Reflections on True Devotion to Mary

THE NAME ABOVE ALL OTHERS

Our starting-point should be generally agreed: “Jesus, our Saviour, true God and true man must be the ultimate end of all our other devotions; otherwise they would be false and misleading. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end of everything . . . If then we are establishing sound devotion to Our Blessed Lady, it is only in order to establish devotion to Our Lord more perfectly. [We do this] by providing a smooth but certain way of reaching Jesus Christ. If devotion to Our Lady distracted us from Our Lord, we should have to reject it as an illusion of the devil. But this is far from being the case.” (1)

OUR LADY’S LOVE FOR OUR LORD

Even when painted with the broadest of brush strokes, to say nothing of the exact delicacy of the miniature, Catholic devotion to Our Lady stems from seeing her as the new creation in Christ, living not for herself but for God, giving himself in her Son (cf. 2 Cor. 5:14-21). Her identity is from her Son and Lord. They are inseparable. “Lord, you are always with Mary and Mary is always with you. She can never be without you because she would then cease to be what she is. She is so completely transformed into you by grace that she no longer lives . . . exists, because you alone, dear Jesus, live and reign in her more perfectly than in all the angels and saints. If we only knew the glory and the love given to you by this wonderful creature.” (2)

To see Our Lady from within the perspective of a living faith, therefore, so at one with God in her Son, naturally invites the mind to try and find a vocabulary to express what is in the heart. This may mean devotion alien to those who do not share the initial in-sight or personal perspective. But Paul Vl offered a basic framework, showing over the centuries of the Church, how this initial vison was deepened in response to a living faith. “It is important to note how the Church expresses in various elective attitudes of devotion.

THE CHURCH AND MARY

THE MANY RELATIONSHIPS THAT BIND HER TO MARY . . . profound veneration . . . burning love . . . trusting invocation . . . loving service . . . zealous imitation . . . profound wonder … attentive study” (Marialis Cultus 22, italics mine). Every approach here suggest living experience, a personal link in faith. To be bound to Our Lady by any or all of these ties implies that she is especially real. Just how real, can be seen in some representative devotional responses, chosen from within that framework, from so very many binding the Church to Our Lady.

PROFOUND VENERATION

Everyone is culturally conditioned. Time leaves its mark. Today, for example, ‘Jack’s as good as his master.’ An agreed hierarchy of values cannot be assumed. We dress down and dress casually. Whatever positive benefit this brings, it does not help us understand ‘profound veneration.’ By contrast, the ancient prayer of the Orthodox Church can “sing in honor of thy Son, O Mother of God, and praise thee as a living temple. For the Lord . . . hallowed and . . . glorified thee, teaching all to cry to thee:

• Hail, tabernacle of God the Word:
• Hail, greater Holy of Holies.
• Hail, ark made golden by the Spirit:
• Hail, never-empty treasure-house of life .. .
• Hail, height Lord to climb for the thought of men:
• Hail, depth Lord to scan even for the eyes angels . . .
• Hail, for through thee the creation is made new.” (3)

This is profound veneration, contemplating Mary overshadowed and so indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and given the graced identity of Mother of the Incarnate Word. The Old Testament experience of the Spirit, and centuries of living experience are sought to respond to Our Lady, living temple of God. This is, of course, a response to the Gospel of the annunciation and its consequences. It savors the reality of Our Lady now, a living temple hallowed and glorified, and calls on all taught by God to sing too. To pray like that is a transforming experience found from within the Church. If we are not free from the levelling-down conditioning of recent decades, such profound veneration of Our Lady may be indeed a “height Lord to climb for the thoughts of men.” Such prayer shows that there is a richer tradition. The Spirit has been given us too to attempt to scale those heights.

