and totally open to God, is capable of being a vessel of God’s life in the world.

God is God, and He is the efficient cause, the prime mover of the Incarnation, but Mary shows us that this is what God wants to do, chooses to do, what He has made humanity for in a very essential and real sense. He has made us to bear Himself into the world. Creatures of flesh, mortal, passible, inconstant—and yet this is the real story of humanity, the real truth of our being.

There is a whole anthropology in this short passage, a whole vision of what human life is, that is well worth meditating on and in the deepest sense of the phrase, taking to heart. Open, praying, alive, responsive, listening, loving, stretching forth, believing—this is what a human person in truth is to be. When we live elsewise, when we move in some other mode of being and acting we are not ‘merely being human’, but truly lapsing into being sub-human.

So if this is the feast of the Incarnation of God as man, in a sense it is also the great feast of our humanity, our human dignity, our human vocation, our human nature in its truest expression. So, rejoice today in being human, rejoice that God has made us thus, and that His love and His generosity (and His mercy, because how many times have we refused Him!) desire to do in us what He did in Mary, in a different way for sure, but the same thing in essence.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. May we all say yes today to God, so His word can live in our lives today.

40 Years Later

[Mary’s] whole life embodies what is meant by ‘Zion’. She does not construct a self-enclosed individuality whose principal concern is the originality of its own ego. She does not wish to be just this one human being who defends and protects her own ego. She does not want to regard life as a stock of goods of which everyone wants to get as much as possible for himself. Her life is such that she is transparent to God, ‘habitable’ for him. Her life is such that she is a place for God. Her life sinks her into the common measure of sacred history, so that what appears in her is, not the narrow and constricted ego of an isolated individual, but the whole, true Israel.

 Mary, the Church at the Source, 66

Reflection – The March for Life this year in Washington DC, on the tragic 40^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade which nullified all abortion laws in America, coincides this year with today’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul.

Meanwhile my Randomized Ratzinger Quote Generator™ coughed up this little gem which was one of the key drivers for my licentiate thesis on Mary and modernity. All of which comes together rather significantly, it seems to me.

Apparently some recent polls show a swing in the direction of pro-choice sentiment in America. While these polls have been critiqued (as polls always are), the fact is inarguable that abortion is legal because there is no real will to make it illegal. This is true in the USA, and even more true in Canada, where abortion can hardly be discussed in the public forum at all.

This means that there is profound need, a desperate need for conversion in our society. Fundamentally, we want abortion legal because we want to have sex without consequences. Human beings at their smallest and most vulnerable are killed by dismemberment by the hundreds of thousands each year so that we can structure society around consequence-free sex. I am striving here to use the most non-inflammatory and yet accurate language I can find, by the way.

The Ten Commandments all hang together, by the way, it turns out. If a man is going to commit adultery, he is also going to have to lie, and he certainly is no longer worshipping God. Thieves by definition are covetous, and liars, and violent. And idolators inevitably perform human sacrifice for their gods.

The god of sexual freedom is a particularly blood-thirsty one, and the corpses piled high on that altar number now in the tens of millions in North America alone.

And so… conversion. Stop worshipping the god of autonomy and start worshipping the God of Israel. And this description of Mary from Ratzinger is just about perfect in describing this worship and this God. To be habitable for God, to be an open space where He can live, to abandon the project of life as an exercise in egoism and acquisition, to live a life ordered to something bigger and better than ourselves, yet which is the deepest truth of ourselves—this is what Mary shows us, and what true human life and true human dignity consists of.

Of course this takes us far beyond the specific issue of abortion. It has implications for economic life, political life, for how we treat the poor and how we live in our neighborhoods and churches and work places. But abortion is, I would say, the most important issue of our time, simply because it is the open gaping wound of our society which claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of unborn human beings each year, blights the lives of their mothers, coarsens and deadens the hearts and minds of their fathers, and perpetuates our society in a truly demonic system of child sacrifice at the service of lust and greed.

I realize some who read this will be offended by my words. You know, I don’t really care. I do realize that individual women have abortions often because they are scared, or shamed, or coerced into it. We need to help them, and the pro-life movement does a great deal to do just that.

But the larger reality of abortion, the hardening of hearts and consciences, the turning of blind eyes towards the fact of abortion, the tacit decision of the silent majority to maintain a status quo that is truly a culture of death—this has to be brought into the light and called what it is.

It is evil, and our civilization, insofar as it chooses to maintain this reality, is an evil civilization. And so, we all need a conversion, and let us pray for that grace of repentance and conversion in all our hearts.

Theology of the Body, Ratzinger Style

In a break from my usual style of blogging (quote the Pope, discuss the quote), it occurs to me that I’ve been touching upon some pretty deep and difficult subjects these past two days, with the constraints of space on a blog making it a challenge to do them justice.

So today I have a short section of my book She is Our Response, on the Mariology of Joseph Ratzinger, which treats precisely this question of gender and freedom. It is such an important question, and so here are some additional, if a bit heavy and academic, thoughts on the matter.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual nonsense…

 

Ratzinger, writing of Mary as the ‘answer’ of creation to God, stresses that the mode by which she represents creation, and hence humanity, is that of her physical conception of the child by the Holy Spirit, that is, by her virginal motherhood. Therefore, she “represents saved and liberated man… precisely as a woman, that is, in the bodily determinateness that is inseparable from man [i.e. human nature].” (Mary, the Church at the Source, 31).

This determinateness of gender, which in Mary is the very matrix of her free answer to God then becomes in her, and consequently in humanity as such, the irreducible sign of the received quality of being, of life, and of human freedom and dignity itself. Gender, as a received quality, is the imminent presence to each person of his or her own personal determinateness. It signifies as nothing else does the relativity of personal freedom within an already existing order of meaning and being which encompasses our entire human reality.

In this order of being we are participants and recipients before being agents and makers. Humanity does not create itself, and bodily determination in gender is the great sign that communicates this reality to every human being at every moment of their existence.

Mary, then, by entering into the very heart of the divine-human drama at the very point of her womanhood in its most biological facticity shows forth that this biological determinateness, far from being a bondage or an affront to freedom and dignity, actually is the place whereby both freedom and dignity encounter the divine sphere of reality and are caught up into transcendence.  Ratzinger writes of this precisely in light of the current anthropological theories of gender deconstruction, showing how this ideology which operates in the name of freedom and autonomy in fact reduces man to a ‘thing’ to be manipulated. The body and its sexual identity is an inescapable fact of human life, and a dis-embodied anthropology inevitably leads to a functional and technical view of the body, and hence, of man:

While today’s anthropological program hinges more radically than ever before on ‘emancipation’, it seeks a freedom whose goal is to ‘be like God’. But the idea that we can be like God implies a detachment of man from his biological conditionality… something that man, as a biological being, can never get rid of, something that marks man in the deepest center of his being. Yet it is regarded as a totally irrelevant triviality… and is therefore consigned to the ‘purely biological realm’ which has nothing to do with man as such. Accordingly, this ‘purely biological’ dimension is treated as a thing that man can manipulate at will because it lies beyond the scope of what counts as human and spiritual (so much so that man can freely manipulate the coming into being of life itself)… man thereby strikes a blow against his deepest being. He holds himself in contempt, because the truth is that he is human only insofar as he is bodily, only insofar as he is man or woman. When man reduces this fundamental determination of his being to a despicable trifle that can be treated as a thing, he himself becomes a trifle and a thing, and his ‘liberation’ turns out to be his degradation to an object of production. Whenever biology is subtracted from humanity, humanity itself is negated. (Mary, the Church at the Source,  32-33).

