Why Be Moral?

Surely the righteous shall give thanks to your name;
    the upright shall live in your presence.
Psalms 140:13

 If you consider that he is righteous, you also know that everyone who acts in righteousness is begotten by him
1 John 2:29

Before answering the Why question a philosopher would ask the What questions- what is morality? what is a moral life? After answering the What and Why they would likely then proceed to the How questions- how can I live ethically? how can human societies be collectively moral? This helps explain why philosophy books tend to be quite big and not very popular. They seem to spend a lot of time proving what the reader already knows to be true or attempting to disprove what the reader thinks of as 'common sense.' Religion appears to offer a way of short-cutting all this tedious playing with words. All religions have associated moralities and within the Abrahamic religions these have the sanction of divine revelation. Morality is what revelation says it is, obedience to God is the only acceptable response to revelation and within the content of that revelation, either in the form of scripture or divinely mandated authority, is all the guidance required for individuals and societies to live out the moral life in practice.

There is no real doubt that if this is an accurate summary of religious belief then many of the criticisms levelled at religion by New Atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens (God grant him rest) and the current Richard Dawkins (God keep him on Twitter) are well merited. Such a rigid structure which requires no moral judgement on the part of believers but merely an acceptance of the first principles of faith would lend them and their belief system to being manipulated in the service of anyone who could pervert the interpretation of revelation to suit their own purposes, as Islamic State and Boko Haram appear to have done with Islam. There are, however, a number of things which could be said about this critique. Firstly, any moral code which has been reduced to a written set of rules is liable to be misadministered by the kind of unimaginative epigones that rise to the top of an established bureaucracy. This will typically result in injustices and absurdities regardless of the original source of the code because the letter and not the spirit is the deciding principle in decision making. Stalinism is the classic secular example of this but even the much vaunted Western Liberalism is vulnerable to the same defect. Secondly, Catholic thought proposes two crucial considerations which must always be borne in mind by those seeking to apply the moral rules derived from revelation. These are the principle of reason and a living relationship with the divine source of revelation.

In an Address to scientists at Regensburg early in his papacy Pope Benedict XVI looked closely at the role of reason in religion. One of his key points was that part of the definition of God provided by the scriptures is that God is Reason in the same sort of way that we say God is Love. He focussed on the prologue to the Gospel account of St John 'in the beginning was the word' where what we translate as 'word' is Logos in the original Greek. He said 'God acts...with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason' One of the implications of this is that God cannot act irrationally, this is, as it were, a check on His omnipotence. And what He cannot do He cannot command. Therefore all moral codes which are derived or claim to be derived from divine revelation must past the test of reason. Moreover humans, being endowed by God with reasoning powers, are obliged to apply that test to everything which they encounter including revelation itself. A mechanical obedience to authority of whatever kind is of no merit, however meritorious the authority may be and however outwardly virtuous the physical act may appear to be. Right action always requires to be accompanied by right intention and the latter cannot be formed without the conscious and deliberate use of reason.

The Regensburg Address gave rise to a storm of controversy because a quotation used by the Holy Father from Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus was maliciously or ignorantly attributed to Benedict himself. The emperor had said "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Although Muslims were wrong to suppose that this was intended as a modern commentary by the Pope it might be argued that some of the other words used by His Holiness should have given them pause for thought- 'for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.' Speaking about theological speculations by both Christians and Muslims he added that they might lead to  'the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.' The Catholic Church has decisively rejected such speculations and the image of a God always in harmony with reason forms part of her infallible Magisterium. This cannot, however, be said for Islam or, indeed, for Judaism or the Christianity of the Reformation if only because there is no body with the authority to say it. Thus these religions remain vulnerable to dissident groups who will use the image of a capricious God as the basis for a moral code which demands obedience unmediated by reason from its followers.

                                            St Thomas Before the Cross- Sassetta


God should have more than a walk-on part in the life of His faithful people. That is, each person should have a living relationship with Him and this exchange of love should lie at the heart of their decision-making processes. The Apostle John suggests that those who live righteously are begotten by the Righteous One. I think that means more than asking What Would Jesus Do when we are faced with morally significant choices. It means that we should allow ourselves to be possessed by our Lord in such a fashion that He lives in us (and we in Him.) Thus it should be the case that He acts through us and that in a sense our moral choices are literally His. This is a difficult programme to fulfil of course but at the least when we are charged with making especially significant ethical decisions we should have recourse to prayer, meditation, study of Scripture and the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. We give Him an opportunity to speak clearly within our very hearts and then we pause to listen to what He might say. In that sense I would interpret the psalmist words 'the upright shall live in your presence' as meaning that we only come to life as upright persons when we are in His presence. Apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:5) Therefore it must be our aim to be as fully clothed with Christ as is possible in our daily journey because only so can we be fully alive to Him and, through us, He can be alive to those whom we encounter who will be affected by our moral actions. His choices are always morally good and where there is no difference between His choices and ours then we can be sure that we are living a moral life.

