ADVENT MASS

I often puzzle about Mary and her deep entwining with us in the Catholicism ( both East and West) of our faith, but it’s less puzzlement about her, rather trying more to work out just what sort of a puzzle this woman, this lady, mother, and sister of us all means for our world now! Forgive a short personal insight, over the years `I realise that I have ever had a deep love of the Theotokos, but a horror of the sentimentality and excessive piety sometimes found near to her cult.

We Catholics and Orthodox are used to her, texts, hymns, images of Mary abound, and they allow us easy access to the long and loving tradition of her memory within the family of the Church, but with familiarity can come that gentle blindness to the wider connections she has with others, beyond our faith and horizons.

I grew up with her in my faith, but it was a French relationship, engendered by my French grandmother. I can remember my 5^th birthday spent in Chartres with her en route to our family in the Jura, and an early morning mass in the crypt where Mary’s statue is ‘sous terre’. That place is special to her and to me too, but even over here (my Grandmother married and lived in England) every Sunday morning mass at Our Lady of Lourdes in Headingly ended with lighting candles at Our Lady’s shrine, a superb modern stained glass image which captivated me. It was the same captivation with the medieval images of her I grew so used to from holidays and time spent in France but also found elsewhere (I loved Our Lady of the Pew in Westminster Cathedral). Later my love of iconography and supposed talent as an icon painter enriched that visual and theological depth, for all these deep rooted connections grew, remain and as I get older have shifted into a deeper, more poetic appreciation of her.

Yet I have a challenge to myself and others s Mary occasionally needs rescuing from our muddles. These days I wonder if we do need to take far more time to see, experience and know her in the glimpses of the poets, the works of the composers and musicians, the images of great artists, to remove from her a surprising amount of our own self projection. Instead let her speak to us in an uncluttered way. I can reflect and say that in my life she has always been there, a robust figure, far from the quiet docile background image, or the lovely lady of apparitions, or her alter ego, the rather grim purveyor of God’s annoyance and her sons’ grief with our condition! These are not her, she is there to be encountered but not in abstraction, in our life.  The Theotokos encapsulates something about our own attitude to the HOPE and fidelity of our Christian faith, for she is always there! I sense my love for Mary is bound up in the French captivation with ‘les espaces et les lieux de Notre-Dame’, those little spaces of ‘liminality’ where she waits to greet us.

Mary is ‘one of us’, and for that, we should be determinedly very grateful, but as ‘one of us’, even those elements we try to make very special, also need to be made part of ordinary life, for they will only turn back on us: Her ‘Immaculate Conception’ for instance, has to reflect on us, on our own conception, on that seed of eternity given us by the Spirit of God, for definitions need grounding in our tradition of living faith as-we-live-it. I quote from a spiritual mentor, whose journey was like my own-and who I knew as a novice, Archimandrite Lev Gillet who wrote :’ Orthodox theology has always insisted on the beauty of human nature in its integrity before the fall. Now it is the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which alone can justify this ‘humanism’. It is only in Mary conceived without sin, that human nature has reached its fulfilment and actualized all its possibilities. Mary is the one and only success of the human race. It is through her and in her that humanity has escaped total failure and has offered to the divine a point of entry into the human. (The Immaculate Conception and the Orthodox Church” By Father Lev Gillet From Chrysostom, Vol. VI, No. 5 (Spring 1983), pp. 151-159.)

It seems to me that the way we need to approach Mary, and particularly each of us as men and women who need to reach out to one another across race and space to be for each other the FACE of the compassionate Christ, is to approach her less as mother and more as sister. There is that vertical relationship of mother there, true, but we also need that horizontal respect towards our sister. Isn’t this what those two great French writers Peguy and Claudel found she gave them in their own story of salvation. Paul Claudel found her presence nnext to her statue in Notre Dame, a loved image, which I like so many others rejoiced to see untouched after the fire of 2019,still smiling in the debris the day after the conflagration.

On Christmas Day in 1886 when he was eighteen, Claudel attended High Mass at the cathedral and then returned later for vespers.

