Clergy Recollection December 2007

 

The Incarnation of Christ and the Wellsprings of Life

 

 Edward Booth O.P.

 

 

 

I Begetting and Birth

 

     With this recollection I invite you to think with me about the mysteries faith in their reality as living. How easy it is to fall into the habit of thinking in relationship to the ordered structures which can be discerned in the harmonies of faith and to think of the mysteries in effect as ideas. The shortest of reflections should convince us that we are not dealing with ideas but with mysteries as living realities, related to each as living realities, related to us as living realities. In what may be regarded as a rebuke to that disposition, cultivated because there may not seem to be the time to do more, Our Lord said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. A life on the one hand not separated from the life of the whole of the Godhead. That the Godhead is tri-une assures that it has the features of life, all raised into divine dispositions of infinite knowledge and infinite love. And on the other hand it is not separated from the life of creatures, and in fact exists participated in identity as the supernatural life of men, communicated as the seeds of grace and glory. Renewing our life, elevating it in a mode natural to it, as grace transforms nature in such a way as God only can do it. And all within the context of the divine life in itself, even when passed on through rational instruments and agents.

            That there is one divine life which unites the divinity and the Blessed Eucharistic was explicitly said by Our Lord on the discourse which he gave to the people of Caphernaüm on himself as the Bread of Life: “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn. 6,57). He speaks of his divine Person in relationship to the Person of the Father. But as existing in unity with the human nature which he took from Mary. So divinity, humanity and his relationship to His human Mother, and Eucharist are all brought together there. I shall take our meditation with this above all in mind.

            As for the when and the how, there is only one place to look.

            Not in the future and its dreams; not in the past with its reassurances and its regrets, but in the present in which alone we live and in which an openness to the living God is to be found, where we can draw on God as the unique wellspring of life, whether directly or mediated through other sources. Though, as it is divine and infinite, still communicated to us essentially uncontaminated with what may be the circumstances and people through whom it comes. The breviary counts on us as having learnt to be aware of those moments which reveal themselves as containing intense power and intense joy:

            “… with delight let us drink the sober

            intoxication of the Spirit”.[1]

God will give us the discernment to judge whether all of the elements here are coming together.

 

Whilst the matter of the cosmos moves, cools, displaces itself at every level, powerful but not living, it remains contained by the living God; but only the life of God could have begun it and its processes. And life has always the same characteristics. The sequence from God to the humblest living things is complete and shows exactly that. The Father begets the Son, giving Him everything of himself; together they are the source of the Holy Spirit. But that is only their giving. There is also the receiving. The Persons in God can give the single divine nature to each other and receive it in knowledge and praise and with love. It is not sufficient to say that living things reproduce: they do that but they communicate life, letting it pass through them. And especially to the by intention godlike human race.

 

Saint Thomas and the Image of God in the soul

 

I imagine that all of you will have knowledge of the images use by Saint Augustine, in his On the Trinity, to suggest from a number of points of view that the three-in-oneness of the Divine Trinity, which is also a one-in-threeness, can be given a justification from a similar structure in the human mind which is its image. Though there are several structures given in his text, these are represented by one in the Decrees of the Council of Trent, and passed from that to the Catechisms which derived from it: as by the three powers, memory understanding and will in the single human soul. Undoubtedly with Augustine in mind, but reverently not mentioning him by name, the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas gave another image of the three, insisting that the image in the human mind should be dynamic, and also insisting that that to be complete there must be a central place in the image for an imaging of the producing of the Divine Word, as begotten by the Father.  “There can be no word in our soul without actual cogitation”. And so he produced this image: “The image of the Trinity is found primarily and principally in our mind in its act, in this way that, starting with the knowledge which we have, from forming an expression [Verbum] interiorly by cogitation, we burst out in love from it”.[2] The preoccupation of Augustine was different from that of Thomas. His main concern, especially in the latter part of his On the Trinity, is to argue against the neo-Platonists, who had a triad of highest beings: the One, Mind and Soul. But they saw them as subordinated, and the Arians wanted to associate themselves with their modish philosophy. Augustine therefore thought in  terms of relationships, and therefore of structures, as is to be found in his triads, which are either arranged with relationships of equality between the essence of the soul and the two potentialities of intelligence and will, or with the three powers of memory, understanding and will, which Augustine brought into a tighter unity by thinking of ‘memory of the self’, “understanding of the self” and “willing (or loving) of the self” – where the ‘self as such’, being single has a similarity to the single divine nature, which Augustine does not exploit.

