I don't think Jesus changes; our Saviour God, Scripture tells us, is the same yesterday, today, and always. And I know Mary must be the same, yesterday, today, and always. I was privileged - together with the Archbishop of Canterbury and several hundred other Church of England people - to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes in the year of the 150th anniversary of the Appearances of the Mother of God to S Bernardette Soubirous. We prayed at a little cleft in a rocky cliffside, called the Grotto, which is where S Bernardette had her vision. The Archbishop bent forward full-length on the cold, damp rock of the little cave and prayed there for some minutes. A few feet above his head was the fissure, the slit where our Lady appeared. At the time, S Bernardette was 14 years old - just the same age as Mary was when she became God's Mother - and Bernardette described the Lady of her vision as"no bigger than me". It is as though, through all eternity, Mary is to be seen of men as she was at that moment when she did the Great Thing which all the millennia had been looking forward to and brought God into his own world as her own Baby. She is for ever the One-giving-birth-to-God, Theotokos. And she was, so S Bernardette said, very beautiful. Beautiful, we might say, like her Son who is the fairest among the Sons of Adam.
Let me tell you another thing about Mary that doesn't seem to change. It's the way she talks. Just as she murmured to her Baby, not in Greek, the international language of Big People in government and politics, but in Aramaic, the language of ephphatha and Abba, so, when she appeared at Lourdes, she didn't speak to Bernardette in some grand language of the great affairs of men. There in Lourdes, in the Grotto, two or three feet above where Archbishop Rowan got his cassock damp from lying on the rock underneath the statue of our Lady, they've written the words Mary said when Bernardette asked her who she was: Que soy era Immaculado Concepcion. And that's not French. It's the local dialect, a branch of an ancient and almost extinct language they spoke in the South of France centuries before they spoke French there. It's called Gascon, and it's the language little girls like Bernardette still used among themselves. Que soy era Immaculado Concepcion: I am the Immaculate Conception.
Continues later
Father H. Why do you speak of the little girl who experienced the apparitions at Lourdes as BernaRdette?
ReplyDeleteHer name apparently was Bernadette - without the second R which you seem to favour?
Do you perhaps have St BernaRd, the swooning earlier Mary-adorer at the back of your mind?
Thanks for these posts though. I appreciate it, as a former Protestant, especially the Biblical/language aspects of your exegesis.
I especially love the typological inter-testamental landscapes of the Christian faith. Give us more of that, if yo feel like it, please.
All the best to you, Father!
A question: We know that traditional Catholic teaching describes Mary as the "Mother of God", rather than the Protestant heresy as simply the mother of the earthly human Jesus. However, I recently read a blog/post which went another generation back and described Joachim and Anna (Mary's parents) as "Grandfather/-mother" of God and their forebears as "Ancestors of God" Is this doctrinally accurate? Would this not imply all of them being Immaculately Conceived, as was Our Lady?
ReplyDelete@Colin, Byzantines still use that formula on their feast days, yes.
ReplyDelete@FrHunwicke, surely Heb. 13:8 is, in dogmatic theology, properly understood to be a statement about the hypostatic union via the assertion of the immutability of Christ. I'm confused that you would apply this to Mary. Now, certainly, she is the same today and forever, being free from every stain of original sin and habituated in grace. But adding yesterday to this formula seems to imply that she is not only sempiternal but additionally eternal; does it not? Please educate me.