Monday, 17 April 2017

SPRING, EASTERTIDE AND OUR LADY

Spring is my favourite time of the year, and not primarily because the cricket season gets underway again.  I love the signs of new life all around us, in the created order; and, of course, it’s Eastertide, the Christian feast of new life par excellence. In addition to this, but fittingly, May is traditionally the ‘Month of Mary’, from whom new life sprang in the form of our Saviour and Redeemer.

Eastertide is the longest and most important of all the liturgical seasons.  It lasts for fifty days and culminates in the feast of Pentecost, this year on 4th June.  In the cycle of readings for the daily Mass, we hear from the Acts of the Apostles, and we learn about the growth of the infant Church. The shared life of the earliest Christian communities made a real impression on the people of the surrounding cultures and many were converted to the Faith and sought baptism.  We are reminded powerfully that it is the witness of ordinary Christians like ourselves which makes the Church grow, or not.  During the Easter season especially, we should pray for the grace to become good and better disciples, so that others may believe.

But what of May, Mary’s Month?  Our Lady is central to the Christian life and not, as some Christians seem to believe, something of an optional extra, at best.  Mary is a creature, like ourselves, in whom the grace of God was active and fruitful in a particular and specific way.  She was called to a lofty vocation and, like ourselves, she was free to accept or reject it.  Because of her disposition towards God, and because of her faith and trust in him, she was able to accept, even though what God asked had the potential to wreck her plans for her life.  Consequently, new life in the form of Jesus our Saviour sprang forth.  Her womb became the dwelling place of God in human form.  She was the one, specially chosen by God, to be the Mother of his Son. The best answer to the question of why we honour Mary so much is to say that we honour her because God honoured her – it really is that simple.

Devotion to Mary ensures that our devotion to Christ is healthy and rightly-ordered.  He is God-in-the-flesh, the God-Man, in whom divinity and humanity are united in the mystery of his Person.  The Fathers of the Council of Ephesus in the year 431 gave Mary the title theotokos (God-bearer, or Mother of God) precisely to say something about Jesus at a time when false teaching about Jesus’ Person was threatening to gain hold in the early centuries of the Christian Church.  Mary always points to Christ; devotion to Our Lady always leads us to Him – and that is why most depictions of her, in art or statuary, have her holding the infant Christ.

It’s noteworthy that, whilst little is said of Mary in the Gospels, the tradition has her present at many of the critical occasions in Jesus’ life.  As well as her presence in the biblical birth and infancy narratives, she is present at Jesus’ first recorded miracle at Cana in Galilee (John 2:1-11); and she is present at the foot of the cross (John 19:25-27).  She is mentioned at other points in the respective gospels when the evangelists want to stress Jesus’ humanity (e.g. Mark 6:3), or the virtue of humility and obedience (e.g. Luke 11:27-28).  Mary also features in the traditional Lenten devotion of the Stations of the Cross where, at the fourth station, she meets her son as he carries the cross to Calvary.  The Rosary, a hugely popular Marian devotion since the Middle Ages, introduces us to meditation on the mysteries of the Lord’s life seen through the eyes of the one closest to him.  In the teaching of the Universal Church, she is understood as a ‘type’ of the Church – prototypical in the sense that what we see and admire in her, we should also be able to see and admire in the Church and in the lives of all individual Christians; and, of course, in her Assumption into heaven, body and soul, we are given a kind of ‘proof-text’ that what God promises us in terms of our eternal salvation has already been shown forth, through divine grace, in the life of one of our fellow-creatures.

So Mary is a central figure in the Christian life; she is second only to Jesus who is True God and True Man.  Mary is unique among God’s creatures in that she is the one who was chosen by God to be the means for his sharing in our human nature so that he might share with us his divine nature.

I commend to you for daily use in your prayers during the Easter season the Marian anthem for Eastertide, the Regina Coeli:

 

Joy fill your heart, O Queen most high, alleluia!

Your Son who in the tomb did lie, alleluia!

Has risen as he did prophesy, alleluia!

Pray for us, Mother, when we die, alleluia!

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

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