 

The Divine Conception of Mary

 

            But to our theme. That Thomas could expect the powers in the human soul to be active according not exactly as a structure, but a structure produced in activity amongst them, and with this activity closely reflecting the creative ordering of the Word in his creating the human mind in his image, and not only creating it as a structure, but by ordering it dynamically, and, we could add, by his divine presence to it containing it. The closer it is to him in this likeness the more this divine likeness actively functions. But God in his Trinitarian dynamism is the source of all life, and he will communicate life to it from his life through a recipient which he has made in the likeness of himself. The highest form of this communication was at the divine Conception in Mary of the Word of God by the Holy Spirit, within a transient, most exalted but tender presence of the cloud of the divine glory. A reflection on this fact under the aspect of a communication of life should convince us that we must meditate on this fact in giving it in the highest mode possible to a human person, just a little lower than that of the angels. The divine marriage of consecrated Virgins as Brides of Christ approaches this, following the form of life for Mary as virgin mother. Her co-redeeming presence is almost demanded to provide a way to this exaltation, and it must continue, which is what a consecrated virgin would most ardently hope for. It must be a most significant part of Mary’s heavenly activity as she presents and supports them, enfolding them in fear-dispelling love, drawn from the divine life, which by her childbearing must have formed her so exquisitely for these purposes which are indeed ecclesial, and in the highest sense of the Church’s being the Body of Christ: “another Christ” as Mystici Corporis said, but It and Christ Himself being mystically one, with both as One having the same mother and drawing their being in its mystical unity from her.

The Timeless Begetting of the Word and the Living Image of God in Our Souls; the Single all-Encompassing Mystery of Christ – Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection

            A continuity then between the timeless begetting of the Word by the Father, and the image of God in our souls which presents an image of it.  But that image is most certainly alive. The original has the characteristics of God as being always at rest and yet always in movement. But when we say that the soul images God, it images him as in itself living. Soul and God are both living and the relation between them is also living. The living God lives and acts intimately within his image, and Thomas has said that there must be a dynamic activity in the essential activity of mind, grasping and conceiving, and bursting into love at what it grasps and conceives.

            You may remember when we considered some of the ancient Eucharistic canons we found that some had among the mysteries which the Mass made present his incarnation. They linked together, as so many threads within threads with the mysteries of our salvation and redemption. But those threads within threads contain all the mysteries in a timeless unity. There is what Saint Paul called “the Mystery of Christ”, which contained within it the other mysteries especially of his passion and resurrection. The Passion which stood for the destruction of evils in us, and the Resurrection as our initiation into the glory of heaven, of which grace in this life is in continuity as its anticipation. You may remember how we considered in the context of the fruits of the Mass that action which Thomas related to the two forms of causality acting together, of the active causality of God working on man, but not blindly. Rather modelling us in the manner of formal causality after the mysteries of Christ, because the mysteries of our salvation as lived within the mystical Body of Christ must be the mysteries of the divine and human Christ, whose person was that of the second Person of the Trinity with a divine nature. Thus everything which he did, every action, because of the divine power associated with it, has an infinite value and an infinite power.

  

… sought in the moving present

 

            There where we search for it, in the moving present, yet with its openness to the infinitude of God,[3] if I may use an expression used by an English Anglican poet, which he drew from an image of a pagan philosopher of the third century: there, “at the still point of the turning world”.[4]

            What lies at the heart of experience, in what scholastics called the “flowing now” is our only access to the “standing now” of God, which is eternal. It is the place of a communication of being and knowing from the Creator to his creature, which cannot be gainsaid. It was relatively easy to see this in relationship to the specific mysteries of salvation, which were the achievement of the Pasch of Christ at Jerusalem. Human actions in a human nature of a divine Person, who came into human existence as a human life deriving in the closest unity with the divine nature which belonged to his divine Person.