BURNING LOVE

As long as we are in Christ we owe each other love, and so are forever in debt since we can never pay in full. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law” (Roms. 13:8). Generally, our response is piece-meal, literally half-hearted, since rarely are we sufficiently at one with our-selves to give totally. Not so Our Lady. Immaculately conceived, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, her giving to God in Christ and so to us, is wholehearted. The joy and insight her Spirit-graced presence once brought Elizabeth is there still. If this is a present relationship within the Church, not just evocative memories of yesterday, hearts warm to her now.

Julian of Norwich, the medieval writer, is one who did just that. She chose Jesus for her heaven, and while reflecting on this, Jesus asks her if she wishes to see his mother, “who after myself is the greatest joy I might show you.” (4) To Julian’s lasting delight she understands him “to want it to be known that all who delight in him should delight in her with the delight that he has in her and she in him.” Delight cascades from that insight and on anyone graced to enjoy that relationship in baptism. Delight is not easily contained. Baptism is, in part, an invitation to share it. In a world where no one suffers from a surfeit of love, how that might help heal an injured self. To be invited to share the mutual delight of Jesus and Mary, is to be called to be transfigured into Christ. ‘Jesus wants it known . . .’ says Julian. Do I know it . . . really?

TRUSTING INVOCATION

A man gave up belief in God, because even if God exists he is too selective. Too many innocent are hurt. This life is ‘a vale of tears’ for so very many, from where many invoke Our Lady’s help. Today, it is suggested we leave aside the ‘Salve Regina’ – ‘surely Jesus is our life and our hope not Mary’ – and pray the Magnificat. The former, allegedly refers to the outdated imagery of a far too passive suppliant before a far away Queen. The latter, speaks for a courageous, contemporary woman, not afraid to break convention in pursuit of justice. What is wrong with both? Recent conditioning encourages a one-dimensional, horizontal faith. Look back, look down it is implied, but do not look up, for there lies escapism.

The appeal to Mary in glory is not to forget Mary of Nazareth. Once she was as we are now. She is now where we will be, if we too believe that the promises made us will be fulfilled (cf. Lk. 1:45). Heaven – “to be with the Lord forever” (1 Th. 4:17) – is not escapist. It is the point . . . “therefore comfort one another with these words” (1 Th. 4:18). Those who see her now in faith, rejoicing in God in glory in the face of Christ, invoke her help. They know that she is still and for ever the Lord’s slave, following the kenotic, self-emptying of her choice on earth. There is point and purpose to life.

The Salve Regina, when sung in Cistercian and Dominican houses at the day’s end, registers with visitors, as for a moment perhaps the ‘already’ teeters towards the ‘not yet.’ Someone does care, says this evocative prayer to a woman who knows from experience the tragic side of life. Graham Greene, the novelist, said that whenever he was on a plane waiting for take-off, always he did what he thought a Catholic would do instinctively,—say the ‘Hail Mary.’ Mary’s feminine, maternal presence yet again aligns the individual with the providence of God, not least the less than Gospel-greedy, no matter how tangled the skein between them.

INVOKE MARY’S HELP

A lady dreamed she was praying in her parish church before the statue of Our Lady. It came to life, as Our Lady leant forward and took her gently by the arm. She was told not to worry about her son as ‘he is a good boy.’ This is yet another response to trusting invocation for someone for whom Our Lady is part of the fabric of life. Understandably, some contemporaries might interpret this and so much else to do with Our Lady in terms of the woman’s psyche. This is commonly seen today as an expression of wish fulfilment. Some of the assumptions of psychiatry are currently used to buttress books and writings attempting to explain devotion to Our Lady. So, for example, Mary is just the current expression of the feminine archetype which inevitably is found among people everywhere. Or she is considered the safe outlet for a repressed masculine nature. As Virgin Mother she presents an impossible and demeaning caricature of a woman’s role.

The abstraction of motherhood is seen there as acceptable as apple-pie, but not the reality of sex and childbirth. Women, in consequence, are in a hopeless position. In comparison with the idealized Mary, they can never be good enough. Even for men, on this reading, Mary is only a projection of the unconscious to stop them harming real women. Or so it is alleged.

