Marian dogmas, defined in historical contexts different from our own, challenge us to present them in language intelligible to the people of our time. And this will not be a new task for Christians, for in the first centuries of our era, the Church Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers were able to dialogue with the surrounding culture, thus making the Christian faith meaningful to the people of that time. They used the language of Greek philosophy and different signs of the Greco-Roman world to make the Good News of Jesus intelligible.
In this month of March, in the context of Lent, we are also invited to fix our gaze on the Woman of the “Yes”, as on 25 March we celebrate the Annunciation of the Lord. This is a solemnity that takes us back to Christmas, as it celebrates the incarnation of the Son of God. In this central ministry of our faith, “Mary’s yes” acquires a special force, as St. Bernard admirably expresses it: “Virgin full of goodness, the disconsolate Adam, cast out of paradise with all his descendants, asks you for it. Abraham asks it of you, David asks it of you. The other patriarchs, your ancestors, who dwell in the region of the shadow of death, also ask you ardently. The whole world is waiting for it, prostrate at your feet. And not without reason, for on thy answer depends the consolation of the wretched, the redemption of the captives, the freedom of the damned, the salvation of all the children of Adam, of all thy race. Hasten to give your consent, Virgin, answer without delay to the angel, or rather to the Lord, who has spoken to you through the angel. Speak a word and receive Him who is the Word, utter your human word and conceive Him who is the divine Word, utter a transitory word and receive into your womb Him who is the eternal Word”.[1]
Against the background of “Mary’s yes”, I would like to share with you a brief reflection on the following points: the Immaculate Conception based on “the beauty of Mary, the beauty of humanity”; the Assumption as “the beauty of Mary that reaches its fullness in heaven” and the living Marian spirituality from the Vincentian charism as “the look at heaven that calls for a look at the pilgrims”.
Referring back to Aristotle and going through St. Thomas, we can recall the characteristics of “the transcendentals”: true, good and beautiful. It is also important to consider that according to St. Thomas, God is the subsistent being and that creatures are composite entities that participate in the being of God, which is why, on the basis of faith, we say that man is the image and likeness of God. One of these creatures reminds us in a special way of this image and likeness of our creator, she is the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom we contemplate as beautiful, and she is a sign of the beauty of humanity, which is often overshadowed by sin.
In our society, beauty is highly valued, but this appreciation often forgets the essential, because it responds to standards and not to transcendental characteristics, thus limiting the concept of beauty to a single dimension. In pursuit of physical beauty, “physical exercises” are promoted. Faced with this reality, I see the urgency of also promoting “spiritual exercises”, since they will help us to look at Mary’s beauty as a sign of the creature who knew how to integrate all the potentialities within herself, and from there, to discover in us a call to contemplate the beauty of humanity.
If we were to stop here and if the above were to be achieved, it could be a point in favour of education to transcendence in our culture of immediacy. But as Christians, we cannot stop there. What has been said above can only be a springboard to help us dive into the mystery of grace. For it was grace that made Mary a beautiful creature. She, the full of grace, is also the first to be redeemed, so that we, her children, can enter into the dynamic of the Spirit who worked in her life, so that through the grace of Mary’s Son, we can experience that he makes all things new (cf. Rev 21:5).
We know that one of the fathers of the Church, St. Irenaeus, has said that just as Jesus is the new Adam, Mary is the New Eve, in contrast to the Old Testament Eve, the New Testament Eve receives the word of truth (from the Angel Gabriel), and obeys the word received, Eve receives the word of lies (from the devil), and disobeys the Creator. From this obedience to the Word of truth we can contemplate in Mary the beauty of the human being, graced by God, covered by the shadow of the Spirit (cf. Lk 1:35) and capable of responding to God with freedom. In this way she shares in the holiness of God, who alone is holy, and calls us all to open ourselves to this experience, striving for a realistic anthropological optimism, which allows us to discover the beauty of humanity, called to live to the full all the potentialities it possesses.