It is important to stress that any one of the three strands, revelation, reason, relationship, used independently of the other two is potentially dangerous. Revelation can be radically misunderstood, reason can be based on faulty assumptions, relationship can be illusory (atheists would argue that it always is.) Therefore the three must be woven together and all of them must lie behind any moral act we take individually or corporately. A further danger flows from the situation where revelation is understood to consist of nothing more than a written text. Here everything rests on private judgement so a person can believe that they have accurately and reasonably interpreted the text and that God has personally OK'd their interpretation. They can then go on to persuade others to agree with them and set in chain a movement grounded perhaps upon irrational and immoral premises. Against this there requires to be an authoritative source for interpreting revelation in the light of reason. It might be argued that this source itself can fall prey to irrationality or delusion and teach unreason as reason. Here the Catholic idea of infallibility presents itself not, as is generally thought, as an expansion of Papal power but a limitation upon it. An infallible teaching cannot be abrogated or negated therefore Popes are bound by precedent and cannot issue instructions which contradict previous ones. The moral codes present in the Church today are present in them for all time.

If we answer the question 'why be moral?' by saying 'because Jesus is moral' then we are correct but insufficiently so. Behind this answer is the question 'why is Jesus moral?' To which the answer might be that morality is always reasonable and God is reason and Jesus is God. Christianity proposes a morality which is, I think, of a much higher standard than can be proposed by unaided reason alone. That is, it is reason taken to a superlative level, revelation and relationship are the two wings upon which we can rise up to the level of a divine morality which is divine reason. It is not a rejection of reason or an alternative to it, it is the perfection of reason. So the question 'why be moral?' becomes the question 'why be perfect?' to which the answer this time really is 'So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect' (Matthew 5:48)


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The Devil is Dead?

                                            St Wolfgang and the devil - Michael Pacher


Be sober, and watch: for your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren which are in the world.
1 Peter 5:8-9

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

The philosopher Nietzsche was somewhat premature in his announcement  "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!" (Thus Spake Zarathurstra- Prologue) Despite several centuries of continuous assault belief in God is still buoyant even in Western Europe where the atheist campaign began and where it has been most successful. The associated attack on organised religion, specifically Christianity, has had more effect but still the Christian Church and the ecclesial communities of the Reformation remain stubbornly alive and kicking in Europe whilst expanding elsewhere in much of the world. By contrast there has been no real parallel assault on belief in the devil yet such belief has withered on the vine and even among Christians there are many who do not take the idea seriously.

Various factors no doubt contribute to this decline in satanic credibility but I will focus on one. The answer to the question 'what is Man?' (meaning female and male) has changed over the past six centuries or so and with this altered understanding of ourselves has come an altered conception of the forces that influence us. The rediscovery of classical sources during the Renaissance led the humanists of that epoch to recast human nature as being essentially good, that is, not fatally tainted by Original Sin in the way that had been understood since the time of St Augustine. The Enlightenment added to this the notion that Man was essentially rational, that is, governed by Reason. Man being good by nature and rational in motivation could, therefore, be relied upon to make sound moral choices unless external environmental factors caused them to act contrary to their nature and to reason.

To the obvious objection that Man everywhere behaved in cruel, selfish and immoral ways Enlightenment thinkers echoed Rousseau that the cause for this was to be found in the chains which bound Man, ignorance, poverty, tyranny and so on. If those chains were once removed through a restructuring of society and the banishment of ignorant superstitions (by which they meant primarily the Catholic faith) then Man born free would everywhere actually be free since there would be no impediment to them acting upon their naturally good and rational impulses. In this schema room could be found for God, conceived as an idealised form or collective expression of perfected Man, but not for the devil since Man's wicked actions could be explained as the product of environmental factors.

Every world changing idea is true to some extent, otherwise it would have no persuasive power. Here Renaissance humanism supercharged with Enlightenment deification of human rationality has several good things going for it. It is certainly true that humans are good-natured by design, that they are capable of governing themselves by Reason and that environmental factors play a major role in the moral and intellectual decisions which they make. The flaw in the argument consists of the fact that St Augustine was right, Man is tainted by Original Sin. The essential nature of Man is wounded and vulnerable to concupiscence independently of whatever their external environment may be. Once could recast this philosophically and say that because of his intense internal life of thought and emotion Man, alone in visible Creation, is capable of putting himself out of harmony with the cosmos and all around him through paying heed to his random thoughts and feelings ahead of anything else. Or, to say the same thing the other way round, Man requires to make a conscious and deliberate effort to put himself into harmony with the cosmos.It follows from this that we cannot bank on Man's essential goodness flourishing because it is subject to temptations from within that no restructured society can fully eliminate nor can we rely on Reason always conquering desire, lust or fear because the mere presence of the rational principle in Man is not the same as its sovereignty.

                                           The Good and Evil Angels- William Blake

It might, perhaps, be argued that modern thought has simply replaced one external agent, the devil, with another, the social environment and that while we have evidence for the latter we have none for the former. However, the Church has never accepted the validity of the argument 'the devil made me do it' The devil only has the power over us which we permit him to have. He is also called 'the tempter' and that because his power is a persuasive one, if we did not provide him with the materials to work with, our selfishness, greed, fear, ambition, desire and so on then he would have nothing with which to tempt us. Our fallen nature is the source of our propensity to sin and the more we deny that fallen-ness, the more we insist on our own perfectibility, then the less able we become to see the temptations that assail us without and within.

When we accept the universal and humanly unalterable nature of Man's vulnerability to temptation then reason will lead us on to recognise the need for a universal redemption from that bondage to sin. And universal redemption requires a universal Redeemer made to known to all through a universal revelation. And who better as Redeemer than one like us, tempted in all points by Satan yet triumphant over him, subject to the ultimate victory of sin and corruption which is death yet yet conquering over it? The same revelation which assures us that Jesus is our Saviour and Lord tells us too of our enemy the devil and if we accept the one then we must accept the other.