            Let us try, by passing from his incarnation to his saving actions, to gain a sense of their unity, their perfect unity in the single Mystery of Christ. The beginning and end of his human existence. And with those great mysteries, let us understand also that all of the actions of his life in between were not just events as recorded by the Evangelists and passed to tradition, but each one of them so united with the divine power that all of them form a unity together, from which any element is relevant to the details of our life. Not  primarily to note it as a literal exegete might note it, but a religious and pious exaltation of soul as we find more hand-holds and mind-holds on which we might ascend. They make up a unity in the whole Christ, whose reality we must allow God to make our own.

  

Mary in this Mystery of Mysteries

 

            The place of Mary cannot be ignored here. The conception under the power of the Holy Spirit within the cloud of the divine glory, opened her and her human body to form the human body of Christ. A single life in Him, but not by merging or mixing the divine and the human: her human conception and gestation of the body of her true son followed the course of human birth, but that conception and gestation took place within the timeless begetting of his Divine nature as a divine Person. The word “privilege” is insufficient to suggest the elevation of that association. The divine conception of the human nature, the body so formed as to be an appropriate receptacle for a human mind and soul, also created in particular to be united with the Mind and Will of the divine Person, entails that as she was gestating the body of Christ that childbearing leading to birth was taking place enfolded by and contained within the timeless birth of the Son of the Father. Divine begetting and human begetting were united together, without any question of merging. And that becomes a prototypal model for the infusion of grace in human beings, which makes them participants of the divine nature, given to them as a gift to restore them to what they were, and to prepare them for the life of eternity which must follow as surely as day follows on night. And this is the work of baptism, taking place in and through Mary. So we are made God’s sons by a rebirth, in flesh and blood not hers, but with a communication of a soul totally adapted to us as Christ’s was totally adapted to the body of Christ taken from her, the whole  of which in Christ united to his divinity personally, the whole of which we participate: the whole Christ made in and through Mary – his flesh and blood given by Mary, united with the divinely infused human soul as in every human birth, making up the particularity of a human being, and intimately suffused as a union of  human body and soul with the divine Person of the Son of God: inseparable from his timeless divinity, so that we become participants of the divine nature which was in him united with the human nature as One Thing: from the union of Mary’s begetting within the divine begetting. This being an unmixed unity[5] of the unchangeable divine nature with the time-bound human nature taken from Mary. For she was the “Mother of God”, of a divine Person in eternal generation from the Father from which he could not be other.[6]

            Let us feel for the unity between the mystery of Christ’s birth, at the beginning of his human life, and the events at the end. As a living unity: all manifestations of a single life. The divine life living in perfect unity with the human life of Christ, where our poor words are always in a state of failure and conjecture, falling short of the reality. Only Christ’s words were expressions of infinite irresistible divine power.

In Christ a Unity of Divine and Human – Human especially in His Sufferings

            But even he recognised that the thrust of his divinity in union with that of the Father and the Holy Spirit, felt even in anticipation the pain of the reality of his human passion, when the full extent of the passion passed before his mind, as, sweating blood as a sign of the highest human anguish, he could say and mean, “Father let this chalice pass from me”, as he could also say and mean “but not as I will but as you will.”

