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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