Of course there are many who accept neither. For those I have this thought. If the slogan of a century ago was Nietzsche's 'God is Dead' today it is Christopher Hitchens 'God is not Great.' The obvious answer to the first was 'God lives', the slightly less obvious answer to the second is 'Man is not Good' The problem of human wickedness is not solvable by human means alone. The chains which bind Man are not external to him, he generates them himself and will always generate them because he is always tempted to disharmony with the cosmos. If you defeat Christianity, if you destroy organised religion in the world there will still be one thing preventing you from creating the perfect society. The devil will be sitting on your back.

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Advent- The Final Countdown

                                           Hans Memmling- Last Judgement Triptych 

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
1 Thessalonians 4:16

In the secular West there are a number of beliefs which are considered so ridiculous that no persons pretensions to intellectual respectability will be accepted if they admit to accepting those beliefs On religion the default position is agnosticism and, increasingly, atheism. A sort of bloodless Deism which asserts the existence of an abstract First Cause who by no chance intervenes in the universe which it has created is about borderline acceptable in a patronising sort of way. To assert the truth of things like Heaven, Hell, the Resurrection or the Second Coming of Christ and Final Judgement is to consign yourself to the realm of the witless, the uneducated or the credulous. Some Christians, ie liberal theologians, who desire both to be intellectually respectable and belong to the Church or one of the ecclesial communities of the Reformation will suggest that these things are merely symbolic or metaphorical or they will simply not mention them at all and hope that no one notices. The season of Advent presents a particular challenge for such people since the Parousia or Second Coming is one of the main focuses of the Churches liturgy at this time.

The feeling of all these, from atheists to liberals, seems to be that such beliefs were rational enough in more ignorant times but that now 'science' has conclusively disproved them. Of course, science has done no such thing, nor can it since they lie outside of the scientific domain. These beliefs are, however, incompatible, with an outlook called 'scientism' which suggests that everything is within the domain of science and that what cannot be proved by it or aspire to being proved by it cannot be true. The crux of the matter is what one believes about the nature of God. Where one takes as a starting point either that there is no God or that God does not intervene in the universe then it follows that none of these things can be true. If, on the other hand, one accepts the notion of an interventionist God then there is nothing intrinsically improbable about any of these things. They are not a necessary deduction which flows from such a belief, however, we can only know about them (or think we know about them) if one of the forms of intervention which our Deity initiates is a specific revelation of Himself and of His purposes. Science, as such, can neither prove nor disprove any of these postulates therefore scientism concludes that they must not be true but scientism cannot prove its own postulate that everything falls within the domain of science so its opinion is only an opinion and may well be a wrong opinion.

While it is not possible apart from revelation to say very much about how or why an interventionist God might intervene if we once accept in full any single part of that revelation then it becomes possible to infer much of the rest. With the doctrine of the Incarnation this is certainly so. The two central features of this doctrine appear to me to be-
1) Jesus is fully divine and fully human.
2) The life and mission of our Lord necessarily took place in the context of the Jewish people and their covenant relationship with God.
Knowing this we can go on to deduce the universal reality of sin, the necessity of redemption and the final, complete and irrevocable victory over sin and its consequences effected by Jesus. We can also deduce that from a human point of view this remains 'work in progress' since sin continues to hold dominion to a greater or lesser extent within each human heart and the world as a whole. Since this is so it follows that to complete what might be called the visible part of His mission Jesus shall return and put all things to rights. Therefore it is purely irrational to celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas but to deny, downplay or ignore the Parousia unless you deny the doctrine of Incarnation and suppose that our Lord was simply a wise Rabbi. Christianity is a coherent structure you can reject it in total or accept it in total but you cannot accept it merely in part unless you wilfully ignore the intellectual and philosophical inconsistencies which flow from such a position.

So, Advent is a time of preparation for the threefold coming of our Lord: past, present and future. We commemorate his historic entry into the world at Christmas, (although strictly speaking His Incarnation was effected at the Annunciation, human life begins at conception) we strive to welcome Him into our hearts at this moment in time and we look to His return and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Very often the two things, Parousia and Last Judgement, are considered as one. However we can separate them out to an extent. In this life Christians encounter Jesus under more or less veiled forms, in the Gospels, in the Sacraments, in our neighbours, present but hidden in the life of the Church, in our prayers, in our hearts and so on. One day we shall encounter Him as He is, human and divine, and we shall do so face to face. This will not be a different Jesus from the Son of Mary, from the teacher who walks through the pages of the Gospel, from the One we encounter in the Eucharist. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. The most important question when that encounter takes place is not 'will I be punished?' or 'will I be rewarded?' It is 'will my heart leap for joy, will my love for Him burst forth from me?' If you love Him with a perfect love then you will be content whatever His judgement on you might be. The purpose of Advent, the purpose of the Christian life is simply to prepare for that encounter so that we will say 'I love you Not my will but your will be done'

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Mary- Mirror of Perfection

Luca Mombello (1518-1520/ 1588-1596)

Immacolata Concezione con Dio Padre / The Immaculate Conception with God the Father