Mary, on the other hand, whose motherhood is obviously bound to her gender and body, and thus “in whom the ‘biological’ is ‘theological’—that is, motherhood of God,” (ibid.) stands at the very heart of the Church’s response to modern dualistic or instrumental anthropology.

As mother, she shows forth the theological implications of embodiment: it is in our very enfleshment that human beings bear the Logos in the world. As virgin, she shows forth that this same embodied integrated human person stands alone before God in a primary and essential way, receiving life and fulfillment from Him not only in the mode of time and history, but in its eschatological reference in the mode of eternity and heaven:

Mary’s virginity, no less than her maternity, confirms that the ‘biological’ is human, that the whole man stands before God, and that the fact of being human only as male and female is included in faith’s eschatological demand and its eschatological hope. It is no accident that virginity—although as a form of life it is also possible, and intended for, the man—is first patterned on the woman, the true keeper of the seal of creation, and has it normative, plenary form—which the man can, so to say, only imitate—in her. (ibid)

Freedom, then, emerges from embodiedness, not as a capacity for unbounded action or unfettered self-determination, but rather as a creative principle whereby the human person can become a sharer in the divine action in the world. Freedom, in its Marian revelation, is freedom to enter into the divine sphere, to leave behind the purely natural, self-directed, or self-organized level so as to become a participant in the perichoresis of the Trinity extending forth from its imminent principle into the world of created beings.

 

Whew… this is Fr. Denis, 2013 edition, writing again. Well, all that is a mouthful. Please feel free to discuss, question, argue, demand clarifications… in the comment section. God bless you.

Mirror Mirror of Us All

The Church learns concretely what she is and what she is meant to be by looking at Mary. Mary is her mirror, the pure measure of her being, because Mary is wholly within the measure of Christ and of God, is through and through his habitation.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 66

Reflection – A very happy feast day to you all. The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, alleluia!

Isn’t it beautiful to think of Immaculate Mary as a mirror of our being, as Ratzinger suggests above? Beautiful… and perhaps a bit hard to embrace.

I… am not immaculate. Don’t know about you, but I can definitely say that I am not preserved from original sin from the moment of my conception, and free of all actual sin in my life. Uh, no. I leave it to you to figure that out for your own case, but me, I’m a sinner.

But nonetheless, Mary is my mirror, and this fills my heart with joy and gratitude to God. Mary is like the opposite of a funhouse mirror in a carnival. Those mirrors ripple and distort, stretching out and fattening up and twisting for comic effect. They show us precisely what we are not.

Sin is a funhouse mirror, the distortion of our humanity in a million lying shapes—and the effect is anything but comic. Mary is just the opposite. The undistorted image, the pure and perfect reflection, the real picture of humanity before God.

And this is what I really am, what you really are. We are not made to rebel and run away from God, to dissipate our being in a thousand empty pleasures, to spend our money on what fails to satisfy. We are not made to die. We are made to go home, and this home is our radiant communion with the Father in the grace of Christ.

This is where Mary lived every moment, every second of her existence, and where she lives now. And so it is only by looking at her that we see what a human creature really is. And what do we see? Total openness to God, through a total gift of herself, which takes the shape of a total fiat, a total act of obedience and love.

And then… a quiet, simple disposition to follow Christ wherever he goes. Mary is sort of always there in the Gospels, but almost always in the background, a quiet presence, a silent witness. But there nonetheless—and she never leaves him, not to the very end.

This is what we are called to be individually and as a Church. The Church can only learn what She is to be and do by turning to Mary who was and did exactly what God pleased. There are so many questions—so dreadfully many questions—about the Church, its struggles, its failures, its scandals, its mission, its inability to do its mission—on and on and on. None of those questions can be solved by human cleverness, bold pastoral programs, decisive leadership, and a good social media presence (ahem).

All of those have their place, but it is the way of Mary that is the way of the Church, now and always and forever. Only that way, the way of living ‘wholly within the measure of God and of Christ, of being through and through his habitation’, will bring the light of God and the beauty of the Gospel alive in the world.

Well, I don’t have all the answers, not that that stops me from writing every day like a lunatic. But I know we need to go to Mary very simply, like the little children of hers that we are, and beg her to show us how to let Christ in as she let him in, how to let God take possession of our lives as she let God take possession of her life, and how to become free of all spot and stain of sin as she was, so that the radiant vision of redeemed humanity can shine forth from the Church and from our own faces and hearts, so that the world can come to know and believe in the One who loves us and has come to save us and bring us to glory with Him

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A very happy feast day to you all.

Getting a Word in Edgewise

Mary’s divine maternity and her enduring attitude of openness to God’s word are seen as interpenetrating here [in the Annunciation]: giving ear to the angel’s greeting, Mary welcomes the Holy Spirit into herself. Having become pure hearing, she receives the Word so totally that it becomes flesh in her.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 72

Reflection -  Well, it’s October and I haven’t posted about Our Lady yet. That’s wrong. October is one of the months dedicated to the Mother of God, and specifically to the rosary and its place in the life of the Church.

We see here in Ratzinger’s brief reflection on the Annunciation, the first joyful mystery of the rosary, a penetration into the very meaning and structure of humanity, of creation, and ultimately of God Himself. It is this whole business of receptivity—the entirety of our humanity and its divine origin and destiny can be summed up in that one word.

We receive being from God, and then He wishes to give us His own divine Being. Our received human being is meant to be consummated, completed, by the reception of the Holy Spirit, of the Word of God. Our flesh, itself a gift from God, is meant to be open, receptive, completed by the gift of God Himself in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is all gift and reception. And that is why receptivity is a virtue, a habit of mind and heart, that is of the utter essence for our human life.

We express this receptivity fundamentally in the act of listening. To know that, as the agents Mulder and Scully used to say, ‘the truth is out there.’ It’s ‘in there’, too, in our own hearts, but it’s primarily and fundamentally outside ourselves. And so we are to listen—listen to the word of God in the scriptures, listen to the Church’s teaching office, for sure. But also, listen to the person sitting across from you, listen to the sounds of nature and of the city of man, listen to the cry of humanity coming from so many directions.

Listen to the people we disagree with, and may consider dangerously wrong in their ideas. We still have to listen to them. Listen to people who may seem utterly foreign to us, who we have no idea why they think, say, and do the things they do. All the more reason to listen to them.

