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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Our Lady

page 66

Our Lady

Lately I was reading Charles Davis’s book A Question of Conscience – and without trying to judge another man’s spiritual situation, I felt what we all must feel – a sense of grief that one of the shepherds of the flock should come to the conclusion that he is not a shepherd and the flock is not a flock.

And, again without judgment, I began to wonder how this thing can come about – that the Faith can dry up in a man’s heart like a river that falls away and sinks into the sand of the desert.

And the notion I arrived at was that it is not enough for a man to believe in God; he must also feel that God is immediate, that God works through His Church, that we are being continually cared for even when it does not seem that this is happening at all.

And when I questioned myself – ‘How is it that God and His Church remain immediate for you?’ the answer was one which may astonish some fellow-believers, though I trust it does not scandalise them. The answer was ‘Because Our Lady exists and cares for you.’ It may not be the perfect theological answer; but it is the one which came to me from the bottom of my own soul.

I also remembered the story about the great philosopher Plato. It seems that Plato was lying in the bath one day, soaping himself and running the hot and cold water. And, being a philosopher, he used the time for meditation. And the thing he meditated on was the uses of the human navel. Finally, by a chain of perfect argument, he arrived at the conclusion that the human navel had no use whatever.

So he stood up in the bath and began unscrewing his navel. It took some time to unscrew it, for the thread was long and fine. But at length he unscrewed it and looked at it and tossed it over his shoulder, with a sigh of relief at having done the logical and philosophic thing. At this moment his backside fell off.

If one religion is wholly logical, then a small breakdown in the chain of logic could rob us of our religion. Again the man who sees all things human and Divine through an intellectual lens may run the real risk of remaining emotionally underdeveloped, so that some kind of obscure emotional upheaval may rise up inside him, as if this inner self were crying out: ‘This belief is too geometric, too inhuman! You must leave it and search out the intimate company of your fellow beings.’

With due respect to Charles Davis I think that something like this happened to him. He had lived in a world of intellectual abstraction, and then the inner revolt came, and he had nothing with which to withstand it. It is the specialweaknessof the intellectual temperament.

Ten years ago I bought a small framed print of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help – though at the time I knew her under the more Latin title page 67 of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour. It doesn’t matter which title one uses. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet; and while very few of us have any resemblance to roses, there is no doubt that the image applies perfectly to Our Lady, the holiest and loveliest rose that the Heavenly Gardener ever planted.

After the print had been blessed by a priest and sprinkled with holy water, I took it back to the boarding house room where I was then living and hung it on the otherwise bare wall. And then – being an unashamed and passionate convert – I lay down on the floor and stretched out my arms in the shape of the Cross and began to implore Our Lady’s help. It was not slow in coming. You might say, it came down in buckets-full. And though I no longer lie on the floor to pray, she does not cease to help me.

I do not know if Charles Davis lay down before an image of Our Lady and implored her intercession. Perhaps he did. But I do suggest, with real diffidence, that in A Question of Conscience the one thing that is striking on account of its absence is a spirit of prayer.

I do not mean by this the regular recitation of prayers. I do not mean a prayerful attitude towards God. I mean the wholehearted bellowing of a child in its bassinette that brings the mother running. I mean Marian devotion at its strongest, with no time for politeness, with no holds barred.

My timid opinion is that if any of us, priests or laymen, men or women, old people or children, hold on to Our Lady as the modern water-skier holds on to the kite that is going to lift him off the water, then she will never melt away and leave us to ourselves.

There were those unconquerable evil habits. We brought them to Our Lady’s feet – strange gifts indeed! – and when we looked around they had shrunk to the size of a two cent piece. There was that firm intention to take a train to Auckland and improve one’s life by a diet of gin and the edifying company of at least eight call-girls. On the way to the station we went in to burn a candle and kneel at Our Lady’s altar; and we were still kneeling there long after the train had departed.

There was that terrible unforgivable injury dealt us by our second cousin twice removed – a thing that would not bear speaking of; a slow death by torture could not have wiped it out. We visited the shrine of Our Lady to discuss the matter with her; and came out grinning so widely that a policeman all but took us in charge for the offence of looking cheerful in a public place.

