FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT
Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing is impossible to God” with the faith that was required of Abraham and Sarah (Gn 18:14). Mary had to walk all her lifetime by the same dark faith that St. Paul describes as a part of Abraham’s surrender to God’s promise (Rm 4:17-21). It was in a hope against all appearances that Abraham believed in God’s promise to make him the father of many nations.
Mary becomes the mother of the faithful and the prototype of the Church and of each individual Christian by her virginal faith and total surrender to the Holy Spirit operating within her from the first moment of her existence.
And this surrender in faith to cooperate with the Holy Spirit is done through her personal acts. Mary is not a puppet. Nor is she one who begins to be the faithful handmaid of the Lord only at the time of the Annunciation. She evolved at each moment of her life as she contemplated God working in her life. “In an utterly singular way she cooperated by her obedience, faith, hope and burning charity in the Savior’s work of restoring supernatural life to souls. For this reason she is a mother to us in the order of grace.”
MARY – THE SIGN OF CHRISTIANITY
But Mary stands as the sign of the distinct quality of the Christian Church, holding out to each human individual a synthesis of the perfect human being. She is the ”place” where God’s transcendence and immanence meet. She opens her whole being in silent contemplation of the awesome, majestic God and she hungers and thirsts to receive of His fullness. She embraces, womb like, God’s gift of Himself. She yields to His love by a return of love that proves itself by complete, docile obedience to Him. “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to thy word” (Lk 1:38).
Mary as virgin is the archetype of the integrated human being. In her contemplation of God’s supremacy, she experiences her creaturely poverty. She chastely desires to give her total being back to God. In complete obedience to God’s wishes, she opens herself as virginal earth to God’s fertility. She receives the divine Seed which God the Sower casts into her. Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Rhenish Dominican mystic, expressed this archetypal symbol of woman found in all human beings in these bold words:
“For man to become fruitful, he must become a woman. Woman! That is the most noble word that can be addressed to the soul, and it is far nobler than virgin. That man should conceive God within himself is good and in this predisposition he is a virgin. But that God should become fruitful in him is better. For to become fruitful through the gift received is to be grateful for the gift. And then the intellect becomes a woman in its gratitude that conceives anew.”
The symbol of woman suggests a movement inward, toward creating life. The peak of womanhood touches our human transcendence and excellence and becomes the best in us when woman stands for one who completely and totally accepts life from the Other, unites in loving service to that new life as now a sign of her communion with the Beloved.
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