The Christian should be all ears. All Ear, all reception, all concentrated determined choice to hear the other, to hear the Other, to receive into one’s being what is not ourselves, always with discernment, with careful and judicious thought, but always listening.

It is this attitude of mind and spirit, which is closely connected to humility, that allows God to instruct us and teach us the way we should walk. Even more, it is this humility of heart and openness of spirit that allows God to finally come to us and make our flesh an expression of his Word for the world today. I don’t see how this can happen if we bluster around with arrogance and aggressive self-assertion—can God get a Word in edgewise into our flesh?

I’m aware of this in the context of the times we live in. The Americans who make up the bulk of my blog readers (hi guys!) are in the final weeks of the usual red-blue contentious election season. Global strife is hotting up in the usual places among the usual players, and the future looks a bit bleak on that front.

There is just so much hostility, hatred, polarization, division. So much shouting. We who are Christians need to curb that in ourselves at least, and cultivate quiet listening hearts. We need to bring the Word to the world, not our own endless wrangling words. And Mary…and the rosary… can help us here a great deal. October is the month of the rosary.

Putting It On the Line

If the misery of contemporary man is his increasing disintegration into mere bios and mere rationality, Marian piety could work against this ‘decomposition’ and help man to rediscover unity in the center, from the heart.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 36

Reflection – Happy Feast Day! Another Marian feast rolls around today, the Birth of Mary. Of course we do not know Mary’s actual birthday, and this feast simply commemorates this event, this beautiful appearance on earth of the pure one, the immaculate one who is to be God’s mother, who is to be the instrument by which God’s awesome plan is realized.

In Madonna House, as in many communities, it is also the day when we receive new applicants, new candidates beginning their period of discernment and formation for the vocation. And so at supper tonight three women will be received in a simple ceremony as ‘staff worker applicants’ to Madonna House.

This brings us to the quote from Ratzinger above. Vocation is a matter of unity in the center, from the heart. There is so much fragmentation in the world, and it takes many forms. Certainly what Ratzinger describes above is at the heart of much of it: we are merely, in secular modernity, clever apes, physical creatures bounded by the laws of the animality and biology, but with these strange intellects empowering us to ever greater feats of abstraction and invention.

In such a picture, there is no coherent realization of the human person. We simply are one or the other—‘sentient bags of meat’, in that charming phrase popular among the new atheists, or ‘artificial intelligences’ floating in a increasingly digital and cybernetic world, and increasingly part of and subsumed to that world. The Borg are coming, and you will be assimilated!

And so we have Mary. Her mind completely ordered to faith in God; her will completely ordered to obedience to God; her body completely given over to give flesh to the Word. And so the highest Reality—God Himself—and the lowest reality—the level of matter—become one. Disintegration and fragmentation give way to a depth of unity that surpasses our wildest hopes.

And so it goes with us, when we embrace the vocation God gives us. When our minds and hearts choose the path of the obedience of faith, and we put our bodies on the line by making a commitment to a way of life. This is how we enter this Marian unity of person.

And commitment is crucial in this. In our bodies we are temporal creatures, crawling along the face of history like little ants, moving from one ‘now’ to the other. In our minds we can stand apart from this movement to some degree, through memory and imagination, and so we can choose to dispose of our temporal being, our future, here and now.

And so we commit ourselves to a life. We entrust our future to God, and in this entrustment we are giving him our bodies, so that the Word can become flesh in us. This is so crucial. The deep struggle of so many young people, especially young men, to commit to any permanent way of life, while it is understandable and worthy of nothing but our compassion, is a tragic one. What is lost is immeasurable—the capacity of the person to fully bring forth in his or her flesh the word of God.

So we have Mary, and in her example, prayers, and motherly help we have a powerful advocate to help us get out of that fragmented life. So do something nice today to celebrate the feast, and pray for our new applicants, and all who God is calling to follow Him in consecrated life of any kind.

A Call to the Action of Grace

Mariology demonstrates that the doctrine of grace does not revoke creation; rather, it is the definitive Yes to creation. In this way, Mariology guarantees the ontological independence of creation, undergirds faith in creation, and crowns the doctrine of creation, rightly understood… Mary is the believing other, who God calls.

Mary, The Church at the Source, 31

Reflection – In the early decades of the 20^th century Catholic theology was very much taken up with a debate about the relationship between nature and grace. Writers such as Karl Rahner and Henri de Lubac challenged the existing neo-Thomistic orthodoxy which emphasized nature and grace as two separate realms, two distinctly delineated modes of existence with their own proper functioning, rules, integrity.

Without going into all the details of the debate, which would be impossible to do justice to in a blog post, Rahner and de Lubac attempted in different ways to show more of a continuity between nature and grace, to show how God’s grace completes nature or how nature is ‘by nature’ open to grace and incomplete without it, while preserving the utter gratuity of God’s action of grace.

It is a complex debate, perhaps notable in our day and age for the intensely Catholic and faithful way in which it was conducted. There were no full-page ads in the New York Times, no petitions circulated, no pressure groups formed (Call to Action of Grace!), no manifestos published. All the players involved in the debate were faithful Catholic men and conducted themselves in just that way, while opening doors to new theological insight that are still being explored today.

That is the underlying theological context (part of it, anyhow) behind this quote from Ratzinger today. And so we see in this quote how Mary is, in fact, the one who shows us both the reality and beauty of creation, since she stands before God as wholly other, as ‘not-God’ and at the same time wholly beloved of God, wholly in dialogue, in encounter, in commuion with Him.

Creation is not at war with God. Humanity is not at war with God. So many Enlightenment thinkers held that God and man are in conflict, that God is a threat to human autonomy, freedom, dignity. Mary smiles at all that.

The queen of heaven and earth does not need Nietzsche to teach her about human dignity and power. The one who freely said yes to God and freely walked the way of that yes through the years of Nazareth, to the foot of the Cross, and ultimately to heaven itself does not need Sartre to teach her about freedom.

Mary shows us that humanity is made free and confirmed in royal dignity precisely by its openness to God and to His grace. Creation—nature—is an open space for God. Its ‘ontological independence’ (big words!) is precisely for that: to be something real, something that exists, not without God exactly, but truly as not-God,  so as to receive God as a guest, to extend hospitality if you will to the Most High God.

What a dignity! This is what our freedom is for, that something real, something existing, can say to Existence Itself, Reality Itself, “Hello! Come in! Welcome! I love you!” Mary did it, and she shows us that this is what we are to do, what God wants us to do.

And tomorrow’s feast, about which I will have more to say tomorrow, shows us that this openness, this hospitality, this utter giving over of ourselves to God, leads not ultimately to the Cross, to suffering, to sorrow and death, but to glory, glory, glory. Creation (you and me, if we will) opens up to its Creator, and the fruit is a beauty, a joy, a life that is radiant and eternal beyond our wildest imaginings. And Mary teaches us that, too.