Now, consider that Mary loved her Divine Son with an unutterable love; and consider too she had Him all to herself for thirty years. Do we not see that, as she was full of grace before she conceived Him in her womb, she must have had a vast incomprehensible sanctity when she had lived close to God for thirty years?—a sanctity of an angelical order, reflecting back the attributes of God with a fulness and exactness of which no saint upon earth, or hermit, or holy virgin, can even remind us. Truly then she is the Speculum Justitiæ, the Mirror of Divine Perfection
Blessed John Henry Newman

Is Mary, the mother of Jesus, truly a mirror which reflects in the most perfect way possible to humans the Divine attributes or is it more true to say that she is a mirror which reflects mostly the work of the Catholic imagination? I would argue that to some degree that she is both and that moreover the two things are really one thing approaching the same object from different angles. Critics of the Church often assert that the Mary of the Gospels and Catholic Mary are two very different figures with little in common. The person whom the Church venerates under that name is based less upon the Bible than it is upon fantasies, legends, speculation and liberal borrowings from pagan cultures. Most arguments which have the power to persuade large numbers of people usually contain an element of truth and that is so here. I propose to demonstrate briefly what is false in the allegation and then to suggest that what is true in it does not contain the meaning that the critics suppose that it contains.

 First then, the references to our Lady in the New Testament. No woman has more references made to her in the Gospels than Mary although that still means that the total number is quite small. As I demonstrated in my earlier series The Bible & The Virgin however the Evangelists had the ability to compress masses of information into very few words. Close consideration of the verses will enable a person to learn explicitly and deduce implicitly much that the Church holds to be true regarding the Mother of our Lord. The same applies to the appearance of Mary in the Acts of the Apostles and the figure of the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation (Apocalypse 12) whom it is not unreasonable to identify with the Theotokos. The Church also holds it to be axiomatic for Christians that they should always read the Old Testament through the lens of the New. This means that we see in the OT much which prefigures or foreshadows the new dispensation in archetypal form. Included in this are any number of figures, like the bush that burns without being consumed or the Ark of the Covenant or Rachel the mother of Israel, which refer to Mary. Perhaps above all there is the figure of Eve and the Protoevangelium in Genesis 3  I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel. (Gen 3:15) Taken together all the references in Scripture which can be readily understood to refer to our Lady fill up in great measure the figure of Catholic Mary and identify her with the historical Mary of Nazareth.

It remains true nonetheless that the image of Mary which Catholics hold in their hearts and minds with such devotion is in part based upon extra-biblical sources but that is hardly the devastating critique that its opponents suppose it to be. The Church has never held it to be a truth that the Bible is the only resource which gives us accurate information about the revelation of God to Man and the Bible indeed makes no such claim for itself. The Sacred Traditions passed on by the Apostles to the faithful are of at least equal value and the two things balance each other, nothing in Tradition can contradict Scripture and nothing in Scripture can contradict Tradition. We can see, then, from the very ancient liturgies and prayers of the Church and the writings of Early Church Fathers much material which is now incorporated into the Marian cult of the Church. A third pillar to the understanding of revelation which we possess is the use of reason. By applying reason to Scripture and Tradition we can that deduce certain things must be true or can be accepted as being true without contradicting either of the other two. Hence speculative theology adds another element to the picture that we can form of our Lady. Where these things, Scripture, Tradition and Reason are in harmony with each other we can have some confidence that their collective wisdom forms a truth and so what they tell us about Mary means that the figure whom the Church honours is the same as the young woman who first heard the words of the Archangel Gabriel some two thousand years ago.

There is a fourth source to our picture of the Mother of God which proceeds from the reports that over the centuries many visionaries have given of their encounters with her in visible form. These constitute what are called 'private revelations' to distinguish them from the age of public revelation which ended with the death of the last Apostle. At that point all that was necessary for a saving faith had been made known to Man and nothing could be added to or taken away from it. What private revelations, insofar as they are authentic, do is recall to mind this or that aspect of revelation which it is particularly necessary for a particular epoch or society to remember. Some supposed revelations are spurious and consequently are rejected by the Church. Others which are consonant with Scripture, Tradition and reason are considered worthy of belief although the Church does not insist that they be actually believed in any case. From this deposit of private revelations many Catholics draw their image of Mary as a person among us with whom they can and do form a strong personal attachment and devotion. And this is the figure who can be described in a sense as the mirror of the Catholic imagination.

If a mirror reflects what is before it then Mary does not reflect most actual Catholics. She reflects them as they desire to be, as they should be. In many ways the apparitions of our Lady of Lourdes is typical of much that we can learn about our Lady from visions. If we focus on her for a while then we can see where the lines of Mary as the mirror of Catholic imagination and Mary as the mirror of perfection intersect and merge. For the 2008 Jubilee celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of St Bernadette's encounter with our Lady of Lourdes the Church issued a special prayer which contained in summary form the essential elements to be learnt from this Marian apparition. It concludes thus-
Because you are the smile of God,
the reflection of the light of Christ,
the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit,
because you chose Bernadette in her misery,
because you are the star of the morning, the gate of Heaven,
and the first resurrected creature
we praise you,
we acclaim you
and with you we sing the wonders of God

The word 'smile' here is a central part of the whole encounter. Bernadette later recalled the first apparition in these words  She smiled and smiled at me, beckoning me to come closer as though she were my mother, and she gave me to understand in my soul that I was not mistaken. One of the factors which began to convince the people of Lourdes about the apparitions was the sudden transformation that would come over Bernadette's face when she saw the Lady. The visionary was transfigured and a smile transformed her appearance in a remarkable way. This was a reflection of the one which she saw before her proceeding from Mary. What does this simple thing tell us about the Mary of Catholic imagination?