Dostoyevsky’s phrase “beauty will save the world” is well known. In relation to this, the title of the book by the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han (German of Korean origin) “The Salvation of the Beautiful” is suggestive, where he indicates that “the ideal of the beautiful completely surpasses aesthetics and even enters into morality to dictate the morality of the beautiful”.[2] In the light of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, can we speak of the morality of the beautiful in Mary Most Holy? Referring to the etymology of morality (mos moris) as a way of life, we can say that she, the graced one, was able to live fully according to God’s will, because the Holy Spirit “overshadowed her” (cf. Lk 1:35), and she is the one “full of grace” (Lk 1:28). Commenting on this biblical quotation, John Paul II said: “kecharitoméne, that is to say, particularly loved by God, totally pervaded by His love, completely consolidated in Him: as if she had been formed entirely by Him, by the most holy love of God”. (John Paul II, homily 8 December 1980).
Mary’s beauty, which invites us to contemplate the goodness-beauty of humanity, reminds us that beauty demands fullness, which is why the dogma of the Assumption is the fullness of beauty. Heaven is the place of fullness, since there Christ, head of the Church, since his Ascension is the God-Man who reminds us of his promise of eternal life, the first of the human race in whom this promise is fully fulfilled is his mother. The son of God and son of Mary is love made flesh, his life was a preaching of love in word and deed. He loved his mother with the heart of a man-God, therefore, the Assumption is an expression of the Son’s love, as well as hope for the Church, because in this mystery we can see fulfilled the words of the phenomenologist Gabriel Marcel: “To love someone is to say to them: you will never die”. Therefore, by dogma we affirm that Mary “at the end of her earthly life was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory” (Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus). It does not mean for us that Mary Most Holy did not die, but that, through the love of her Son (which is the expression of the love of the Holy Trinity), the beauty was able to participate readily in the fullness of life. That is why we Christians, contemplating the beauty of creation, cannot conclude such an observation without raising our gaze to heaven.
Our gaze towards heaven calls for a gaze towards earth, towards pilgrims. Our gaze to heaven challenges us to look with compassion, like the Good Samaritan (cf. Lk 10:33), at the realities of fellow pilgrims so that we can bind up their wounds, walk with them and lead them to a place of care for life (cf. Lk 10:34-35). So our gaze to heaven brings us back to earth and here we are invited to love, being aware that “if you love, you will be wounded and perhaps die, but if you do not love, you are already dead” (Herbert McCabe). The saints of our Vincentian family teach us that Marian devotion has led them to love their brothers and sisters intensely. The example of the one who had the privileged encounter with Mary, Catherine Labouré, speaks eloquently. After her experiences of private revelation, she lived devoted to the service of the elderly, in the humblest of offices, loving and serving Christ present in the poor, being “the saint of silence”
Vincent and Louise inculcated in their brothers and sisters devotion to the Blessed Virgin, especially veneration of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception as an expression of complete surrender to God, and therefore as a model of submission to God’s will. She placed before them the picture of the Visitation and thus invited them to prompt and effective service to those most in need. And she is the humble handmaid, therefore a model of this virtue. St. Vincent says: “If you want [God] to call you to expect this grace [of humility], do not harden your heart, but go to the Holy Virgin, begging her to obtain for you from her Son the grace to share in her humility, by which she called herself the handmaid of the Lord, when she was chosen to be his Mother. What was there in the Virgin that God looked upon her? She herself says: ‘My humility’” (SVP X, 536-537).
As Vincentians, the legacy we have received from our founders is great. Our Marian heritage is not only the Miraculous Medal, it is perhaps a response from heaven to the Marian spirit of the founders and the saints of the Vincentian Family. Our Marian heritage is based above all on the witness of Marian love which in the founders was expressed beyond a devotion centred on piety, but rather manifested itself in concrete gestures of imitation, in order to follow Christ the Evangeliser.
F. Hugo R. Sosa, CM
[1] From the Homilies of St. Bernard, Abbot, On the Excellencies of the Virgin Mother, Homily 4, 8-9
[2] Cárdenas Valenzuela, R., “La belleza salvará al mundo” in: https://www.nuevarevista.net/la-belleza-salvara-al-mundo/