WILL YOU SEE HOW YOU ARE LOVED

Yet, assuming that some of these assumptions have a scintilla of insight, does years of pastoral experience suggest that they are the explanation of trusting invocation? The woman who dreamed as she did, was very much at home with Our Lady during her waking hours. The feminine, balanced, rational Julian of Norwich, when first Our Lord said to her, ‘Will you see how I love her (his mother)?” She understood him to be speaking to all as to one person, saying in fact, ‘Will you see in her how you are loved?”

The perspective of someone baptized into Christ and so graced by the Spirit of God, must be different, unless we assume that faith too is only another projection of the unconscious. “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:13-14).

Without faith and the accompanying Spirit we cannot see. Contemporary culture is confused. Male and female identity is fragmented. The sexual has been taken so often from the personal, and from the resultant mix of ebullience, fear and anger, the person of Mary, for many, is given the role of the coconut-shy at the fairground. Our Lady’s personality is in her identity with the will of God. Devotion, expressed in ‘trusting invocation,’ knows that well, and hopes to be at one with her in God too.

LOVING SERVICE

Whenever Mary is seen in the Gospel she is attentive. Whether to the angel announcing God’s will, or Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna, shepherds or magi, her child in the stable or in the Temple, lost and found, her Son in his frightening public ministry, at Cana, Calvary or the upper- room, she gives herself to what the situation asks. Her reflective heart absorbs the experience. In the Gospel, ‘I obey’ (HUPAKOUW), is really intensified listening (AKOUW). Mary went in haste because first she listened. This helps us understand the bond of loving service between Our Lady and the Church. Seeing us in her Son, she can recognize our under-nourishment in the ebb and flow of faith. Her feminine, maternal presence intuitively wants to encourage growth in Christ. Gerard M. Hopkins, the Jesuit poet, captures just this note in his ‘May Magnificat.’

• May is Mary’s month, and I
• Muse at that and wonder why.
• All things rising, all things sizing
• Mary sees, sympathizing
• With that world of good Nature’s motherhood.
• Their magnifying of each its kind
• With delight calls to mind
• How she did in her stored
• Magnify the Lord.

The season bringing nature into flower in May after its promise of growth, reflects exactly Mary’s sympathetic presence, delighting in God as all things blossom. If this is her feeling for sparrow or flower, as the poet believes it is, what is her feeling for us in Christ?

PERSONALLY KNOW MARY

Such loving service as it encourages growth invites a response. Individuals and communities, religious orders and their founders, secular institutes and contemporary lay groups of Gospel-based people, have grown under her influence, both in response to God and service to others.

J.H. Newman, for example, who chose ‘Mary’ for his confirmation name, saw in her particularly, much of the atmosphere in which his new branch of the congregation of the Oratory would grow. He travelled to Loreto, “to get the Blessed Virgin’s blessing on us. I have ever been under her shadow, if I may say it . . .” (5) Speaking of the spirit he would like to see in the Oratory, he said that, “our whole line has been a sort of domestic one – easy, familiar and not rigid – with special devotion to St. Mary, the special patroness of such habits of mind, so far as they are virtuous.” (6) As ever, the relationship is truly personal. Mary is someone he knows – ‘ever under her shadow.’ He wants her to do as much for his Congregation and so facilitate growth. That same spirit has won the devotion of many.

To Be Continued: Link to Part II 

 

Footnotes:
1. St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Vir9in, 61-62, in God Alone, the Collected Writings, New York 1987.
2. St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, op.cit., 63.
3. The Akathistos Hymn to the Most Holy Mother of God (Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1987).
4. Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. M. Glasscoe, Exeter 1976, chapter 25. All further references to Julian are from this chapter.
5. J. H. Newman, The Letters and Diaries, vol. XII ed. C.S. Dessain, Nelson 1962, letter 12.1.1848.
6. J. H. N man, op.cit. letter 31.12.1846.