The smile reassured Bernadette who was frightened. It proceeded from the kindness of the Lady. The perfection which Catholics seek in their lives begins with kindness, the kindness they receive from Jesus who died for them and calls them to Salvation, the kindness which should overflow from them casting its light upon all who surround them. In Mary they see that quality, it has flowed from Jesus to her and she mirrors it, it flows from the faithful to her in earnest desire and she reflects that also and it is not two types of kindness but one. The smile is a product too of happiness. Who can be happier than the one who is closest of all to Jesus, who loves Him with a perfect love and is sure that she is loved in return? Mary's life had more than its share of sorrow, the exile in Egypt, losing her Son in the Temple, seeing the hatred and envy His mission provoked, sharing in the agony of His Passion and Death yet that underlying solid happiness never vanished and never could vanish, founded as it was in the strongest of loves. The faithful too know sorrow and loss and they too love Jesus. Mary reflects the love she has received from above and she reflects also the earnest desire of the faithful to share in that love and they are not two loves but one which intersect in her slender graceful figure. A smile shared is more than a smile doubled. Our Lady of Lourdes shared her smile with Bernadette who smiled in return, it was an act of companionship, of friendship of sharing it established a unity. The smile of Mary is a reflection of her union with Jesus her Son and it is a reflection too of the earnest desire of the faithful to be united through Mary with Jesus. And union always means one.

The Jubilee prayer reminds us that our Lady chose Bernadette. This is no small thing. When the Saint was asked why she thought she had been singled out she replied "if she could have found some one poorer and more ignorant, then she would have chosen them instead." The history of Marian visionaries shows that our Lady has a predilection for the poor, the humble, the discarded and despised. In Bernadette she found possibly the least regarded girl in Lourdes and gave her a gift that the Empress of France would have envied. This is what you would expect from the woman who sang the Magnificat
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.       
Here there is no doubt that the Mary of the Gospels and the Mary of the Church are one and the same. Here too we see that, as the prayer says she is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit the same Spirit which inspired the Canticle of Mary inspires her choice of little Bernadette Soubirous. In this preferential option for the poor our Lady is a reflection of the Divine preference and she is a mirror of the desire of the faithful poor to be included in the Kingdom and these two are one, the desire to save and the desire to be saved which intersect in the person of Mary.

It is of significance that not only did Mary choose the poor despised one but that she treated her with a tender courtesy. At their third encounter Bernadette reported that our Lady said Would you have the graciousness to come here for fifteen days? This is the august Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God speaking to a girl that lived in a disused prison cell considered unfit for prisoners but suitable for the Soubirous family. Mary spoke as to an equal for in the young Saint she recognised one for whom her Son had willingly become incarnated and suffered the ignominy of the Cross. More than that in making a request and not issuing a command our Lady reflected perfectly the respect that God has for human freedom. And in coming to Lourdes she reflected also what the response of the faithful to the requests of God looks like. The Mary of the Gospels who said Behold the handmaid of the Lord is the same as the Mary of the faithful who comes to do the work of the Lord in the midst of His people.

In saying  you are the star of the morning, the gate of Heaven the prayer recalls to our minds that the name that the Lady of Lourdes called herself by was this- 'I am the Immaculate Conception.' The first light that hinted at the coming of the Son who would dispel all darkness was that moment when Mary was conceived in the womb of Saint Ann. For the first time since Eve a human person entered into life who was not under the dominion of sin. When the faithful look upon Mary they see reflected their own earnest desire for liberation because in Mary they see a mirror which shows that freedom from darkness which our Lady shared with Jesus because of Jesus. And the freedom desired is not a different freedom  from the freedom achieved they are the same thing viewed from different angles.

In describing Mary as the first resurrected creature the prayer recalls that our Lady is the pioneer that shows us the destiny of all the faithful, to follow Jesus body souls and spirit into the joy of the new heaven and the new earth. She is the mirror in which we see the gifts that God showers abundantly upon His beloved ones and she is the mirror in which the faithful see that life which they so earnestly desire to enter in upon and the two things are one.

I could go on, the Apparitions reveal so much more about prayer, sorrow for sin, love of the Church and many other things besides. But I have wearied you enough and, I hope, made my point too. The Mirror of Divine Perfections and the Mirror of the Catholic imagination reflects the same things because they come from the same source. It is the work of the Holy Spirit who creates in the faithful what I have been calling imagination and what you might equally call the Catholic faith. There are those who think that the word 'imagination' means 'making stuff up' or 'fantasising' but that does not exhaust the possibilities of the word. The active imagination may do these things but there is a passive imagination also. This receives impressions and works them into forms which are understandable to the mind by blending different elements each of which is real. We see an example of this in the parables of our Lord who took truths and wove out of them striking images which inhabit the mind and heart and make those truths live in a way that bare sermonising never would.

