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By Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, O.C.D.
(Veni Sancte Spiritus…)
Closing Conference – Blessed
Virgin
[Read Isaiah 7: 10-14]
My dear sisters in Christ,
Because we have been
spending so much time on the Israelites and their history as a means of helping
us to see some of the characteristics of our own spiritual development, it
seems fitting that we consider the event, which brought the history of the
Israelites to its fulfillment. Or
rather, we should consider the one person through whom Israel had its
fulfillment, the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The actual fulfillment was, of course, the work of Christ. It was she who successfully concluded the
task for which Israel was chosen: to
reveal the living God and allow Him entrance into human history for the purpose
of restoring fallen mankind. When this
was done the Old Covenant ceased. The
type and the shadow had been replaced by the substance and the reality.
The Blessed Virgin Mary is
important because she is, in a very true sense, the embodiment of Israel. She represents an Israel that is perfectly
refined and purged of all the elements that could offer resistance to the
loving will of God or offer a barrier to His entering fully into creation. This idea of Mary being a refined
Israel reminds us of the process of refining
metals or of distilling essences. Vast
amounts of sap from a sugar maple tree for example, containing very small
amounts of maple sugar in solution, are subjected to an evaporation process,
which drives away the moisture and leaves as a residue the pure maple
sugar. The long, hard, tortuous history
of Israel represents a massive amount of the experience of the chosen people,
containing within it the essence of their relationship with God and the
revelation of God to them, in the process of being evaporated, so to speak, so
that all that was purely human and which provided the vehicle for the pure
essence of the revelation of God was driven off. We can very well say that Mary was an incarnation of all that is
the very best and noblest and purest of the good that God placed in His human
creatures, and particularly of that receptivity and openness toward the divine
that God placed in mankind and which He activated in Abraham and all his
children. She is, after all, said to
be our tainted nature’s solitary boast.
She is the Immaculate Conception.
We can also well believe
that she recapitulates in herself all of Israel because we do say that we are
able to earn graces for others by our prayers and sacrifices offered on their
behalf. This is part of the doctrine of
the communion of saints. Surely this
same solidarity existed for the children of Israel, sons of Abraham. Surely it was their century long history of
prayer and sacrifice beseeching God to send the Redeemer that earned for her
the extraordinary privilege. We can see
signs of a Covenant made by God with Mary.
After delivering her from the tyranny of nature by the extraordinary
grace of the Immaculate Conception, God speaks a Word to her in the
annunciation calling her to a very special covenant with Him, a very special
relationship, one even, that exceeds our relationship to Him as children. She is at once daughter, spouse and mother
of God. We see that Mary accept this
role in Faith knowing that it is going to be the fulfillment of the History of
Israel. Israel needed her word of
consent as much as we did. She was the
one Israelite who made Israel to be a success.
There seems to be evidence
in the Magnifcat that Mary had learned
to identify herself with her ancestors and their History of intimacy with God
through a thorough knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, and she seems to have
learned the lessons that most of her ancestors failed to grasp in its entirety,
namely, that He is “wholly other” (to use a popular expression among
theologians). He so utterly transcended
the limits and capacity of the human intelligence that He revealed Himself best
in all that ran counter to their natural human expectations in all His dealings
with them. She learned what the
Prophets were trying to say: His was an
invincible will and power to accomplish what is good and to save and that He
would prefer to see all He had done for Israel wiped out, He would prefer to
see Himself eclipsed and judged unequal to the promises He had made rather than
fulfill their carnal expectations and confirm them in the false notion that the
leaders had of Him. She learned that
when He seemed weakest He was at His strongest, and that when He seemed most
foolish then He was most wise, and when He seemed most cruel, then He was most
loving, and when He seemed farthest away, then He was very close.
She reveals her inmost
soul when she sings her song of praise, the Magnificat, and reveals therein the mark of the true, the ideal
Israel.
My soul magnifies the Lord – He reveals Himself in His dealings with me – and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour – I have Him present in me and His presence has made me whole.
Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid – He
sees me standing in the knowledge that I am totally devoid of merit, and
standing ever ready, waiting on Him, waiting to do His will, to serve Him – For
behold henceforth all generations shall call me Blessed because He who is
mighty has done great things to me and Holy is His Name. All He has done for Israel for centuries –
having been proofs of His love for me, and He does it for no other reason than
He is holy – He is a law to Himself, it is His own inner nature that prompts
Him.
Then she enumerates His works of mercy, His revolutionary tactics, choosing
the poor and needy and rejecting the humanly powerful and rich, so that no flesh might glory in His sight. She saw all
this as fidelity to Abraham, to the
promises He had made to Abraham nearly 2,000 years earlier.
None of us can completely penetrate
the mind of Mary, but surely she had become “wholly other”, too. Perhaps being fully aware of the inner
harmony and integrity that was hers as the Immaculate Conception, perhaps being
fully aware of the rich gifts of intellect and will, of knowledge and
love. Perhaps she was tempted to allow
herself full reign to the instincts of her womanly nature, perhaps even to
aspire to the dignity of being a direct ancestor of the Messiah, since she was
truly a daughter of David’s house. And
perhaps because she knew God so well she was able to resist this temptation to
vindicate for herself a place of honor; for she knew that God is totally other,
and that what we do actively to help Him no more helps Him than what we
actively omit can hinder Him. She probably
knew that God didn’t need her, or her body, nor her offspring to fulfill His
will to do good and to save. She must
have known that He could raise up children to Abraham out of the very stones
that dotted the landscape.
Surely Mary must have
known that the gift of life is such a marvelous gift that if we do nothing with
it but give it back, consuming it in a life of praise, adoration and thanksgiving of Him, then we have by that
fact alone, been a smashing success.
This morning then, in a
couple of minutes, we are going to assimilate ourselves to Mary, and orient
ourselves to God with her by the renewal of our vows. I’ll be renewing mine, too.
We want to say by our vows that we are giving back to Him all that He
has given us. We want to say that the
gift of life and faith are gifts far beyond our deserving, that having received
them is happiness enough – we do not appropriate them for ourselves, but we
stand ready and open like Mary, waiting for His word, ready to spend ourselves
in service of His good pleasure.
By our vows we echo Mary’s
word of response to the creative word of God, a word of response which is
itself creative and makes us – as it made her – to be what we are, what God
intends us to be. Mary’s response was a
word that was reserved for her to utter on behalf of all Israel. We utter this same response on behalf of all
the Church, for by our vows we enter deeply into the mystery of the Church, of
which Mary is the type and the mother.
It is really the only adequate response to the word of so mysterious a
God, so close and so loving. The
response is: Fiat: be it done to me, according to your Word.
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