 

 

The Selflessness of the Divine Communication of Knowledge, Praise and Love and the inherited Disobedience of Our First Parents, where the Original Condition is to be Restored according to this Divine Model

 

            This also has a great significance for human life. By their original sin our first parents chose for themselves and for those whose being lay within their loins to disobey God, Eve and then Adam. A fallen angel had told them “You shall be as Gods”. Their drives, their thoughts and all their motivations were thereafter to disregard God, and coincide with their own conceptions, not imitating the selflessness of the divine persons who were giving themselves to each other in a Praise which was a unity of love and knowledge, with each therefore receiving that from the others. That divine model stands. But when God comes to us to communicate life he will communicate it to us with a congruity to our own nature, but it will have a new principle: a principle that derives from Him, not from us. The eternal commerce in our souls follows God’s laws not our laws: but for our own good, for in giving up our life we gain it. We cannot by an interior act of our will, will to go contrary to the law which belongs to all the living cells, organs and limbs of our body. Thus we retain our liberty, whilst others experiment with living bodies according to the conceptions of their own minds. If that is so with our living body, how much the more so with God’s working in us. We must not be foolish and think, explicitly or implicitly, that we can so bargain with God that we can still run the life of our souls independent of the life of the will and movement of God. Rather, out of love for a God who; in himself, is true love, we must let him develop a life in us from the models of his Incarnate Son’s  birth, life, death and resurrection, so that he conforms us to them. In that salvation consists, and at its heart it is a conversion not to what is harmful to us, but to what liberates us and gives us a selflessness which can prepare us to enter into the totally selfless but totally loving presence of the Father. This is effected by the totally selfless and totally loving presence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, acting as sources of life, transforming human souls to what they must have the courage to want: not on their own terms, but on the terms of God.

            Already the unbaptised human soul retains in itself an image of the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father, and its dilation in love to what it itself conceives. Adoption into a divine Sonship increases that likeness immeasurably, and baptism effects that. As it communicates a new life it is in continuity with the primal life-giving from God, communicated to the human race through the divine begetting under the life-giving Holy Spirit of the eternal Son of God as Word in Mary  The primary restitution of human dignity, it goes on to transform human life according to its deeper experiences. Here are contained both the experience of all of its failures and deviations and the anticipations of its hope for eternal glory and immortality, real in adults and anticipatory in infants, which are linked with the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, in order to pass through a purification from the Passion into a transformation in the Resurrection.

 

The Essential Unity of Divine Life-Giving

 

            Here the essential unity of divine life-going shows itself. As effective models, with the divine power operating through them, they relate both to the conception and birth of Jesus in Mary, and to the saving acts of the Pasch of Jesus, which in the Paschal language looks both to the ultimate sources of life – as a light in the darkness, which is given the widest context from Genesis to all of the Prophets, who waited on a new epoch as recapitulating all of their history in one individual who had a special unity with God, and at the end as “Son of Man”, in whom the anticipated Passion and anticipated Resurrection took place.

            Life is restored to men primarily through a new birth, in union with the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem. It was characterised by newness and force, in which the divine birth in it and its consequences are without equal.

            But to realise itself and make itself effective it must disclose its Wisdom to men. It must stir up interest and loyalty, and also bring to a head the misery of the refusal of God by men. It must make them evident and completely clear for the future. That it must conquer this misery of refusal by bringing out the coldness and cruelty of man to man by suffering infinitely. Not as an end, but as a new beginning, which will render the humanity of the victim immortal, and pass that immortality to men. But the principle of life in the fullness of its Person and in the fullness of its Life must have appeared in order for these consequences to be historically established. And in the divine knowledge and nature they have an essential unity and coherence in themselves, only needing to be manifested in historical stages.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II) a)  The Life-Giving Eucharist as Continuity because of Identity with This

 

There was so much to say in the first conference, that this conference must begin by adding another element to the conference but not to the reality.

            In this form by which God communicates life in making this revelation, and still within the reality of the incarnation through Mary, we must not forget all the entailments of what he said in the Caphernaüm synagogue: “I am the Bread of life … he who eats me will live for ever”, and that Bread is “my flesh given for the life of the world”. The inhabitants understood, but large numbers of them could not accept it.

