Last
week an Australian JPIC (Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation) team sent
me – as they kindly do every month – their ‘Sunday Reflections’. This edition commented
on the Annunciation and Nativity of Christ, providing, the JPIC people hoped, "food
for thought and prayer".
So
I prayed and thought, and here's what I thought:
“We have
sometimes ended up,” the Reflections state, “with an image of Mary that is “a long way removed from the reality
that most mothers experience around conception, pregnancy and childbirth.
That’s just as it
should be, isn’t it?
Mary is “a long way removed” from that natural
reality. Mary conceived not by man, but by the Holy Spirit. Her pregnancy was
nine months of contemplation of the Most High God physically present within her.
Childbirth for Mary, according to Venerable Mary of Agreda and described similarly
by other mystics of the Catholic Church, “filled her with incomparable joy and
delight, causing in her soul and in her virginal body such exalted and divine
effects that they exceed all thought of men. Her body became so spiritualized
with the beauty of heaven that she seemed no more a human and earthly creature.”
Then in speaking of
Mary’s grace, the Reflections say us that grace is “not submissive meekness.
Grace is not submission. The power of
God is never meek.”
Hold it
right there.
It seems to
me that these Reflections misinterpret the word, meek. Or maybe they’re suggesting that when God uses
his ‘power’ he is ‘never meek’.
God uses his
power in everything. He is meek in everything. You can’t extract or excerpt one
of his divine attributes from any other - God is indivisible.
Jesus' power to save men subsisted not in force, but precisely in meekness. He says, “Learn
from me, for I am meek and humble of
heart” (Mt 11, 29). So important did Jesus think meekness, he offered himself - for this one and only time - as an example.
The psalmist says, “The
meek shall inherit the land and shall delight in abundance of peace” (Ps
36, 11). St Francis de Sales: “Let us be very meek toward everyone”. St Thomas: “Meekness makes a man master of himself”.
Even that useful
Protestant publication, Cruden’s Concordance,
says ‘meek’ means “gentle, kind, not
easily provoked, ready to yield that than cause trouble; but not used in the
Bible in the bad sense of tamely submissive and servile”.
But wait,
there’s more - of significance to all contemplatives, especially Carmelites:
“Meekness
has a very special importance in the development of a life of prayer and union
with God. ... When we are disturbed even slightly by anger we are unable to …
hear the whisper of divine inspirations: the noise of our passions prevents us from
listening to our interior Master, and we no longer act according to God’s good
pleasure but allow ourselves to be carried away by our own impulsiveness, which
will always cause us to commit faults. …
Our Lord
teaches his ways to the meek,
because only one who has silenced all resentments and feelings of anger is
ready to be instructed by God” (Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, OCD).
And more: there’s
nothing in Luke’s Gospel to suggest Mary was ‘startled’ by the appearance of an
angel. She was “troubled at (the
angel’s) saying ... And the angel said to her: “Fear not.” (Douay-Rheims.) The angel saw that Mary, in her profound
humility, was astonished that an angel should call her “full of grace”.
There’s
nothing to suggest she ‘challenged’ the angel, either. She simply asked, “How
shall this be done, because I know not man?”
Neither did Mary
‘decide to bear a holy child’. She submitted, yes, but not in Cruden’s ‘bad sense’
of servility. To ‘submit’ means to ‘place oneself under a
certain control or authority’ (Shorter Oxford): that authority, of course, was
God.
Instead of trying to reduce the divine to the mundane, let's ask the Holy Spirit to raise us to the divinity. That's what we're designed for.
The kingdom of Heaven, after all, is within us.
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