Getting Sorted Out

The salvation brought about by the triune God, the true center of all history, is ‘Christ and the Church’—Church here meaning the creature’s fusion with its Lord in spousal love, in which its hope for divinization is fulfilled by way of faith… Mary’s motherhood becomes theologically significant as the ultimate personal concretization of Church. At the moment when she pronounces her Yes, Mary is Israel in person; she is the Church in person and as a person.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 30

Reflection  - Mary is at the heart of the mystery of salvation. This is why she is so important, why we cannot just ignore Mary and go to Jesus directly, as Protestants and others are always telling us to do.

Mary is not the savior, but she reveals to us the nature of God’s saving work. And she embodies for us, and helps lead us into, our own part in that saving work. Salvation is not just God forgiving us our sins, not just some loving action of God that causes an effect for us. It certainly is that, but it’s not just that.

Salvation draws us into a life, a way of life in which our whole person is transformed by grace. When Mary said ‘yes’ to God, her whole being was transformed. Her womb was filled with the presence of God incarnate by the work of the Spirit; her whole being—body, soul, spirit—centered upon this new life, this mysterious presence in her of the divine.

This is a model for us of the Church and of our own personal entry into the life of the Church. The Church is not in essence institution or function or social ministry or even mission. Before all of that, the Church is Mary: humanity receiving the life of God in a real, concrete way, and bearing that life into the world of man in a real, concrete way.

Mary, then, answers the question ‘why the Church?’ Why the institution, why the social action, why the mission? We have received God really, and we must give God really. There is no other purpose, no other end, to the life of the Church. Any other end introduced into the Church’s life is idolatry which needs to be purified. Of course we all know that this purification is an ongoing and painful reality. Ecclesia semper reformanda (the church always to be reformed) is not just an elegant Latin maxim, but an excruciating and humiliating experience these days.

But the reform is always into the form of Mary. That’s why she’s so important. She not only models for us the pattern of Church life, but it is in our devotion to Mary that we become conformed better to this pattern.

She helps Jesus make us saints—that’s all. When I see someone with a lively and deep Marian devotion (which in Madonna House is a fairly common sight!), I don’t worry too much about that person spiritually. They may be a mess psychologically, socially, economically, and those areas are real and important, but spiritually I know Mary and Jesus are sorting this person out.

So as August 15, the great feast of Mary’s assumption into heaven draws near, let us allow her to sort us out today, tomorrow, and ongoingly.

Biology is (Theological) Destiny

We must avoid relegating Mary’s maternity to the sphere of mere biology. But we can do so only if our reading of Scripture can legitimately presuppose a hermeneutics that rules out just this kind of division and allows us instead to recognize the correlation of Christ and his Mother as a theological reality.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 29

Reflection – Well, August 15 is coming up, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven, and it seems timely to do another series of reflections on Mary, her meaning and role in our lives.

Ratzinger is, in this slightly dry technical passage, making a very basic point about all that. Namely, that there is a tendency to reduce Mary to a simply biological role in Christ’s coming-to-be. This would be the general approach in Protestantism, for example. Mary is Jesus’ mother simply in the physical sense, or at best in the sociological, relational reality of motherhood.

No deeper significance to this fact, then. It’s just the case that God chose to come into this world as a man, and so some woman somewhere had to be his mother. Now I’m not quite sure what Ratzinger means about hermeneutics and reading of Scripture—I don’t have the book at hand where this quote is from, and it’s been awhile since I read it. The underlying point is clear, though—we see Mary’s maternity as a theological reality, not simply as a biological one.

This means that Mary’s mothering of God in the Incarnation reveals something very profound about God and his ways with us. God could have come into the world in any number of ways—an adult Christ could have sprung from the earth fully formed, for example. God could have saved the world in any number of ways—it is a good exercise in theological imagination to think of a few.

He chose to be born of a woman. This means something. Mary means something. He is showing us something, revealing something to us in this choice of His. The relationship of the unborn child to his or her mother is unique, intimate. Literally, the child takes flesh from the flesh of the mother, grows within the womb of the mother. That which is the mother’s own being, her body, her physical self is given to become the physical self of the child.

Mary gave Jesus his flesh, and his flesh is what hung on the Cross for our salvation. Mary gave Jesus his flesh, and his flesh is the life of the world, our true bread and true drink. Jesus is the savior, not Mary, but she is intimately involved in his saving work. This is a simple fact tied up in the reality of maternity, the reality God freely chose in his saving plan for us.

There is something being communicated about the role of the creature, the human being, in the drama of salvation. Mary’s own unique once-and-for-all role, for sure, but she is revealing to us (or rather, God is revealing to us through Mary) something of the inner meaning, purpose, action, and dignity of the creature and of the human person.

God is the savior, the creator, the redeemer, the great love of mankind… but Mary has a role to play, and this role is vital, real, necessary. And in this we see that we are not just passive recipients of salvation. We receive salvation, but in that are called into an active, vital role, a necessary task, a giving over of our flesh to Him, a conscious choice to enter into his work and his love for the world.

All this Mary reveals to us in the simple biological fact of her maternity. Biology and theology are made one, and no longer is anything ‘merely’ physical, since the physical itself has become the place of divine life and divine love. ‘My flesh is the life of the world,’ says the Lord.

Mama

Mariology underscores the nexus mysteriorum—the intrinsic interwovenness of the mysteries in their irreducible mutual otherness and their unity. While the conceptual pairs bride-bridegroom and head-body allow us to perceive the connection between Christ and the Church, Mary represents a further step, inasmuch as she is first related to Christ, not as bride, but as mother. Here we can see the function of the title ‘Mother of the Church’; it expresses the fact that Mariology goes beyond the framework of ecclesiology and at the same time is correlative of it.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 29

Reflection – OK, nobody panic. This quote is a bit dense, I grant you. Even I, who wrote an entire thesis on the Mariology of Joseph Ratzinger, was a little flummoxed by it at first. It’s a good reminder that, as lucidly and beautifully as he writes most of the time, he is indeed a German theologian, and can convolute it up with the best of them if need be.

Let’s see if we can untangle the syntax and elevated vocabulary and find out what he’s really saying here. First, some context. There is a move in contemporary (i.e. 20^th century) Mariology to reduce Mary to simply an icon or archetype of the Church. Mary is the Church; the Church is Mary. Mary is the pattern of a Christian disciple, and of course the community of disciples taken together is the Church.

Ratzinger certainly does not reject that—I’ve written a whole thesis on the matter, and there’s lots in there about Mary and the Church. So here he is simply pointing out that we cannot simply reduce Mary to that level. The danger of doing so is that Mary then becomes merely a symbol or a type or an example to follow. Sort of a schematic drawing of discipleship or ecclesiology. All very abstract and clinical and dry.

Well, Mary is not like that. She is indeed the one who shows us what the Church is and what discipleship is, what it means for a human creature to truly open up to Christ and give herself to Him and His kingdom in our midst. But she’s more than just that.