The Mary of the Gospels is real and identical with the Mary of the Church and with the Mary of the authentic visionaries. The Catholic imagination is no more than the act by which the faithful blends these different impressions as they come to them and form them into a unified picture. It does not create a new Mary it makes the one Mary present to us in a vivid way. Speculative theologians take concepts derived from revelation and distil them down to ideas which the combine to create dogmatic statements or doctrinal propositions. Speculative theology is the imagination of the intellect, devotion to Mary is the theology of the heart. Theologians and popular sentiment can sometimes err by making over extravagant claims or by failing to give all that is due to the Mother of God. In both cases the error can be corrected through submitting to the judgement of the Church which has been granted the authority and given the guidance to be wise with a spiritual wisdom in such matters.

A final word about the apparent contrast between the Catholic Mary and the Mary of the Gospels. Critics constantly make the error of confusing the titles with the person. They see our Lady referred to as Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Angels, Refuge of Sinners, Mediatrix of All Graces, Help of Christians, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, our hope and so on. They actively imagine that we attribute to the person who holds such titles all that they would imply upon earth of pride and inaccessible splendour. But Catholics see no contrast between the most glorious creature in God's creation being at the same time the humble young Nazarene maiden and also the kindly figure who smiled so sympathetically and encouragingly at little Bernadette. Mary is not her titles, they do not alter her but she, because she is in truth the Mirror of Perfection alters instead our understanding of what it means to be queenly, to be honoured, to have power. It is not imagination but truth which tells us that it is only humility and love which enables a person to fulfil their purpose as a person and Mary as Queen and as the young mother in flight to Egypt is never anything other than the perfect image of love and humility.

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Gays, Abortion, Women's Rights- Is the Church Out of Touch?

                        Image: Gustave Doré - 'The New Zealander' illustration from 'London: a Pilgrimage' by Blanchard Jerrold



There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable....Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Thomas Babington Macaulay 

The position of the Catholic Church on many of the more contentious issues of our time is very clearly laid out and easily accessible. Notwithstanding which most of her critics seem to rely upon second- or third- hand summaries of them provided by enemies of the Church whenever they decide to comment upon them. I do not propose here to enter directly upon a discussion of the merits of the Catholic point of view, instead I will focus on a secondary argument which is often deployed. This is to the effect that by taking the stands which she does the Church is rendering herself out of touch and irrelevant in the eyes of the public and above all those of the youth. The customary counter-argument is to point out that those Christian communities which have taken on board the opinions of the age in matters like LGBT rights are declining at at least the same rate as those which reject them. Even if this is true it is insufficient since it places too much reliance upon passing events which might after all change in the future. Instead I will suggest that this charge against the Church rests upon a number of assumptions which are inherently false. Specifically I mean:
-Ascribing too much importance to the Zeitgeist.
-Subscribing to the notion of inevitable and irreversible progress.
-The illusion of permanence
-A misunderstanding of the nature of truth.

Firstly, by zeitgeist is meant "the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time."
It seems to be the case that this defining spirit in most Western countries and in the chattering classes of other countries includes a commitment to a whole canon of issues such as free access to abortion, ordination of women, the idea that same-sex relationships are more or less identical to heterosexual ones and so on. The Church by taking a distinctive stand on such matters stands accused, in the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, of failing to "get with the programme." I think it is quite accurate to say that Catholicism is out of sympathy with the zeitgeist in some parts of the world but that is less of a problem than her opponents imagine.

Except in quite exceptional circumstances history is made by activist minorities. Most people most of the time are intensely absorbed in their own concerns. They tend to express opinions on broader matters about which they care little through the simple process of repeating what others have said. As an example I will look at the change in reported social attitudes towards same-sex relationships which has occurred in the UK during the course of my lifetime. When I was younger the prevailing feeling was that these were, on the whole, A Bad Thing and people tended to feel mildly hostile to them. Within that consensus was a minority who were very strongly hostile and another minority who were either homosexual themselves or very strongly supportive of homosexuals. Today the prevailing feeling is that these relationships are A Good Thing and that people tend to feel mildly positive about them. Two different cohorts of the population here are worth thinking about. Those of my generation (I admit to being 51 at time of writing) have mostly got with the programme. However, even the most committed liberal optimist would probably not suggest that in each of the several million people in question this 180 degree change was effected after a period of soul searching and deep thought. In most instances they have simply trimmed their sails to the wind on a subject that doesn't deeply interest them. The cohort of the young, as you would expect, is thoroughly imbued with the zeitgeist. However there is little doubt that in most case they hold as firmly to it as my generation held to theirs which is to say hardly at all. What has happened over the course of some three or four decades is that power and influence has slipped out of the hands of one activist minority and fallen into the hands of another. That is how history happens. To rest any kind of prediction about social attitudes going forward, however, on the zeitgeist is simply to mistake a possibly temporary victory for a fundamental change of some kind.