“’It was the gloomiest winter day and the darkest rainy afternoon over Paris,’ he wrote. He listened to the psalms and the Magnificat.”He recalled that he ‘stood near the second pillar at the entrance to the chancel, to the right, on the side of the sacristy. . . . Then occurred the event which dominates my entire life.’In an instant, my heart was touched and I believed’. (see extract below)

What is this about? I suggest that relationship of sister, a loved trusted sister-who as sisters often become, somebody with whom you share your secrets and hopes. I end with Charles Peguy, who having found faith difficult recovered it through Mary : “So I prayed to Mary. Prayers to Mary are prayers of reserve. There is not one in the whole liturgy, not one, you hear me, not one that the most miserable sinner cannot really say. In the mechanism of salvation, the Hail Mary is the last resort. With it, one cannot be lost.”  I believe that!

But let us honour her, sister, mother, the best of us, in Claudel’s poetic words, the first and last pieces of his poem, The Virgin at Noon:

‘It is noon. I see the church is open. I must go in.
Mother of our Lord, I have not come to pray.

I have nothing to offer and nothing to ask.
I am here only, my Lady, to look at you…

Because it is noon, because we are here in this day today.
Because you are there for always, simply because you are Mary, simply because you exist,

Mother of Jesus Christ, be thanked!’

We too thank you, Theotokos, Mother of Christ, our sister.

Reference Quotes

Paul Claudel

Conversion at Notre Dame Paris.

Paul Claudel’s youth was spent among free-thinking intellectuals, and he had become cynical about the Catholic faith.  His conversion happened in this dramatic way, as recounted in Louis Chaigne’s biography of him, Paul Claudel: The Man and the Mystic. On Christmas Day in 1886 when he was eighteen years old, Claudel attended High Mass at the cathedral. He left and then returned later for vespers.

“’It was the gloomiest winter day and the darkest rainy afternoon over Paris,’ he wrote. He listened to the psalms and the Magnificat.”He recalled that he ‘stood near the second pillar at the entrance to the chancel, to the right, on the side of the sacristy. . . . Then occurred the event which dominates my entire life.’“’In an instant, my heart was touched and I believed. I believed with such a strength of adherence, with such an uplifting of my entire being, with such powerful conviction, with such a certainty leaving no room for any kind of doubt, that since then all the books, all the arguments, all the incidents and accidents of a busy life have been unable to shake my faith, nor indeed to affect it in any way.'”

Ralph McInerny had this to say about Claudel conversion, which didn’t immediately change Claudel’s behaviour nearly as much as St. Thérèse’s conversion changed hers:

“Claudel did not return immediately to the practice of his faith. But on that Christmas Eve in Notre Dame, the liturgy spoke to him with a power he would never forget and his disbelief drained from him.”

From Dappled Things

The Virgin of Paris and the Conversion of Paul Claudel, Christmas Eve 1886

Roseanne T. Sullivan

December 11^th 2020

https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/18209/the-virgin-of-paris-and-the-conversion-of-paul-claudel-on-christmas-eve-1886 

From:

The Virgin at Noon
By Paul Claudel

‘It is noon. I see the church is open. I must go in.
Mother of our Lord, I have not come to pray.

I have nothing to offer and nothing to ask.
I am here only, my Lady, to look at you….

Because it is noon, because we are here in this day today.
Because you are there for always, simply because you are Mary, simply because you exist,

Mother of Jesus Christ, be thanked!

Charles Peguy

But for eighteen months he could not say the Lord’s Prayer. He confessed on September 27, 1912 to Lotte: “’Thy will be done,’ I could not say that. It’s not a matter of just muttering through it; it’s a matter of really saying what you say. I couldn’t really say, ‘Thy will be done.’” So, he boldly addressed the one who is infinitely pure, because she is infinitely sweet. God is just and strong, the Virgin Mary is tender and merciful. He continued to tell Lotte: “So I prayed to Mary. Prayers to Mary are prayers of reserve. There is not one in the whole liturgy, not one, you hear me, not one that the most miserable sinner cannot really say. In the mechanism of salvation, the Hail Mary is the last resort. With it, one cannot be lost.” He then affirmed: “It is the Blessed Virgin who prevented me from sinning.”