Retreat – Newport
Mary and the Vows
(Veni Sancte Spiritus…)
“The kingdom of Heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and buried
My dear sisters in Christ,
A long, long time ago, when we opened our retreat, we had occasion to speak of the Will of God. We tried to point out that we are co-authors of God’s will for us, and that His will for us grows slowly – it is being shaped by God and ourselves jointly as we grow and mature. We tried to show how our Heavenly Father’s Will for us takes shape in much the same way as an earthly Father’s will does for his human child. Among other things, we said that the more intimate a child is with his human father, the more he will share with him his mind and heart, the more noble and sublime will be his dreams and desires for his child and the much greater requests he will feel free to make upon his generosity. A human father will then prefer the highest and best for his offspring, even though its attainment requires of us the hardest work, the most difficult sacrifices.
There is no doubt in my mind that you are here this morning because you have responded freely and generously to your Heavenly Father’s invitation to greater intimacy with Himself, and having tested your spirits through the manner and quality of your response to His love for you over the past several years, particularly your cooperation with His grace while you were growing up. He has seen fit to desire great things for you. He shares with you His own desires in regard to the entire human race, and His preference for you is that you shoulder weightier responsibilities in the great work of making His desires for mankind a reality.
We have said quite a bit about the original creative word of God, which brought the universe and finally the human race into existence. We saw that mankind’s original response to this word was one of refusal, a refusal to be subordinate to the same creative word that placed upon him the responsibility of revealing the love that God is. As a result, sin entered the world and sin is nothing else than the wound our human nature has sustained which makes it impossible for us to love. That is, to love freely, to love with a love that reveals what God is like.
We have also spoken about the re-creative word of God. We have said that the refusal of mankind to subordinate itself to God has not finally and effectively shut the love of God out of the world, but that it only presented God with an opportunity to reveal how deep His love runs and to show us an added dimension, that of merciful love. And we said that God seized this opportunity by uttering a re-creative word that would take away the insubordination of mankind to God and heal the wound, which makes it impossible for us to love. That word He began to speak when He selected Abraham and revealed Himself to that man of Faith, and promised Him an offspring through whom the nations of the world would be blessed. We saw that the more God revealed Himself in the History of Israel, the chosen descendents of Abraham, the more His power was able to exercise an influence in the world until finally His re-creative Word gained full entry with the birth of His Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is then, the leaven that has been buried – or hidden – in the mass of mankind, and His work of leavening the entire human race has been an ongoing event ever since He sent His Holy Spirit upon the Infant Church.
So just as the creative word of God required an evolution until it was definitively uttered in Christ, so also the effect of this re-creative word admits of an evolution. It’s effect will continue to grow until all of mankind has been drawn into the kingdom of Heaven, and then time will cease. Thus we who are baptized Christians have been transformed by the leavening effect of Christ, the re-creative Word, and it is upon us that the responsibility of being with Christ a leavening action upon others has fallen.
There is a parallel, then, between the development of the Old Israel and the development of the New Israel, which we, as baptized Christians have been constituted. The old Israel was chosen to produce Christ, - God incarnate – God made flesh – in one man. The New Israel, to which we belong, has been chosen to produce Christ – God Incarnate – God made flesh – in one whole world-wide community. Israel of old spent long centuries being purged of all those elements, which stood in the way of God’s full entry into the World or a man. And we, the New Israel are being purged, down through a greater number of centuries, of all those elements that stand in the way of God’s full entry into the world as community.
Now we really haven’t brought the Blessed Virgin Mary into our retreat except for one or two casual references. And so I would like to call your attention to her at this time and present her as the embodiment of the Old Israel. She is the culmination of the History of the Old Israel; she recapitulates in herself all of the history of her people, she is the fruit of all those centuries of Israel’s intimate exchange with God. And by the vows you are about to take, and even by your reception you are saying yes to the invitation of Christ to be in the New Israel what Mary was in the Old: you are invited to be an embodiment of the Church, the New Israel; the recapitulation and fruit of the centuries of intimate exchange between Christ and the Church.
We ought to think of Mary as the utterly refined Israel, free of all things, sin in particular, that kept God from entering into human history. The knowledge of God that Israel had gained through so many years of experience as God’s chosen people, a people He espoused, was distilled; it became pure and true in Mary’s consciousness. This was the fruit of her life of prayerfulness, of her careful reading of her people’s history in scripture, of her whole-hearted acceptance of and immersion in the Covenant relationship between Israel and God. Thus Mary was the incarnation of all that is best and noblest and purest of the goodness that God has placed in His human creatures. She is the incarnation of all the receptivity and openness that God had given us in creating us intelligent and free. In coming forward to take the vows of religious life you show that you have learned the lessons of our history, the church’s history as God’s people. You show that you have seen Christ revealed ever more perfectly in this same history; you make it evident that this knowledge has been purified and distilled in your consciousness. By proposing to take vows you activate the openness and receptivity to God that is ours in virtue of our being transformed into new creatures by grace. By our vows you help mightily to bring Christ to birth in a higher way. You help bring Him to birth in a more perfect, less carnal way, and a more divine-like human community.