            That flesh: not a new flesh, but the same flesh which lay embryonic in the womb of Mary, was born at Bethlehem, and lay in the feeding trough of animals, which carried their owners or pulled the carts in which they sat and journeyed. Therefore the flesh taken from Mary as the life of God communicated to this world, was unlocked from her by the conception of the Holy Spirit in the cloud of divine glory. That flesh is to be united with our flesh, and therefore strengthening it and immortalising it on the model of Jesus as the Incarnate Word: living, resurrected and ascended. Certainly not just a symbol and nothing more, but a living contact with the human Christ now living eternally in heaven and communicated in its heavenly state.  The full identity of Jesus Christ in his heavenly state, in continuity with his earthly state, begun by his birth from his Virgin Mother, with his presence in the Bread of Heaven. The Bread of Heaven, which Saint Ignatius of Antioch called “the Bread of God”, is an essential element of our Catholic belief, and we must first continue our meditation on it and its identity with the life which God communicated from his infinite life through the Holy Spirit to make the Divine Son and Word incarnately present amongst men. It is the life of the same Christ in his Mystical Body, and as the same Son of Mary conceived in her.

            Here we follow the logic of the harmony of faith, to unite them together at a distant point of convergence, and remembering that it does not lose thereby a connection with the earthly starting points which look out into these perspectives, even if they are expressed here a little unusually.

            Would that we could find that living contact, undiminished! His body entering into our body through the facility of eating and digesting: through the unity of his Person divine and human. In full identity and continuity with his earthly existence, and then as transferred to its heavenly state, and in the conditions of its heavenly state. He touches and enlightens our minds and hearts with his divine and his human mind, and with his human heart, and plants in us the seeds of immortality. So let us assent to these facts as the purest elements of our faith, and let him do in us and act in us as he wills. Let us be sure that his life will, in the best possible way for us, make all the opposition which comes from our own life crumble and eventually conform.

 

            The human birth took place at Bethlehem, and “Bethlehem” has the meaning of “House of Bread”. The twelfth century apse mosaic in the basilica of San Clemente in Rome has as its lowest, horizontal level, a line of converging lambs coming from the two doorways of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. A plurality of lambs: not the single Lamb of God himself, but the sheep which he pastured, coming not only from the place of his final teaching, his passion and his resurrection but also from Bethlehem. Converging also together in time; putting the two places on an equality. Nourished by the mysteries of his passion and resurrection, but nourished also the mystery of his birth. His Eucharistic Life and his divine-human life in identify together.

            As such it fits into a perspective which stretches forward from the priestly figure of Melchisedech, offering bread and wine, receiving the tithes from Abraham, and blessing him in his enterprise of searching for God and his purposes. The 110^th Psalm looked backwards to the story in Genesis and forward to the Messianic King, who was also a priest. And there are those seven references to this psalm in the epistle to the Hebrews which identify him with Christ, of which only one (7,11) asks, “a new priest would arise … why not of the order of Aaron?”. The implication is that Melchisedech blessed the initiative of Abraham – on a mission for the sake of the whole human race and conceived within the setting of the whole human race. But, finally the representatives of the final stage of the Aaronic priesthood would compromise themselves in the death of the Messianic King and loose their prerogative, where they should have gone forward to welcome Him and have established a bridge from themselves to the new revelation. In doing so they corrupted the whole Mosaic development of the tradition which went back to Abraham and Melchizedek by a gross infidelity to the voice of God revealing itself, this time in a divine person become incarnate. So the priesthood of Christ replaced the Mosaic priesthood: in himself, and those who participate his priesthood and become pastors of the flock of which he is the chief Pastor: guiding their instrumental endeavours from heaven with his pastoral indicatives as he also lies behind their priestly acts when they celebrate his Mysteries as realised in and through bread and wine, by choice in continuity with the bread and wine of Melchisedech, in identify with the original acts as now raised into the timeless permanence of the glory of heaven.

            So with a view to the future of the Church so far incomplete and developing, let us consider the original witnesses of the birth at Bethlehem, as part of this originating      mystery.