She’s also our mama. She was Christ’s mama; she is ours. She is a member of the Church, but she also stands in a unique and vitally important relationship to the Church and to each member of the Church. And this is relationship is very simple. She is our mama, our mother. Mother Mary, my mother and yours and the Pope’s mother. Mother of the most separated, straying, confused and broken down member of the Church, and Mother of the saintliest saint who ever sainted their way across history.

This means that we are called not merely not contemplate Mary as example and icon, but to truly love her, talk to her, go to her for help, live in a true intimate nearness to her, as children do with their mother. Again, I’ve written a whole book about this, which (in a spirit of totally disinterested concern, I assure you!) I highly recommend.

What does it mean to say that Mary is our mother? Mothers, by definition, nurture out of their own substance the life of their children. A mother, by definition and irrespective of her own virtues and gifts, gives her flesh to her children for their life. First in the womb, and then at the breast, a mother gives her own being to her children so that their being can flourish and grow strong.

This is not sentimentality about motherhood (like that awful old song, ‘M is for the million things she gave me, O means only that she’s growing old…’). This is simple biological fact. And this is what Mary does for every believer. Out of her own essential being—that is, her fiat, her total openness of her whole being to God—she nourishes the feeble life of her children. Our fiat is compromised, partial, weak. Hers is perfect and total. But as we draw near to her, she nourishes us with it, and so we grow a little bit stronger, a little more total. As mother, she does indeed model for us the way we are to walk, as any good mother teaches her children right from wrong. But it’s deeper than that – we draw strength and life from this woman. Her life is communicated to us to become our life.

Why? Well, because God wants it so. And in this ‘wanting it so’ of God, we learn something deep about not just Mary, but ourselves and all creation. As we grow stronger and more total in our fiat, we too become ‘mothers’, in a sense. We too can communicate our life to others so that our lives become food and drink for others.

So Mary’s motherhood of the Church, this real relationship each of us is called to have with her, actually communicates to us that the Church, too, is a mother, and that means that you and I, male or female, are called to this kind of  ‘motherhood.’ To nurture and feed and give our life to be the life of others—this is the awesome vocation of the Christian in the world, and Mary is the one who reveals it to us in her universal motherhood.

A Gift and a Task

The point [of the Church’s Marian doctrines]… is not to spread static mysteries before our astonished gaze, but to give an account of the historical dynamism of salvation, which includes us and assigns us our place in history as both a gift and a task. Mary is not ensconced merely in the past or merely in heaven, God’s preserve. She is, and remains, present and active in this hour of history... her life is not only behind us, nor is it only above us. She goes before us… Mariology therefore becomes a theology of history and an imperative to action.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 46

Reflection – Today in Madonna House is a very special day. June 8 is the anniversary of the blessing of the statue of Our Lady of Combermere, the patroness of our MH vocation. It is also Promises Day, when those joining our community and those in temporary commitment to it make and renew their promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience to God in this family.

And so, in a few short hours, two young women and a man will stand up and say “For the glory of God, and because I desire to respond to the call of Christ to preach the Gospel with my life, I, N., promise with the help of Our Lady to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience for one year according to the Madonna House spirit and mandate.” Eleven others, here and in our mission houses, will renew their promises for two years, and finally two women will stand up and make these same promises, not for one or two years, but forever.

Being assigned our place in history as a gift and a task, a theology of history and an imperative to action – that’s what these young men and women are embracing ‘with the help of Our Lady.’ It’s what she embraced, after all. From her Immaculate Conception, where by God’s grace she had no other element in her person except to receive and respond to the God’s grace to the Annunciation where she made her final promises to Him, to the living out of this in long hidden years of service, symbolized in a sense by the Visitation and her service to Elizabeth there, to the consummation of her life’s offering as she stood at the foot of the cross of her Son, to the final glorification in her Assumption and Enthronement in heaven—Mary’s whole life was caught up in the dynamism and saving action of God, and she had no other life than to be part of this divine action in the world.

And so it is with us—all of us who are baptized. God calls some of us to make these special public acts of consecration, to pledge ourselves in solemn ceremony to poverty, chastity, and obedience, and to live out these strange funny lives that look different from other people’s lives. But everyone is called to do what Mary did. All are called to abandon themselves to the divine action and plan for the world, and to give their little bit of life to this plan as a gift and a task.

We consecrated ones stand as a visible reminder, a living parable if you will, to all the baptized to remind you of your own consecration to Him. We may be fairly shabby parables at times, may not always be ourselves so wonderfully given over to God’s will and plan, but that is nonetheless our call.

So if you’re reading this today (or even tomorrow!) say a little prayer for those three young people embarking on this beautiful but rather daunting adventure with God, for the eleven who are in the early years of that adventure, and for the two who pledge themselves so beautifully and whole-heartedly to God forever today.

And if you are a young person wondering if God may be calling you to do something wild and crazy with your life, to throw in your lot with Jesus in a particular way, why don’t you come out to Madonna House and see how we do it? It may or not be for you, but MH is nonetheless a good place to meet God and find out what He wants for you.

Mary found out what God wanted of her, did it, and is enthroned as queen of heaven and earth. So we learn from her that to abandon your life to God and have no other life whatsoever is a path, not to degradation and misery, humiliation and impoverishment, but to glory, beauty, joy, peace, and life to the full, forever. So we can take a chance on this God, and ‘with the help of Our Lady’ promise to follow Him to the end.

The Sign of the Woman

The church must relearn her ecclesial being from Mary. Only a conversion to the sign of the woman, to the feminine dimension of the Church, rightly understood, will bring about the new opening to the creative power of the Spirit, and so to Christ’s taking form in us, whose presence alone can give history a center and a hope.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 59

Reflection – A happy feast of the Annunciation to you all! Well, we launched the parish mission here in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia last night to rousing success, and I talked precisely about this feast and this mystery of Mary that Ratzinger so eloquently reflects on in this passage.

This truly is the heart of the matter for him and for us: we have to live like Mary lived, if we want to be the Church Christ wants us to be. This is the main theme of my book She is Our Response, that Mary is the icon of humanity redeemed by Christ, the icon of humanity receiving God first before we can give Him to anyone, and that without this dynamic Marian reception of God we are doomed to mere programs, agendae, bright ideas and politics. Towards the end of the book, reflecting on various themes I have explored earlier at length, I write:

The Marian witness—Mary’s presence in the Church’s proclamation of the Good News to humanity and her presence to the Church itself in its own acceptance and penetration of this Good News—is necessary to show forth the truth of this Gospel on the level of the individual concrete historical being who receives it and strives to live it. Mary’s presence to the Church in the modern world is necessary for the Church’s proclamation to be certain and unhesitating, as Mary alone shows forth the fullness of the dynamic of God in man. Her presence is also necessary for the Church to persevere in its own integrity—its own truth to itself and to the God who constitutes it.

