March Recollection: the Mysteries of March
Mgr Philip Whitmore, parish priest of St James’s Spanish Place and quondam rector of the English College, Rome, led the Order’s March Day of Recollection. Mgr Whimore will also be admitted as a Magistral Chaplain of our Order this summer. We are grateful to him for allowing us to print the first of his wonderful spiritual conferences.
A few days ago, we celebrated the feast of the Annunciation. We’re now at the midway point of Lent, with Laetare Sunday coming up tomorrow, which means that Holy Week and Easter are just three weeks away. It’s been pointed out that the closeness in time of the Annunciation and Holy Week is no coincidence. The mystery of the Lord’s incarnation, celebrated on the feast of the Annunciation, and the mystery of his death and resurrection, celebrated in Holy Week - these two mysteries are closely interconnected as the working out of God’s saving plan for the world. They have been described as the Mysteries of March. Very occasionally, Good Friday actually falls on 25 March. It happened in 1608, and Alexa tells me it’s also happened more recently, but the 1608 date was important for John Donne, one of whose “Divine Poems”, entitled “The Annunciation and Passion” reflects very beautifully on the interconnection between these two great events, and Our Lady’s place in each of them. Transcribed into modern English, he says:
At once a Son is promised her, and gone,
Gabriel gives Christ to her; He her to John
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity
At once receiver and the legacy
All this, and all between, this day hath shown
The abridgement of Christ’s story which makes one
(As in plain maps the furthest west is east)
Of the Angel’s Ave and consummatum est.
Jesus our Saviour came into our world at the Annunciation, early in spring, the season of new life - and it’s no coincidence that it was also in spring, the season of new life, that he died and rose again, so as to share his risen life with all of us. The Mysteries of March are the Mysteries of spring, the mysteries of new life in Christ. Mary was of course a key figure at the Annunciation, when she received the angel’s extraordinary invitation and she said in response, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord - let it be done to me according to your word.” How often that scene is depicted in sacred art! And she was present at the foot of the Cross. Stabat Mater Dolorosa. How often sacred art depicts her standing there, with the Apostle John, gazing in agonised love upon the figure of her crucified son. And how often sacred art depicts the Pietà, Mary’s loving embrace of her son’s lifeless body when he is taken down from the Cross. It’s very telling that these three scenes are among the most frequently painted of all the scenes in the Christian story.
I’d like to reflect with you today on some of the insights contained in a wonderful book by the theologian John Saward, which is actually called “The Mysteries of March”. In this book, John Saward presents some of the ideas of the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Von Balthasar is one of those seminal thinkers whose ideas are frequently presented by others. I suppose this is an indication that his thought is actually quite difficult, and his books are certainly very long. There’s a lot to be said for a concise and synthetic presentation of difficult ideas, but I’d have to warn you that John Saward’s book is not exactly an easy read either. That said, it includes some real gems, which is largely the reason I wanted to draw upon it for today’s reflection.
I’ll need to begin with some of the basic notions of Von Balthasar’s theology. Do forgive me if these are already familiar to you, but I think we need to talk through them in order to provide a context for some of his other ideas. He looks at Christian revelation through the lens of what he calls constellations, that is to say, groupings of characters and narratives centered around Mary, around Saint Peter, and around Saint John. It probably makes sense if we begin with Peter, perhaps the easiest of the three to talk about. Peter, not surprisingly, represents the institutional aspects of the Church - hierarchy, sacraments, ordination, the priestly side of church life. We all know how important this is, and we probably feel rather uncomfortable if anyone starts to relativise it for us. But by speaking of a series of constellations, von Balthasar manages brilliantly to express both the importance and the incompleteness of this one constellation. It’s been said that the Church would look very silly without the laity. Certainly, the Church would be incomplete if it had only one constellation. The Petrine dimension is masculine, and we’ve all heard a variety of views expressed about the Church’s stance in insisting on the exclusively male character of the priesthood. I expect we’ve all been asked why this is, and it seems to me that we can’t possibly win any argument on this topic unless we find a way of saying that the priesthood is a function within the Church, but by no means the be-all and end-all of being a Christian. The really important thing is to be a saint, and the priesthood is a means to that end, for the priest, yes, but more importantly for others. The Petrine constellation is absolutely indispensable, but it isn’t the whole story.