 

b)  Mary and the Other Witnesses

-  Mary in relation to this Origination of the living Christ in herself

 

            The Tri-une God: one in nature and three in persons, Three-in-One and One-in-Three, is the God who is known to us all, found in faith: sometimes obscure, sometimes illuminated. Known to us in the mystical Body of the Son, which is another Christ: as Son and as reality of the Church, identical. Implicit in the faith of non-believers, in his own way and in his own time poised to reveal Himself in his fullness. A living God, whose reality can be expressed as the life of mind, with an omniscience, and with a willing and loving, which precede by its eminence, from our point of view also in time and in its duration, what he has created, is creating and will create. That includes the spiritual movement  which he initiates to bring us to faith, to sustain us in faith, and to carry us through the conception and accomplishment of all our works in their being – even though without the fullness of being which is spoilt by our ill use of our divinely-given liberty.

            In Mary this knowledge was intact and unspoilt, and therefore direct and clear. It was a knowledge which she had shared with other man, though exceeding them by far in what we may sum up as being her wisdom.

            Within the embrace of the Father, source of the cloud of divine glory, after her consent given to the Angel (for she said “according to your word …”) in a creative moment the Holy Spirit penetrated her fully and infused the living Person of the Son into her womb: a divine seed not a human seed. In Himself the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son as from one principle, though the Easter Orthodox Christians prefer to keep to the language of his origination from the Father, and through the Son – but that “through” represents the necessary bond by which Father and Son are bound together. It does not represent alone the Son’s divine passivity in His origination. It is conformed by the fact that in the incarnation of the Son, His divine Person passed from the Holy Spirit. The reversal in direction reveals their equality and the immediacy of their relations with each other. Mary was no longer a pure contemplator of God in his Tri-unity, the Son in the fullness of His person, was established within her. A union of heaven and earth without precedent. It entails a stable coming and a stable remaining, fully respectful of the virgin in her intimacy, and with an exaltation of Mary in knowledge and love, of body and soul, from within. The Magnificat was a song of praise rehearsed infinitely in its essential reality by her, and expressed to the Divine Nature within her, and yet omnipresent. Yet attentive to her not exclusively because the divine knowledge knows first itself and within that knowing it knows everything about Creation down to the nature of every sub-particle, of every particle, of every atom, of every molecule. Her return in knowledge and love corresponded not to the mode of the knowledge of the divine Persons of each other, but according to the knowledge by which the divine Person within her was knowing her and loving her, so she returned to him knowledge and love. This was higher than the extrinsic though deep mode of knowledge which she would have of him as a Child and through to his manhood. The Magnificat which she expressed to Elizabeth and recalled to the evangelist Luke were the human expression of what the divinely given life evoked from the intactness of her immaculate life.

            Henceforth in addition to her attentiveness to all of the details of the world human, living and non-living around her, she would be attentive to the mystery in which she lived gestating the child from her flesh and blood. Then her own knowledge had gone in union with his with intimate sympathy through the stages of Israel’s history, back through the Patriarchs, back through and beyond Abraham and to the origin of all: to the Mother of all the living whom she gently supplanted, transforming resolute sorrow into hope, as her Son: Son of God become man supplanted Adam himself. In her Son by knowledge and by his personal divine power; in her by knowledge following his, and in His power.[7] Those touches reaching to the past, a work of them both: a primary coredemption lies behind the canonisation somewhere in the tradition of both first parents of our race. Saved through their ultimate counterparts, and they together saving them together, from the power and grace of the divine communication of life. “Primary”, because something like a process would then have begun, which was perfected in the visit of Christ to Limbo during the three days of his repose in death.

            Then came the calm courage of the journey to Bethlehem, the improvised accommodation in the stable of the inn: the Child’s bed in the feeding trough of animals. The child who was in his Person the eternal son of God had passed from her body, perhaps as suddenly as it was seen by Saint Bridget: in an instant he lay on the ground, naked; Mary herself remaining intact. But only briefly, and to be wrapped in those long strips of wool, because he was in his flesh, which was hers, subject to the conditions of the earth.