We do not offer a product or project or ethos or program; we receive the Word so as to speak the Word. We receive God to give God. We become a new creation (in contemplative receptivity) so as to live the life of the new creation (in compassionate love) and to radiate the goodness of this new creation (with joy) to all.

Mary, who lived this, teaches the Church how to live it; Mary, who embodies this in her virginal maternity, continues to bear Christ in the world by making the virgin Church fruitful through her maternal solicitude and intercession; Mary, who in her immaculate being is humanity in its integrity, thus prevents the image of God in man from being utterly effaced from the modern age; Mary, who in her assumed glory shows forth the goodness and end of creation, draws all creation after her through her queenly mediation and prayer.

So this is our feast. As we contemplate this little girl standing before the angel and saying a bold and total ‘yes’ to God’s invitation, we contemplate our own mystery—what God wants each of us individually, and the whole Church collectively, to become. Without this becoming, this ‘yes’ coming from each of our hearts, the world is doomed to continue its path of darkness and negation. But if and as we say ‘yes’ to God, the light of Christ breaks through here and there, and hope is reborn on the face of the earth.

This is the most urgent task of our times. There are political and programmatic things we need to do, but unless they are coming from hearts that have deeply and totally said ‘yes’ to God they will be of no avail. This is what Madonna House is all about; this is what Pope Benedict is all about, and this is what this little blog is all about. Say yes to God; the world needs your ‘yes’ so desperately.

Mutter, Sigh, Groan, Scream, Speak

The exclamation of Elizabeth to Mary (Lk 1:45) [i.e., ‘Blessed is she who believed that what the Lord said would be done to her’] becomes the key word of Mariology… For Mary… faith is trust in, and obedience to, God, even when he leads her through darkness. It is a letting go, a releasing, a handing over of oneself to the truth, to God. Faith, in the luminous darkness of God’s inscrutable ways, is thus a conformation to him.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 49

Reflection – The words here are very beautiful, luminous, simple, attractive. A fine example of Ratzingerian prose stylings. The reality behind these words, while certainly very beautiful, luminous, simple, and (ultimately) attractive, is also very challenging indeed.

It is one thing to regard Mary and her obedience, and to nod our heads sagely. Oh yes, she trusted God and isn’t that wonderful! And look how it all turned out – Jesus saves the world and Mary is assumed into heaven and is queen of heaven and earth. Isn’t that lovely!

We look at the whole picture, knowing full well how the story would unfold and how it would end. But what did Mary see, that little 14 year old girl, pregnant in an utterly inexplicable way, faced with a whole world that would look upon her with contempt and perhaps even violence, not knowing in the slightest what was going to happen to her next? What did she know? What kind of surrender did she have to make, right then and there?

And (more to the point) what about us? We can look at the biblical story and it’s all very lovely, but what about us, when we are in the ‘luminous darkness of God’s inscrutable ways’? A lovely phrase, but that darkness is pretty darned dark, and pretty darned inscrutable, and at times the ‘luminous’ aspect seems pretty obscure!

We have to be clear about this. Faith is hard. Faith is really, really hard. When ‘life’ (or Divine Providence, as we used to call it in more faith-filled times) blows up all around you, when terrible things happen to you or to the ones you love, when you are confronted with painful, searing choices, when all the lights go out, when all the supports and consolations of faith shatter and vanish like they never existed—it is hard.

It is hard to believe. When the real moment of faith comes, when God is truly leading us through such darkness that we scarcely know any more that God is leading us, there is no room for a vague sentimental piety—pastel colored angels flapping their wings while Mary (and we) ‘meekly bow our heads’ to say yes.

We may say yes, but there’s not much pastel coloring to it. More blood red and pitch black. As it was for Mary. We have to get that: Mary was a real person, a girl, a woman—she knows all about this passion of faith. And she really can help us through these pitch black, blood red moments when we are called to mumble our own fiat through clenched teeth and frozen lips, at what feels like enormous personal cost.

She knows what that’s like. She did it herself. Today (liturgical laws notwithstanding) is the feast of the Incarnation, of Mary’s fiat and God’s becoming flesh. And you see, that’s what’s at stake in all this. That’s why ‘blessed is she (and we) who believe.’ Because when we mutter, sigh, groan, scream, or simply speak that fiat—God becomes flesh once more, in us.

And when that happens, the kingdom of God is close at hand. The power of God is unleashed on earth, here, now, in our lives. You and I, right now, have that invitation from God – to say yes to Him, and so receive His life into our life, His flesh and blood into our flesh and blood. Fiat, whatever ‘yes’ God is asking of you and me right now, in all its ‘blood and guts’ realism, is the gateway to that kingdom, to that blessedness, to that beautiful, luminous, simple, and attractive mystery of peace, joy, and glory that God desires to give us.

Used and Used Up

The mystery of Mary means precisely that God’s word did not remain alone; rather, it assimilated the other – the soil – into itself, became man in the soil of his Mother, and then, fused with the soil of the whole of humanity, returned to God in this new form…

To be soil for the word means that the soil must allow itself to be absorbed by the seed, to be assimilated by the seed, to surrender itself for the sake of transforming the seed into life. Mary’s maternity means that she willingly places her own substance, body and soul, into the seed so that new life can grow…  Mary makes herself entirely available as soil; she lets herself be used and used up, in order to be transformed into the One who needs us in order to become the fruit of the earth.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 14-15

Reflection – Well, I’m writing from beautiful Herring Cove, Nova Scotia, where I am to be giving a parish mission over this next week. The Atlantic Ocean is glistening away outside my window on a beautiful sunny morning, and the tang of salt in the air is a novelty to this normally land-locked priest.

And so we continue to contemplate the mystery of Mary as we approach her great feast day this Monday. We see here in this passage both the uniqueness of Mary’s vocation—she is the unique soil that God assimilated to Himself so as to forge this once-and-for-all change in the human condition—and the extent to which she reveals to us our vocation.

We are to do, in our own proper way, what Mary did. We are to be ‘absorbed’ by the seed, to ‘surrender ourself’ for the sake of the seed and its life in the world. This seed in Christ, his life in us, his will to become incarnate in our life, not as he did in Mary’s, but incarnate nonetheless.

We are to make ourselves available, to be used and used up, so as to be transformed into other Christs, so that the earth be fruitful.

We must contemplate these matters deeply. One of the greatest temptations and greatest tragedies of the human race is the choice to stay on the surface of things, to hold back from really plunging into the depths of life, God, love, meaning. To ‘settle’, to decide that these heights and depths are not for the likes of me, but for saints and mystics only. I will settle into having a nice little life, for sure being a good person who helps others, but nothing too dramatic.

We are made for more than that. We are made to give our soil, our flesh to God, and giving that soil and flesh to God, our life (whatever it consists of) to Him, to receive in turn His life from Him, and so bring (through Him, with Him, and in Him) the kingdom of heaven onto earth.