The idea of 'Progress' is itself part of the zeitgeist in much of the world. It rest also on the more secure foundation of being a philosophical conviction which is at the heart of the Left, Social Liberal weltanschauung. Briefly the idea is this; civilization progresses from a lower state to a higher one over time. This does not just mean that it's technological level continually rises, it means that its core values undergo a continual evolution towards ever more perfect expressions of the human spirit. The perfectibility of Man is an article of faith of this creed. Since Man can become perfect it follows that human societies can become perfect and that, led by wise liberals, it definitely shall become perfect. History becomes an unfolding map recording humanity's gradual progress towards its final goal. Since Progress has its enemies, reactionaries who cling to the old ways for self-interested motives, its advance takes the form of a series of battles some bloody, some in the realm of ideas. Despite the odd defeat along the way the line of march is inevitable and irresistible. This set of ideas, this sunny optimism, was the openly expressed view of many, such as the Science Fiction author H.G. Wells, at the beginning of the 20th century. The events of those troubled hundred years and since have rather silenced these transports of delight. Probably most contemporary Social Liberals if challenged would state that victories were neither inevitable nor irresistible. Nonetheless the notion that they actually are both is a deep rooted emotional truth for the Left. Ask them to envisage the world in a couple of centuries from now and they will reproduce a version of today's Sweden or Holland only more so. Societies where old folk hold leaving parties before visiting the neighbourhood euthanasiast, where promiscuous sex without biological or emotional consequences happens all the time and (more commendably perhaps) where healthcare is free and first class at the time of need, where poverty, unemployment and wars are things of the distant past as is religious belief in all its forms. Essentially it is a working out to the end of the impulse which was commenced by the the French Revolution in 1789.

There are several drawbacks to this vision. The most important one is this idea of the perfectibility of Man. It is in some ways a mutation of the Christian idea of the redeemability of Man. This holds that each person without exception is capable of being redeemed by the saving power of God and transformed into a new creature, a saint, who then, among other things, contributes to society in a generous and self-sacrificing spirit. The necessary corollary to this belief is that each person stands in need of redemption, that without such a transformation Man, wounded by the effects of Original Sin constantly yields to temptation and sins most grievously against their neighbours and themselves. The Liberal idea decouples Man from personal, internally experienced, concupiscence and lays the blame for imperfections in individuals primarily on external pressures usually caused by reactionaries. Remove the imperfections from society and you will remove the imperfections from man. This contributes to inevitable and irresistible progress because as each generation has one or more shackle removed from it its successors born into the new more perfect world and no longer subject to the external pressures of reactionaries on this or that issue as it is removed will no longer act imperfectly with regard to, say, race, sex, sexuality or the like. They will then resist any attempt to rollback history and the world can prepare to move on to the next level up by defeating the next enemy along in the chain of progress. In this scenario the Church, it is argued, so long as it remains attached to the values of a previous epoch will be left behind in the slipstream of progress and disappear altogether. Only if it attaches itself to the chariot of Progress does it have any prospect of survival.

The basic problem with this theory is the inadmissibility of it's central premise. Man is not perfectible. However society is ordered, whatever institutions are created or destroyed, however many reactionaries are defeated and despatched to the archives each individual human person from the moment of birth will be subject to the power of temptation. Selfishness, self-centeredness and narrowness of perspective are not impositions laid upon people by their environment, they are an inescapable part of human nature. They can only be defeated by a conscious personal act of the will prompted by the grace of God. That means, for the purposes of this discussion, that no political victory is ever final no triumph is irreversible. 'Progress' is a chimera which is every bit as likely to vanish away to the same place that the 'Divine Right of Kings' has already gone to. The failure of the Church to jump into the progressive bandwagon is not the one thing guaranteed to ensure it vanishing into oblivion, it is rather one of the things ensuring that it will do no such thing whatever may happen to that set of French Revolutionary ideas which are not even three centuries old yet.

The illusion of permanence. Another facet of the human personality is the persistent illusion that the way things are is the way that things will be. In the middle of summer it is difficult to imagine winter and vice versa. The 51 years which I admit to have been tumultuous ones in the history of humanity. I grew up in a world in which the Soviet Union and its allies were seemingly a permanent feature of the world and it seemed likely that their number would grow rather than diminish. A world where South Africa was ruled by only whites, where Israel was at war with its neighbours, where telephones were immobile, computers filled large sized buildings, Popes were always Italian, televisions were black and white, India and China were minor regional powers with small economies and so on and so forth. All but one of these things has changed beyond recognition. But where the map of the world has changed the map of the mind remains the same. We still expect tomorrow to be pretty much the same as today unless we are unfortunate enough to be in a war zone or fortunate enough to be about to give birth for the first time. One of the more powerful forces preventing people from turning to the spiritual is the illusion that what visibly surrounds us, the things of time, really matters and that what is invisible, the things of eternity, doesn't. We seek to transform the place in which we find ourselves into a permanent home and invest all that we have into making it perfect, believing that perfectibility is both possible and desirable. This is a transposition of the error of liberalism into private life. It is the fruit of an earthbound hope this earnest striving to make the space we inhabit into a paradise because we believe it possible to do so because we think we can make the transient permanent. One of the products of this illusion is that our vision of the world going forward is that it should and will contain the elements of the world as it now is. And to those who support the ideals of 'progress' or who accept the current zeitgeist the future, in the West at least, is one that contains free abortion on demand, artificial contraception, 'equal marriage' and so on for no more powerfully cogent reason than that that is what the present contains. And since the Church does not accept these things she will not be part of the future unless or until she 'gets with the programme.' I feel here that simply to state the case is to undermine it. Nothing is permanent, all things must pass. The programme can be interrupted.