            He passed from her but the experience left its eternal mark in its eternal remembrance: as real to her afterwards as whilst she gestated him. The conception under the Holy Spirit had been a moment of withdrawal into her deepest herself, as, at that still point of the turning world, but subjectively expanded to receive all of the mystery, her mind and heart was given to what transcends a special grace of prayer, and which remained for ever. As Saint John of the Cross understood, once the fullness of a divine moment had passed, there remains ever afterwards a nostalgia to return to it. But in her that nostalgia was ever satisfied and growing, even during moments of human anxiety.

            Whilst she looked comprehendingly and compassionately around her, the essence of her attention was given to the God who was within: to the undying traces of the Father’s embrace in his sending of the divine glory, the conception from the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the Son of God within her, an attention distended simultaneously into the purest love, her engendering and childbearing set within his eternal engendering in knowledge and love by the Father.

 

-  Saint Joseph

            For Saint Joseph, there is more information in the gospel of Saint Matthew. For additional information there is that of the “proto-Evangelium of Saint James”. This is apocryphal and yet is very important because of its being dated from before 200 A.D. It is a source of information about Mary and her family. For Joseph its produces the significant information that he had been married before, and so the “brethren” of Jesus, referred to in the gospels could very well be these. This document gives the original home of Mary and her parents as being in Jerusalem, so that it would be interesting to know the exact circumstances which brought them together and had taken her to Nazareth. On these matters all we would wish to say now in the context which we have chosen is that the hypothesis that both Joseph and Mary belonged to a grouping of fervent Jews who, with Anna and Simeon, were hoping for a better future for Israel, and another possibility that such a young woman would become betrothed to a much older man out of charitable concern for him and especially to help with the upbringing of his children.

            He does not fall within the full intensity of the revelation made to Mary. That he had not been informed about the divine conception within her is usually asserted, but it is said that she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. That raises the strong possibility that, if the order of events was Mary’s revealing at that point the divine conception as described by Luke, he wanted “to put her away privily” out of respect, and out of view of a potentially suspicious population, which would be used to scandals and might attach a scandal to her. In point of fact the whole birth of Jesus was hidden by circumstances: Jesus was born at Bethlehem, and the immediate aftermath was concealed by the fact that events took the Holy Family south to Egypt.  There could be no counting of months. The silence of Mary here was nothing to do with shame or other human motive, but rather because she was full of God: body and soul, and as full of God was far more drawn into a contemplation of the divine life of Jesus. That was her secret, which the highest prudence inclined her to say as little as possible and to trust greatly in the divine Providence: the Providence of the God within her, whose presence alone would protect her. It is necessary to take very seriously this evidence that she had first divulged the nature of her pregnancy to Joseph. The second stage came from an angel in a dream which told him to have no fear of accepting Mary into his household with the other children. In this way Jesus would grow up with an independence from his brethren, who would not be able precisely to fill in the years of their absence in Egypt, though the news of the massacre would be enough to suggest a reason for the flight into Egypt which whilst not being the whole truth, was not untrue. And that reason would cover the period of the whole flight and stay in Egypt: the fear that, so long as he was alive, Herod would be able to trace them.

            Joseph was therefore given exceptional knowledge about the condition of Mary and the child. It would not have been difficult for him, in having to take flight for the protection of Mary and the child, to think of other miraculous births like that of Samson and even Isaac, yet not so miraculous as that of Jesus. The two appearances of an angel to him in a dream showed his familiarity with exceptional events with a divine origin, but he knew his duty was to protect the mother and Child, and to give them a trustworthy companionship. But as his closeness to them could not have been without the attraction and impulse of divine grace, so he could not have failed to have joined himself in that continued Magnificat of praise in Mary, and have let his heart rise to the source of all Blessings who lived as one of their family in their midst.