There is evidence in the Magnificat that Mary had thoroughly identified with her ancestors, that she had learned the lessons the history of Israel had to teach her about God. She learned the lessons most of her contemporaries who had failed to grasp it entirely. She learned perfectly the one basic truth about God, that He is “wholly other”. He completely transcends the limits and the capacity of human intelligence. So far is He above and beyond us that He revealed Himself particularly in all those things that ran counter to the Israelites natural expectations. She learned well what the Prophets had been saying – that His was an invincible will and power to accomplish good – that is, to save us from sin – and He preferred to see all He had done for Israel up to that point wiped out completely, He preferred to see Himself eclipsed and judged unequal to the promises He had made, rather than to fulfill their carnal expectations and so confirm them in the false notions their leaders had of Him. The vows you are now, or one day to take indicate that you know, with Mary, that when God seems most weak, then He is most strong, when He seemed most foolish, then He was most wise; when He seemed most cruel, then He was most loving, when He seemed far, far away, then He was very, very close.
Mary echoed the song of her innermost heart when she sang the Magnificat – you can make it your very own, for it reveals the spirit of the ideal Israel, whether Old or New.
My soul magnifies the Lord: in giving me the desire, strength and courage to make the vows God is revealing His glory: the magnitude of the love He bears toward me and toward all mankind.
And my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour: I cling with joy to my God present within me, and His presence has healed me and transformed me.
Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid: He has seen me standing firm in the knowledge of my nothingness; and having set aside all hope in the power of human resources, I am ready to do His Will and to serve Him.
For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call be blessed because He who is mighty has done great things for me and holy if His name: all will acknowledge that I have merited none of this, that God has done this for no other reason than that He is Holy. He does this because it pleases Him; He is a Law unto Himself. He follows the instincts of His inner nature, His instinct to give, to share and to love.
In her Magnificat, Our Lady enumerates His works of mercy – works so contrary to human prudence and human expectation. He chooses the weak and the needy and rejects the powerful and the rich. He would have no flesh glory in His sight and Mary saw all this as fidelity to those impossible promises He had made to her Father Abraham 2,000 years earlier.
None of us can comprehend completely the mind of the Virgin Mary, but we can say for certain that it had become “wholly other”, too. No doubt she was aware of the complete inner harmony that was hers, the integrity of her nature and the freedom from sin she enjoyed as the Immaculate Conception. Surely she was aware of the rich gifts of intellect and will, of knowledge and love that were hers by the grace of God. She may thus have been tempted to vindicate for herself a place of honor in the plan of God for all mankind. She may have even felt she was qualified to be a direct ancestor the Messiah. She was after all of David’s royal line. And yet, she knew full well that nothing we can do for Him is, of itself, capable of furthering His plans any more than our omitting to carry out His Will can hinder their fulfillment. Surely, she knew that God did not need her body or her offspring to fulfill His will to do good – to save mankind from sin. She must have known that He could raise up children to Abraham out of the very stones that dotted the landscape. And surely, Mary must have known that life is such a precious thing in itself, that if she did nothing else with it except to give it back to God, consuming it in a lifetime of praise, adoration and thanksgiving for His love, then by that fact alone she would be a smashing success.
By taking your vows, my dear sisters, and by taking the habit, you are showing that your minds are “wholly other” as was Mary’s. You are saying that you know He doesn’t really need or depend upon anything you can do, humanly speaking to communicate divine life to the world. By your vows you are giving back to Him intact everything He has given you. You are saying you know the gifts of life and of the Faith are beyond our deserving, and that having received them is happiness itself. You are making it quite clear that you do not appropriate these gifts for yourself, but that you stand ever ready and open, like Mary to hear and respond to His every creative Word – ready to consume yourself if need be, in the service of His good pleasure, and yet you will discover, as Mary did, that by responding in this way to whatever it will be His good pleasure to say to you, you will have become exactly what He wants you to be, what He has made you to be.
Mary’s response of total abandonment into the hands of God was made on behalf of all Israel, or rather, in her; all Israel was making its act of total dependence upon God.
In professing your vows you will be making a response of total abandonment to God on behalf of the Church – and thus you immerse yourself entirely in the mystery of the Church – of which Mary is model and mother. As the attitude of Mary was exactly what God was waiting for to enable Him to utter in its fullness the Divine re-creative word in the world, so also, it is this attitude you assume by your vows that enables Christ to be an effective re-creative word in our midst. God bless you!
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