Replies

Just saying they're shallow doesn't cut the mustard. I made propositions. WHAT about them was shallow? Just a general condemnation is, well, little different from most of what goes on here. There's nothing to grab onto. It doesn't move the ball.

We think that the Incarnation is really important, cosmically important. It elevates the created world, so that it is made fit to bear the perfect revelation of God, to be breathed into His lungs, to seep from His pores, to bear the tread of His feet.

Consequently, stipulating most of the "humble, simple, Jewish girl" stuff, we think Mary's role in the Incarnation is really important.

(And how do we know she was 'simple' anyway? Lewis points out the ferocity of the Magnificat and suggests that when our Lord was on a tear, perhaps the people of Galilee said, "He's his mother's son.")

I guess it would help explain (not persuade) if I repeated what I said about metaphors and God. I start knowing a little about God because know a little about being a father. I am one and I had one.

But somewhere in there I realize that fathers on earth are the metaphor, that God is the REAL father, and we are approximations and imitations.

You all challenge us, when we are discussing the Sacrament with whether we think Jesus is really a door.

My answer is yes, He is THE door. Doors on earth are just pale imitations of what a door is, they are images of Him, not He of them. I pass through a door, and I am still here. But when I pass through Him, the old is made new.

Similarly, when He says my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed, He means it. It's my daily bread which is fake food, and convivial gatherings with my family and friends are little more than mockeries of the Blessed Sacrament which is a foretaste of the Heavenly banquet with wine on the lees well refined.

There is something similar going on with Mary. She was not just a 'surrogate mother,' a rent-a-womb. She was, in a way, the fulfillment of what motherhood had been created for.

We all know that our children are born to die. They are cherry blossoms: exquisite for a while, evoking yearning adoration (after their order) from us, precious beyond reckoning -- and we hope, most of us, only that we will die before them.

They are all wonders: in us (if we are mothers), with us, OF us, but not entirely. They matter so much to us and our duty is to let them matter that much and to let them go, when the time is right.

But this child was the perfection of childhood. And the sentimental adoration which is the impulse of every healthy mother was perfected in Mary by Him. He merited and still merits complete adoration, and in what other creature was that duty so willingly discharged?

He is all grace and favor. And He came to us through her. It is just fact that the incarnation was begun, not by her but in her. All grace and favor and love came to us through her. That is just history.

But look here: If you have brought someone to Christ, you know exactly how in one way you did it, and yet in another you did nothing, since God's Spirit did it all in and through you. We argue here about the nature of Mary's "fiat", but there is no question that she cannot take much credit for parturition. When a woman's time comes, it comes. She may fight it, but it happens will she or nill she.

She can say "fiat" to what is happening anyway, and surely that will tend to make for an easier birth. And while every sane husband thanks and praises his wife for bringing their child into the world, every sane wife, enjoying the admiration of her husband knows perfectly well that a lot of it happened without her.

So every person who has ministered the Gospel, who has shown the Divine Love, knows a little of what it is to be Mary, to be a mother.

And more than that, we can see in those to whom we are privileged to bring the love of Christ a little of what Mary saw in Elisabeth: Something within that person jumps for joy at what is within us.

It has been suggested here that God could perfectly well save someone on a desert island who had never met a Christian or seen a Bible. I dare say he could. But Paul asks, "... how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard, and how are they to hear without a herald ... ?"

It is God's way, evidently, to choose humans to bear His Love, as a tree bears fruit, or a mother a child.

In our case, the saying is not true, "You shall know the tree by its fruit," because we are sinners, and yet by God's grace we are sometimes permitted to bear grace to others, who taking into themselves what we bear come to new life.

We are clear that we are maybe a little like a corrupt old apple tree, still capable of a few good apples, and yet we check and shy away when someone says Mary is the Tree of Life, though the fruit she bore gave Himself for saving food to all whom the Father called. It is the fruit which justifies the tree, not the other way around, and we call Mary the Tree of Life only because she bore the fruit which drew to itself the poison of the fruit of that other tree and which gave Life to the world.

Just as the title "Theotokos" arises from an assertion about the Divinity of Christ, so most, if not all, the titles and attributions of Mary are really praising her Son at one remove.

The Psalmist says, "The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed." Our Lady says, "For he that is mighty hath magnified me, and Holy is His Name."

He has made her great, we think, and we join her in magnifying His Holy Name.

Now simply saying that's unconvincing or weak or whatever is just no good. It's fine if you are not persuaded -- your loss. But if there isn't some question, some directed pointing out of a flaw, some "How do you tolerate plastic statues on your dashboard when Leviticus says this and Isaiah says that?" then, well, I don't have time to play 20 questions. If no pertinent and meaningful objection is offered, I can't respond to it, and I am certainly under no clear obligation to think it exists.