This may all happen in the very heart of your and my ‘nice little life’ where we help others out as we can. But there’s an element of depth that God wants to bring us to here, an element of surrender, of trust, of prayer.

And this is what Mary shows us. An ordinary woman who did this extraordinary thing in a very ordinary way. A baby who needed feeding and washing and raising, a boy who needed to be taught and clothed and nurtured, a young man going forth into the world while his mother watched and prayed, a mother watching her son die. The details have been repeated millions of times in the history of the world, and each individual element of it is ‘ordinary’.

But beneath the surface, what depths lie there. Totality of love; totality of surrender; totality of obedience; totality of forgiveness; totality of trust. And this is what God wishes to work in each of our ‘soils’, each of our hearts, so that He can bring us into the totality of grace in this life, so that our lives may be totally conduits for that grace in the world which needs it so desperately, and bring us into the totality of glory in the world to come.

Mary knows the way we are to walk, and this is why we turn to her and ask her help in all things.

We Are Not Sponges

The Church is the body, the flesh, of Christ, in the spiritual tension of love wherein the spousal mystery of Adam and Eve is consummated, hence, in the dynamism of a mystery that does not abolish dialogic reciprocity….[this] mystery of the church… remains within the proper measure only when it includes the mystery of Mary; the mystery of the listening handmaid who – liberated in grace – speaks her fiat and, in so doing, becomes bride and thus body.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 26

Reflection – We are approaching one of the great feasts of the liturgical year—the Annunciation. Because March 25 falls on a Sunday, and in our Roman liturgical cycle the Sundays of Lent take precedence over Solemnities of Our Lady, it is moved to the following day. But it remains a great feast, the feast of the Incarnation, of God the Son taking to Himself a human body, soul, and nature in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

So I think I’ll do a little series on Mary over these next four days. In the midst of Lent and its rigors, it’s good to ponder the face of our Mother and what she has to teach us about life in Christ. I’ve written a couple of books on the subject, and so always have lots to say.

The above passage is dense, but worth sitting with and pondering a while. It’s this whole business of Adam and Eve and marriage being a sacrament—that is, a sign pointing to another, deeper reality. And that reality is Christ and the Church. The coming together of man and woman to be one flesh, and in that one flesh to experience love and creativity—new life flowing from the union of their bodies—is a sign of the fundamental movement of God towards his Creation. God loves the world, and is in communion with his Beloved Creation. From this love and union springs forth newness of life, a true explosion of life and love that goes on into eternity.

In other words, we are not just passive sponges receiving God’s gifts. We are truly participants with Him in the dynamism of creation and redemption. He is God, the One who creates and redeems, who initiates and is Lord. But we are not nothing in this. Next to nothing, perhaps, but not nothing.

We are agents, actors. We are the bride, the one who lives in ‘dialogic reciprocity’ with God, who accepts his initiative, his action, his ‘proposal’, if you will, and gives herself to it, and so brings her own beauty and gift to meet God’s beauty and gift.

This is the whole substance and meaning of creation, of humanity, of you, of me. The point, the purpose, the glory and joy of it. And Mary is the one who keeps this mystery before us in a vibrant, beautiful way.

She does this because she lived this mystery to a degree that we do not. Our ‘dialogic reciprocity’ is marred by sin and rebellion. Hers was not. Our ideas about agency and freedom are perpetually corrupted by ideas of autonomy, that our freedom consists in standing against God somehow. Her freedom is expressed in standing with God, in giving herself to the divine project unreservedly.

While our fallen and corrupted notion of freedom leads to death and futility (since to turn away from God is to turn towards non-being), her freedom becomes a doorway by which she enters the divine sphere of reality. The maid of Nazareth is assumed into heaven and becomes Queen of heaven and earth.

So Mary shows us how to be human, how to be the Church (which is the same thing), and shows us that this is a Good Thing. And I will continue to meditate on this Good Thing for the next few days, so that we can truly celebrate on March 26 the gift God and Mary have given us—our Incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, the savior of the world.

The True Ark

[Mary is] the true Ark of the Covenant in Israel, so that the symbol of the Ark gathers an incredibly realistic force: God in the flesh of a human being, which flesh now becomes his dwelling place in the midst of creation.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 65

Reflection – We all remember the climatic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark—the one with the melting Nazis and all that. While it made for a stirring action film, we have to be clear that the real ark of the covenant is a much more profound reality, much more beautiful, much more meaningful.

God has made his home among men—this is the point. The historical ark of the covenant, as we read in 1 Samuel 4, truly symbolized the presence of God among his people, but we see there how they used this object as a way of ‘making God’ fight their battles. The ark, the physical object, begins to be used as a magical object, something we can manipulate so as to manipulate God.

This project of ‘manipulating’ God by manipulating the signs and symbols of our religion is not exactly alien to us. We may not be quite as crude about it as the ancient Israelites, but many of us harbor the idea that if we just say certain prayers, if we just carry around certain sacramentals, if we just follow certain rules—well, then, it will all turn out all right. Everything will go according to (our) plan.

And of course, this form of ‘religion’ is doomed to failure. We do not manipulate God. Our life is not about our own plans and ideas. The whole point of all reality is the obedience of faith, the total surrender of the human person to the mystery of God and his love for the world. It was no doubt by the mercy of God that the original Ark was lost forever, as it would have continued to pull Israel into this totemic kind of magical religion, instead of the true dynamic of faith.

So we have Mary emerging from the heart of our Christian faith as the true Ark of the Covenant. The one who makes a home for God in the world precisely through this obedience, this totality of surrender. If we understand this—that the home of God in the world is found only in this obedience, this act of surrender, then all our shabby and rather pathetic ways of trying to make God present fall away.

No longer do we try to ‘please’ God by slavish ritual or fearful rule-keeping; no longer do we try to impress God with a ‘pious’ demeanor or a continually cheerful countenance. The obedience of faith is very different from all of that, even though it encompasses fidelity to ritual, moral life, true devotion to piety, and a radical commitment to joy.

But it’s all about love, not fear. It’s about knowing the One who we follow is awesome, beautiful, glorious, and good beyond measure. It is not about a grubby little effort to make God behave Himself.

Mary stands before us always as the great icon of the obedience of faith, the human creature who was so obedient, so given over, that God could actually physically take flesh in her womb. And that is why we hold Mary in high esteem, keep her statues and pictures in prominent places in our churches and homes, and ask her help and intercession continually. She knows what the presence of God is, and how to place ourselves in that presence, and how to offer ourselves to Him so that we too can become his tabernacles in the world today.