It is not entirely easy to fall in love with the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas – some do, but I was never one of them. It is the easiest thing in the world to fall in love with Our Lady.

‘Is it psychologically sound?’ asks the man in spectacles at the back of the room. ‘Aren’t you indulging in a prolongation of infantile attitudes? Isn’t this excessive devotion to the Blessed Virgin really a sort of religious version of a mother fixation?’

‘No, mate,’ I would reply. ‘She happens to be my Mother.’

page 68

All those images of early childhood – certainly they shared a part – I can’t remember what fairystory book I read it in, or whether it was just a personal fantasy, but somewhere, away back before even guilt was possible, there was a personage called the Queen of the Night Sky. Her palace was roofed with stars and paved with clouds. The souls of unborn children waited there to join their parents on earth. It was the country of absolute innocence and peace.

‘Ah,’ says my inquiring psychological friend ‘there we love it! That was a fantasy of a return to the womb. When you became a Catholic, it reappeared. You projected it upon the figure of the Blessed Virgin with which the Church had presented you. You poor bloke! Come with me to Dr Angledozer. He’ll have you right again in six months. He specialises in these cases of infantile religious fixation.’

‘No, mate,’ I would reply. ‘I, too, have hair on my chest. I’ve spent a good many years learning to sort out facts from fantasy. The fact that some poor girl has fantasies about a man arriving on a white horse to take her off to his castle in – wherever it is – doesn’t mean that her marriage, when it occurs, will also be a fantasy. No doubt we all have childish fantasies of some sinless protective mother figure.

‘Our Lady is the fulfilment of this need of the human race; but she has quite different characteristics from those which we might imagine for her. The thing that struck me most when I became, as it were, spiritually acquainted with Our Lady, was: “Here is something totally new; here is something I have never known before; here is the true source of human joy.” And later on I found that was the name the Church had given to her – source of our joy.’

I don’t think my inquiring friend would be convinced by this kind of argument; but I find it quite convincing enough myself, because it happens to be true. The experience of Our Lady is one experience for me. This is as it should be, since Our Lady is the Giver of graces. All graces, including the sanctifying grace we receive from the Sacraments, come to us ultimately from God, but through her hands. Her position in the Church is entirely central.

A sacrifice requires an altar. In a sense, when Our Lord died on the Cross, Our Lady was the human altar who offered Him up to God. The Host requires a monstrance. In a sense, Our Lady is the human monstrance who shows Our Lord to us, as we acknowledge when we say to her: ‘Virgin, show us your Son.’ The consecrated wine requires a chalice which is at least linked with precious metal. In a sense Our Lady is that perpetual chalice who contains in her pure soul and body the life of the Lamb who is slain.

Altars will fall apart; monstrances will be melted down to make new objects; chalices will be dented and lost. But she – altar, monstrance and chalice – is everlasting. She who contained Our Lord still contains Him. As Ann Ridler, the Anglican poet, once wrote with a woman’s insight

page 69

For as the sun that shines through glass
So Jesus in His Mother was . . .

We are obliged of course to make careful theological distinctions between the worship due to God and the special reverence due to His Mother; we must avoid at all costs the superstition that would degrade her from her unique human sanctity into some kind of vague nature goddess.

But when we truly approach God we find her there already. In fact the Marian atmosphere is that merciful glass which makes the Sun who is our God tolerable to our eyes. She is the closest to Him of all members of the human race; and this is for our sakes, for we can come vastly nearer to Him in the shadow of her cloak than we ever could if we tried to approach Him without her.

Sometimes one hears men talk as if devotion to Our Lady were dispensable; but they speak in ignorance since we can never act or think justly if we forget that we are members of the Mystical Body, and our relation to the Head of that Body (whether we know this or not) flows through Our Lady. We may forget the saints, we may forget the angels, but when we forget Our Lady we are beginning to forget the Humanity of Christ. And without His Humanity we cannot approach His Divinity.

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