 

- The Shepherds and the Magi

            The history of David in the 16^th chapter of the first book of Samuel is difficult, perhaps impossible, to disentangle. Before Samuel insists, at Bethlehem, that Jesse should send for his last son, David, to be brought in from the fields where he was pasturing the sheep, there was a contact with Saul which resulted in David’s being summoned to his court. In Psalm 23, a Psalm of David, he says “The Lord is my shepherd”. Mysterious, too, are the two passages in the great prophet of the exile, Ezekiel, in which David is foretold as shepherd of his people, and also as king: “And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd” (34,23); “My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes” (37,24). Designations, perhaps prophetic. They come together with their message, but, do they point to anything real, anything pertaining to the communication of life, when the heavens opened to the shepherds communicating the glory of God to them, and telling them to find in Bethlehem the one who is just born as “Saviour” and “Anointed”, and lying in the feeding trough of the animals? The heavenly assurance which they received in fact communicated enormous life to those far off, hardly understood prophesies. The presence of David has returned with a higher function, not of ruler but of Saviour, yet also in view of Jesus’ later assertion that he was “the good shepherd”. So he has this function from birth, not only from the divine mode of anointing at his baptism by John. Pastor and Saviour in his intimate being, substantially so, not roles to be taken on like a mask.  It is the language of life, yet looks ahead to his maturity.

            This life communicates itself to the shepherds who cannot refuse this command and invitation. Energy had filled them and they go fast through the night over the rough hill paths which would not be possible for other men. When they arrived at the stable their energy drove them to tell everything in an exalted unrestrainable enthusiasm. It is not said that Mary and Joseph spoke to them, but that Mary heard them out, and remembered every word, which echoed her own charge in consenting to bear the Child. But the enthusiasm had still not exhausted itself, and like preachers of the gospel they repeated it all to the bystanders, awakening the sense of wonder which had been directly communicated to themselves by the vision of angels. Then feeling the call to return to their duty as shepherds, they climbed up the paths to where they had left their sheep: “glorifying and praising God for what they had seen and heard”. Perhaps the drive eventually died down, but the generosity with which they allowed themselves to be driven come from a conscious contact with the divine life in itself: in the baby who may have been asleep. In the simplicity of their hearts they felt the goodness which constantly poured out from him, and allowed it to fill themselves. Life, fresh and overflowing, was in this way communicated to the first witnesses.

            The magi were differently constituted. They were not the recipients of an unexpected revelation. Like the special care of the shepherds their observations of the movements of the heavens took place by night. Astrology presumes that there can be a special power coming from these twinkling lights from within our galaxy: not other planets but other suns, generators and communicators of extraordinary energy, ultimately from the fusion of the most simple atom (hydrogen) with the next in their series (helium), an overflow being liberated as free energy. They saw a new star – modern astronomers are interested in relating it to a conjunction of three planets, which would make it appear a year or so before Herod the Great died, which would make historically plausible the relationship of the arrival of the magi and Herod’s attempted slaughter of the Messianic King. The shepherds were given the shortest possible warning and they were to go immediately, but these Magi astronomers were aware of its presence some time, perhaps years, before. They had time to reflect, to contemplate. And they were visited by divine inspiration in the choice of their gifts, which they thought they were to bring to the King of Judea. Their innocence contrasts with Herod’s duplicity. The inspiration of the star drives them onwards, and they were particularly happy that from Herod’s palace the distance was short.

            At Bethlehem they did not show the uncontrollable enthusiasm of the shepherds. The gifts of gold, incense and myrrh may have been intended as symbolic, but only the gold was purely symbolic: the gold of wisdom; the gold offered to a king. Incense was real enough, to be used in the worship of the living God, and myrrh would be among the spices used to anoint a dead man. And both of these would be justified. They were faithful to their inspirations, like the prophets of Israel: just as sure that their inspiration was correct as those prophets had been. Those near to the ultimate sources of inspiration enjoy a certainty which may induce others to believe, but which those near to the sources would never think of denying.

            Heart spoke to heart, and presence to presence, as, feeling the communication of life and inspiration, they fell on their knees in worship at the source of all life, as they made a return for His gift of life with those material gifts.

            It is not said that Mary communicated with them or they with Mary, but they would have been at total ease with each other in a silence of adoration and receptivity, there at the source of life itself, nearer than the stars and fuller of power. Crude reality might break in on this silence before the next dawn, but they would be protected by angelic inspiration in their dreams, and were preserved from this danger. Amen.