The constellation around Saint John points towards a very different dimension of the Church, what you might call the contemplative dimension. Remember what Our Lord said to Martha in that passage from St Luke’s Gospel where Martha expresses exasperation that her sister Mary is doing nothing to help her prepare the meal, she’s just sitting at Our Lord’s feet, listening to him. Mary has chosen the good portion, he says, which will not be taken from her. Martha is probably best remembered for this episode, although I think it’s rather unfair of us to remember her chiefly for a moment that she would probably rather we overlooked. Her moment of glory came in Saint John’s Gospel, at the raising of her brother Lazarus from the dead, when she made a wonderful profession of faith in the Resurrection “Yes, Lord”, she said. “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world”. Priests tend to be very busy, and perhaps we need to be reminded of Our Lord’s words to Martha in St Luke’s Gospel. Of course, St John was one of the apostles, so unlike Mary, he was a priest himself. In this way the Johannine constellation forms a kind of bridge between the Petrine and the Marian constellations. John represents the religious in the Church, those who, as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux put it, are love at the heart of the Church, and if that heart were to stop beating, none of the other missions in the Church would happen at all. Remember how she says: “If the Church was a body composed of different members, it couldn’t lack the noblest of all, it must have a heart, and a heart burning with love. And I realized that this love was the true motive force which enabled the other members of the Church to act; if it ceased to function the apostles would forget to preach the gospel, the martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. Love, in fact, is the vocation which includes all others, it’s a universe of its own, comprising all time and space - it’s eternal.” The heart is indispensable for the health of the Church just as the priestly dimension is indispensable.
Like the Johannine constellation, the Marian one points us towards the church of love, but from a perspective that is thoroughly feminine. The narratives that make up the Mysteries of March are central here. At the Annunciation, Mary represents the whole of humanity, giving her consent to the conception of the Christ child within her. She receives, not passively, but with what von Balthasar calls ein geschehenlassendes Ja, a yes that causes things to happen, a letting-it-be-done-in-her. I love a passage from Saint Bernard that we read in the Office of Readings on 20 December, and if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to quote a few paragraphs from it. It’s a meditation on the scene of the Annunciation, taking into account the other-worldly dimension, that is to say, all the patriarchs and prophets who are eagerly watching and hoping against hope that Mary will say yes. I do think it can help us to picture the court of heaven looking on at many of the key moments in our Christian lives. Whenever we pray the litany of the saints, we’re acknowledging their loving, supportive, prayerful presence. It’s something I like to mention at a baptism, when there is always a brief litany of the saints. It gives us a chance to say that all the angels and saints are utterly thrilled about what is happening in this simple ceremony and they’re all watching and praying with us, even if there are only a handful of people actually present at it here on earth. Saint Bernard pictures many of Israel’s former leaders looking down eagerly from the next world, waiting for Mary’s response to the angel. Here is what he says, addressing Mary:
Answer, O Virgin, answer the angel speedily; rather, through the angel, answer your Lord. Speak the word, and receive the Word; offer what is yours, and conceive what is of God; give what is temporal, and embrace what is eternal.
Why delay? Why tremble? Believe, speak, receive. Let your humility put on boldness, and your modesty be clothed with trust. Not now should your virginal simplicity forget prudence! In this one thing alone, O prudent Virgin, fear not presumption; for although modesty that is silent is pleasing, more needful now is the loving-kindness of your word.
Open, O Blessed Virgin, your heart to faith; open your lips to speak; open your bosom to your Maker. Behold! The Desired of all nations is outside, knocking at your door. Oh! If by your delay he should pass by, and again in sorrow you should have to begin to seek for him whom your soul loves! Arise, then, run and open. Arise by faith, run by the devotion of your heart, open by your word. ‘And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word.’
There is a sense in which Mary is bride as well as Mother. The Old Testament had been like a long courtship between God and his people, and the Covenant was like an engagement, and then the moment of the Incarnation was like the moment of the marriage, when the divine nature of the Son of God was intimately joined to the human nature that Jesus took from Mary. From that moment onwards, we human creatures have been much more closely united with our God than we ever were before, more closely than we ever could have been before. So Mary’s yes, given at the Annunciation was like an acceptance of a proposal of marriage, made not only on her own behalf, but on behalf of the whole Church, on behalf of the whole of humanity. John Saward has a very striking way of sayng this: “Men are men”, he says. “But at that great moment, man was a Woman.” She speaks in a representative way for us all, but it is not solely representative - it is very much a yes on her own behalf as well. After all, only she was to become the biological mother of God, even if in a spiritual way we are all called to conceive the Christ within us and bring him forth into the world, as she did.
If I may quote John Saward again, he says this: “Mary’s virginal Yes is representative. She gives her consent to the Incarnation on behalf of all Israel. She sums up and fulfils but then surpasses all the faith and obedience of her people since Abraham.” She is Israel in person, Israel at its most perfect and beautiful, the Old Testament fulfilled in the New. This is what is meant by giving her the title Daughter Zion, which as you may know is the title of one of Joseph Ratzinger’s books. So Mary is a type of Israel.