It is Merry, and It is Christmas

Mary, saying Yes to the birth of the Son of God from her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit, places her body, her entire self, at God’s disposal as a place for his presence.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 49

Reflection – There is a mysterious reality of Christmas captured in this quote from Ratzinger. Christmas is such a very festive time, with all that makes up the reality ‘festivity’ for us: food and drink, friends and family, gifts and parties… and maybe, just maybe, the occasional church service!
But at the core of this merry jovial and hopefully fun time is this deep mystery. The mother. The child. God taking flesh. A womb, and what issues forth from it: God, salvation, eternal life.
And this mystery of Mary’s freely participating in this, her free consent, her fiat. And this is where and how God becomes present.
And out of this flows, then, song and dance, wassails and eggnog, tinsel and tarts.
The two must be held together: depth of mystery exploding in silence and beauty from the heart of God, the womb of Mary, the manger surrounded by stars and angels and wonderment; silliness and nonsense and excess and laughter, laughter, laughter.
Without the mystery, the silliness and excess degrades into a mere bacchanal. Without the frolic, the mystery becomes something beyond us, something we poor little humans cannot quite get to.
Merry Christmas. It is merry, and it is Christ’s Mass. It is a time for turkey and stuffing and good wine and song and laughter; it is the self-offering of the God-man, in humility on the straw.
And this becomes our mystery. We can be joyful, laughing, singing, full of jokes and nonsense… and daily lay down our lives for God and one another. And God is present, in that place.
Merry Christmas.

Humble Exaltation

[In some strands of modern theology] an exaggerated solus Christus compelled its adherents to reject any cooperation of the creature, any independent significance of its response, as a betrayal of the greatness of grace. Consequently, there could be nothing meaningful in the feminine line of the Bible stretching from Eve to Mary.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 43

Reflection – When I get to blogging about Ratzinger’s Marian writings, something in my heart sings for joy. Not only because I love Mary and Pope Benedict so much, but because this was my thesis for my licentiate, a thesis which became this book.

So the subject is near and dear to my heart, having filled my little brain for over a year of my life. In this passage we see Ratzinger’s contemplation of the feminine line in the Old Testament – that line stretching from Eve to Sarah to Rachel to Hannah, with Deborah, Judith, Esther thrown in for good measure, and personified Wisdom—Sophia!—coming in at the end as an emphatic affirmation of what had gone before.

All of this feminine line, which then bears fruit in a wholly new and extraordinary way in Mary, is about response, about participation, about the total engagement of the creature in the work of the Creator. The barren women who miraculously conceive, the weak women who lead Israel into battle, and the Woman Sophia who accompanies God in every moment of his creative worked—these all communicate to us that the creature is called into an engagement with the Creator in his saving acts. We creatures are always in the mode of response and receptivity, but nonetheless an active receptivity, a passionate response.

It is this strain of modern theology (I will spare you details of names of scholars, etc. – it’s all in the book I’m quoting from here) that rejects this, that is so fixed on the masculine dimension of Christ and his initiating active role that any suggestion of meaning and goodness in the feminine dimension is suspect.

To have dignity and meaning, value and weight, in this school of theology, can only come from having power, from being on top, from being the one initiating, the one who is doing. Any kind of ‘submission’ or subjection or obediential path is understood as being totally degraded, an insult to those who are invited to walk it.

Since this is the only deal God offers the human race – the path of obedience and submission to His Holy Will – this school of theology is deeply confused and does great harm to those who are exposed to it.

And so, we have Mary – as always, the great defender of orthodoxy, and scourge of heretics in every generation. The one who shows us what it really means to be human, the lowliness and humility of our condition, but in that and only in that, our exalted role in the drama of creation and salvation. “He humbles, only to exalt,” as one of those bold women of the Bible once said (1 Sam 2:7). “He has looked on his servant in her lowliness; from henceforth all generations will call me blessed,” as She put it.

A Love Affair

OK – before you all read this passage from Ratzinger, I need to post a warning – “Academic Language Ahead – Proceed With Caution.” Don’t give up on this blog post – I promise to make it all crystal clear. Cuz hey – that’s my job! But here it is:

 

Mariology can never simply be dissolved into an impersonal ecclesiology. It is a thorough misunderstanding of patristic typology to reduce Mary to a mere, hence, interchangeable, exemplification of theological structures. Rather, the type remains true to its meaning only when the non-interchangeable personal figure of Mary becomes transparent to the personal form of the church herself. In theology, it is not the person that is reducible to the thing, but the thing to the person.

A purely structural ecclesiology is bound to degrade Church to the level of a program of action. Only the Marian dimension secures the place of affectivity in faith and thus ensures a fully human correspondence to the reality of the incarnate Logos. Here I see the truth of the saying that Mary is the ‘vanquisher of all heresies’. This affective rooting [of the mystery of the Church in the personal mystery of Mary] guarantees the bond ex toto corde – from the depth of the heart – to the personal God and his Christ and rules out any recasting of Christology into a Jesus program.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 27

Reflection – ‘Mary is a symbol of the Church’. ‘Mary is the pattern of discipleship.’ ‘Mary is the model for Christian life.’ We have probably all heard something like this at some point – at least those practicing Catholic readers of this blog.

This quote from Ratzinger is giving an important, crucial brake on that kind of language, correct as it certainly is.

Mary is a symbol of… fill in the blank here. But wait a minute—she’s not a symbol, she’s a person. That is the precise point he is making. Better yet, she is a symbol because she is a person. This is what Mary brings to our Catholic understanding and why she remains so important and central to us.

Our faith is not a set of diagrams and schematics. Our faith is not a dry assemblage of rules and programs. Our faith is not a bunch of learned ideas and propositions.

The Christian religion is personal, warm, or it is no longer Christian. It is a love affair, or it has become something false to its own nature. But it is Mary ‘the symbol of the Church’ who by her very personal presence makes this clear, and makes it so.

Mary is only all the things she is—symbol, pattern, model—because she had and has a direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, with God the Father, and with the Holy Spirit. Daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, and Spouse of the Spirit—at every turn, Mary is in relationship, in a personal encounter, in a personal gift and reception of gift, all of which is utterly bound up in the central fact that she said yes to God, and so conceived and bore His Son into the world for its salvation.

And this is the Church. Not a bureaucracy or an army or a social agency or a club or a vehicle for ideology or any other abstract bloodless reality we may make it into. 'A Jesus Program', as he so eloquently puts it. The Church is daughter of the Father receiving everything from God out of love, mother of the Son’s life in her children, and spouse of the Spirit bringing forth the life of Christ into the world continually in the sacraments and in the saints begotten from her womb.

Mary, by standing before us always as our mother, teacher, guide, and friend, makes all of this not just more words, more abstract notions, but a living reality. She is our symbol, our model, and our pattern, but only because she is first our Mother, and our very best friend after Jesus.

God is a pretty smart Guy, you know! Along with everything else He has done to save us and give us eternal life, He gave us the most beautiful thing in the world he ever created—a truly beautiful Woman—to take us in hand and lead us down all the pathways of grace and mercy to the innermost corridors of the heart of God.

God is a Person, and you are a person, and Mary is a person, and the Church, in a sense, is a person—it is all intensely personal, warm, loving, and extraordinarily beautiful. Isn’t it great to be a Christian? Don’t we want to share all this beauty with the world?