On occasion I have attempted to gain a feel for the personality of a favoured author by reading a collection of his correspondence. In most cases I have learned only of his patience. Letter after letter the poor soul is forced to reiterate positions that had been patently put. Alas, those to whom they had to be retold and defended were fellow scholars. I often wondered had they actually read the text they were questioning. Are we simply so hungry for information that we scan our way through life, and see and hear that which we feel we ought to see and hear? How often have I sent a text saying something in the order of: “I am free for lunch any day this week except Tuesday” and then received the reply: “Great, Tuesday! —What time?”
Read more: St. MaryI have been consistently misread, misinterpreted and misunderstood regarding my reflections on St. Mary and the blessed company of heaven. From the earliest works in this forum to the latest iterations on the subject I have been at pains to confirm my devotion to the saints. When I sit in the privacy of my room to say my prayers I call upon those to whom I have long had special devotion to pray with me and for me, aware that whenever we raise our voice in prayer and praise we are accompanied by the host of heaven ever in prayer and praise before God. We are church—if but one—whensoever we pray. In prayer we are never alone, never but a few. We are a company incalculable in number. Prayer is always the Spirit moving us, moving within us, and that same Spirit bonds all prayer and all who pray. Prayer is really not this composition of words or that. It is the voice of grace and faith expressing itself—in supplication, in thanks, in praise. Prayer is the breath of faith. It is a singular action of many parts, many voices.
Prayer is always in the hands of Jesus Christ, our one high-priest and mediator before God, our Father. That is the issue that my reflections on the saints of God have always underscored. We have but one mediator between humankind and God, Jesus, the Son of God, the son of Mary. All saints have their holiness, their blessedness, in and through him and him alone. He is our one access into the heart and mind of the Sacred Trinity. Just as I might ask you to pray with me or to pray for me, so too may I ask it of the Blessed Mary, the Blessed Ann, the Blessed Archangel Michael. No one of them or their companions in heaven—no more than you—is a substitute for Christ. No one of them is a way around Christ into the heart of the Father. No one of them is a surrogate for Christ or some type of shortcut into his good graces. There is a radial and essential difference between the grace of sainthood and the Grace that is Jesus Christ. A few years ago at his installation Archbishop Francis Leo eloquently captured that boundary line when he adjured his congregants to: “Walk with Christ, and let Mary hold your hand.”
I have no issue with St. Mary, or her honours of ever-virgin, and mother of God. They are her spiritual glories. Before any other it was she who said “Yes!” to God as Love. But those spiritual honours do not change the substance of her humanity. Every soul that so responds to God brings forth God into this world in a manner that has nothing to do with the workings of this world. God comes into the world through his sovereign grace. God may overshadow one. God may cast one’s ego and its expectations into shadow, but that is how God acts for the well-being of his creation. That is how the light of the world enters the world, subdues the dis-oriented wants of the world. Man can but assent or decline, ignore, run.
Ever since Eve and Adam banished the paradisaic normality of God-with us, of God walking with us in the cool of the day, God has sought us out in the “new normal” of our ego-driven heat and pretension. He has poured grace into the God-banishing souls of men. In Mary, he overshadowed her, and brought forth something no human ego or enterprise could produce: his very presence in human flesh. In every soul that allows such grace to touch it, overshadow it, transform it, something virginal is happening, something maternal is happening, something pure and nurturing is happening. God, whose grace acts within us, disrupts our fallen world and its superficial expectations. That changes the world, and that may, indeed, change the body, for body and soul and world are one. That, however, is an existential change. It does not change the essence of what we are: sinners descended from Adam, redeemed and graced in Christ.
There is unfortunately among many an inclination to elevate Mary and the saints to a type of metaphysical stratosphere where they do not belong, and indeed I would opine, they would not will to be. These are souls who spent their lives opening themselves up to be transparencies before God and his grace. This tendency concretizes the spiritual reality of their blessedness and therein turns them into lesser-divinities, something akin to the ancient demi-gods. This is not only unfortunate but dangerous. Some may say it is a minor issue, but it has a grievous and caromed outcome. Their reality is no longer understood or felt to be simply incorporate members in the mystical body of all believers. They become co-mediators, co-redeemers—in an unnatural way. That is to say, all who co-operate with the grace of God in Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit are co-heirs with Christ, and so share in the work and the benefit of his mediation before God and his redemption of man. All in grace and by faith are equally thus. If this is not held to be the case, if there is in some manner a way around the singular mediatorship of Jesus Christ our Redeemer, the entire doctrine of the Trinity is endangered. The eternal Father fades into the mists, Christ becomes the judge who must be placated, the Spirit seemingly disappears behind Mary, and Mary, with or without a retinue of other saints, becomes the channel to the heart of the muchly to be feared Lord.
I am splitting hairs you will say, but tiny adjustments to a lens can drastically change the greater, the distant view. The misalignment of the vision of the Trinity, and the apotheosis of the Blessed Mary can magnify into the searching soul feelings of distance, fear and unworthiness that ought not to be there in the progress of maturation. I concede God can heal all wounds, bring water forth from a rock, and every other miracle one can imagine, but in the honesty of our journey we are called to focus on the revelation that is Jesus Christ and not on our own sentiments and insecurities.
I am not about to toss fire and brimstone upon them that opine I am on the verge of the heretical. I have a favourite passage in the Bhagavad Gita wherein Krishna reveals his divinity to his friend, prince Arjuna. Arjuna immediately wants to go off into the wilderness and become an ascetic. Krishna then teaches him how he is to be worshipped. Arjuna is a prince about to go to war. His call to worship is to be obedient to his station as head of an army and nation. He cannot surrender that to become a wondering monk. That would be a dishonest worship. God is there for each according to his station, and receives from each according to the gifts and graces he in his wisdom has given. I never would tell my mother to stop her incessant fumbling of rosary beads. They were her connection to the eternal. They were her soul pouring itself out to God, and I am certain God loved her for it. We each must tread the path we are given, but we each must be circumspect that that path is unencumbered by falsifications of un-enunciated fears and unnamed feelings. We must be honest with ourselves, and that entails being honest with and about them that surround us, be they here upon earth or in heaven.
There are other issues the flow from the misalignment of devotion to St. Mary, but as they were rather fully listed in My soul magnifies the Lord, subsection: “Reflections on a concretized symbol” I find no need to rehearse them here. As with the above, my position is either accepted or it is not. I will admit that I at times feel rather like Bishop Nestorius for whom things went tragically not well. In trying to defend the sovereignty of the Redeemer I find myself at odds with those who believe I am dishonouring his most honorable mother. On my next visit to the church when I kneel to say my Ave before the shrine to St. Mary, and to ask her to pray with me and for me, perhaps I shall light two votive lamps, one for myself and one for the many who misread me.