Mary is also often described as a type of the Church, and it’s true that the Church is also described as the bride of Christ. That’s why we tend to use feminine pronouns to speak of the Church. And isn’t is a strangely positive by-product of questionable developments in modern society that almost everybody now knows what pronouns are? Each Christian soul stands in relation to Christ as a bride to her heavenly bridegroom. And the whole Church stands in that relation to Christ. That’s why Mary is truly representative of us all. As the sinless bride, she is already what Saint Paul describes as “holy and without blemish, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing”. In her we see what each of us is called to be, what the Church is called to be.
This is why devotion to Mary is far from being an “optional extra”, an “add-on” to our faith and religious practice. It has been said that “If Mary is taken away, all you are left with is an abstract Redeemer”. Hans Urs von Balthasar put it rather starkly. He said this: “Without Mariology, Christianity threatens imperceptibly to become inhuman. The Church becomes functionalistic, soulless, a hectic enterprise without any point of rest, estranged from its true nature by the planners. And because, in this manly-masculine world, all that we have is one ideology replacing another, everything becomes polemical, critical, bitter, humourless, and ultimately boring, and people in their masses run away from such a Church.”
So there we have it. The feminine dimension of the Church is essential. All of us, when we come into the presence of Christ, come to meet our heavenly bridegroom. The role of the priest here is ambiguous. He faces two ways - insofar as he is representing Christ, he faces the people in a masculine way, insofar as he is representing the people he faces God, in a feminine way. As Saint Augustine said to his people, “for you, I am a bishop; with you, I am a Christian.” That duality, that ambiguity, is something every priest has to manage somehow. For a religious, or a layperson, it is more straightforward, although male religious and laypersons still have the challenge of relating in a feminine way to the divine bridegroom.
Mary’s response to the angel is, and has to be, a totally free response. Julian of Norwich speaks of God’s “courtesy” towards Mary in inviting her response but not imposing himself on her. So her cooperation at that moment was free, humble and obedient. And it’s been described as the fundamental attitude of all Christian faith and love. Most modern commentators would think that must mean it would have been possible for her to say no. In a sense it would, but in another sense it’s unthinkable that she would have done that. Because saying no to God’s invitation would be like closing the door to his life-giving grace. True freedom is the freedom to co-operate with God, and saying no to him is actually a way of curtailing our freedom. It’s like the choice to sin, which effectively limits our freedom to act rightly in the future. So while it’s hard to imagine Mary giving any other response, it’s still true that her response was a free one, made by the one who is full of grace, highly-favoured. From that day to this, the whole Church has been rejoicing in the answer she gave, and indeed it is for that answer more than anything that Mary is held in such great honour in the Church. Every other aspect of the honour we pay her is related to that one.
Finally, there are one or two elements of the narrative of the Annunciation that are important to highlight before we adjourn for Mass. Remember the saying of the angel: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” This is an example of what is sometimes called parallelismus membrorum, the parallelism of two phrases that say much the same thing in slightly different ways, very common in Hebrew writings, for example in the psalms, which illustrate this kind of parallelism in every verse. It’s a sentence that has all kinds of Old Testament resonances. The Holy Spirit coming upon Mary is reminiscent of the same Holy Spirit hovering above the waters at the moment of Creation, as recounted in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. This indicates to us that the Incarnation of the Son of God is a moment of re-creation, the moment when all things are made new. It is an entirely new chapter in the history of the world, in the history of God’s relation with his people. And the power of the Most High overshadowing Mary reminds us of the pillar of cloud in which God was present to his people as they were led out of slavery in Egypt. So the virginal conception was very much the work of the God of Israel, who saved his people at that moment in their history, and who was to save them definitively through the incarnation of his son.
I’d like to finish by playing a rather remarkable piece of music for you. It’s called “Annunciation” and it’s by the English composer John Tavener, who was an Orthodox Christian at the time he wrote it for the Festival of Saint Cecilia here in London in the early 1990s. The event was one that brought together the choirs of Westminster Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral, so the resources were of the very finest to begin with. And Tavener wrote well for those resources, dividing his chorus up into three groups, one representing the Angel, one representing Mary and one representing the narrator. The choir representing the Angel sings just one word, “Hail”. The choir representing Mary, which is the smallest of the three and located at a distance from the rest, always sings “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man”, and the narrator choir, whose words are rather hard to hear on this recording, sings “Thou that art highly favoured, The Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou among women”.