The nature of truth. I never tire of restating this proposition- the Church is not the advocate of a philosophy, she is the steward of a Divine Revelation. What she proposes for belief is the truth about God and the things of God which she has received from God Himself most fully and completely in the person of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary. Jesus Christ, yesterday, and to day; and the same for ever. (Hebrews 13:8) That being so her propositions though they may vary in form as the centuries roll by cannot, will not and should not vary in content. The world may believe what it will but where the beliefs of the world contradict the truths of Revelation then the world is wrong and the Church is right. It would be a grave dereliction of duty for the Church to turn aside from the straight path to pursue the world through its twists and turns of fashionable belief and practice. More than that it would be a great act of folly. If the truth is indeed truthful then it will, in the end, always prevail. To attach herself to a chariot heading for the cliffs is no act of wisdom. There have been many epoch's in human history when the Church has been marginalised or subject to sustained assault. It is another cherished illusion of the Liberal Left to think that the history of the West consists of a period of unbroken dominion by Catholicism or its variants over society from the time of Constantine until the advent of universal education, the advance of science and the first triumphs of the spirit of the storming of the Bastille began to undermine her. Far from it, the Church has weathered stormier times than this without the opposition of these factors which are neither necessarily enemies of Christianity (education and science are positive goods) or of enduring significance (other -isms than liberalism once seemed unstoppable.) No, the Church has this promise behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Matthew 28;20) and this I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18.) As long as the Church is in touch with the faith of the Apostles and true to her Divine Master then she is on the course marked out for her from the foundation of the world. She will neither disappear nor become irrelevant because Christ will do neither of these things and the Church is the Bride of Christ, His destiny is her destiny, thanks be to God.

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Is Spirituality Superior to Religion 2?

Everyone has the same spiritual access to God — or the Great Spirit, or the Goddess — regardless of education or background. It is a personal spiritual access from within the individual directly to the Supreme Being - 
Stephen E. Schlarb

Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?”  And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.

Acts of the Apostles 8:30-31



In Part One I looked at the shared understanding that both 'spiritual but not religious' and 'religious as well as spiritual' people have that there is an underlying transcendent reality to the cosmos we inhabit. In this Part I propose to look at the assumptions-
a) Religion is man-made and artificial but spirituality is an authentic personal response to the Divine, and
b) Religion is hopelessly bound up in rules and regulations but spirituality is free.
I am writing from the perspective of Christianity but, in fact, I think my arguments would have some traction with all the major religions.

An individual human is limited and finite; the reality which they seek to apprehend or intuit is infinite and eternal. This means that each person can only grasp a small portion of it on the basis of personal experience alone. If they are content with that small portion not only are they terminally incurious but they have just created their very own personal man or woman-made religion. When we set the limits to what is knowable or experienceable on the basis of ourselves alone then we are not really responding to the infinite we are imprisoning it within our own limitations. At the very least it seems reasonable to suggest that spiritual seekers should seek to benefit from the collective wisdom traditions of other spiritual seekers. These can point us towards ways of accessing the Divine that we would not necessarily have thought of ourselves. They can suggest dimensions to the transcendent which we never would have imagined left to our own devices. Authentic spirituality then ceases to be merely an individual experience and becomes part of a community spread over both space and time.

Religion can be considered from this perspective to be the communities that collect, preserve and transmit wisdom traditions. Without the existence of such more or less stable more or less durable organisations or belief systems much wisdom would be lost from one generation to the next. Religion, however, can claim to be more than that. Christianity, for example, posits a Divine Revelation. God by intervening in various ways in human history reveals more of Himself and more about Himself than we could possibly apprehend without such a revelation. Unaided wisdom can lift us to the upper reaches of our own abilities, Revealed truth can lift us into eternity both in this life and in the one to come. In the figure of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, Christians see the fullest possible self-revelation of God. Religion based upon such a revelation is not a man-made one but a received one. We respond to what we have received and seek to form a relationship with the Divine One based upon it. Dogma and doctrine are not attempts to impose order on disorderly humans but are the formulae we use to summarise the truths we have received. Accepting these dogmatic definitions and using them as the basis from which we seek to understand and respond to the Divinity is not an inauthentic man-made response to a transcendent reality it is the fruit of the shared wisdom and understanding of generations of believers who have known God through Christ.

Of course the question naturally arises why accept one revelation rather than another? Why Jesus and not Krishna or why St Paul and not the prophet of Islam? In a world where people travelled little and knew of few religions it would be natural for them to accept lock stock and barrel the religion of one's country or region because they knew no other. For us in multi-cultural societies with easy access to all the wisdom and faith traditions of the world would it not be best to heed all wisdoms and act only on those which spoke most clearly to us? Well, yes and no. The idea that a personal spirituality is something that we acquire like we do an outfit, shoes from here, hat from there, handbag from somewhere else is rather repugnant to both good taste and good sense. Each religious tradition is a coherent whole. It has a consistent inner logic, one part fits with another. It is difficult if not impossible to appreciate that coherence and to benefit from the fruits of it from outside of the tradition. I was a Catholic for ten years or so before it all began to really make sense to me. If you try to match together disparate elements from different traditions it is not the best of all possible worlds that you will get because you will be reducing wisdom to your size not allowing your size to be expanded by wisdom. So much for the 'no', the 'yes' is simply this- to accept a religious revelation as authentic and to live your life by it is leap of faith and that faith can only be founded upon your personal experience of it.  I would urge people in the strongest possible terms to look towards Jesus and by prayer and hope and careful study of the Gospels to invite Him into your heart and life. That would give you the most authentic and most enduring of all spiritual lives. Other religions would no doubt offer similar invitations. The proof of religion is experimental which is a posh way of saying 'suck it and see.'

We come now to the idea that religions are bound by strict commands which usually begin with "thou shalt not" whereas spirituality is free from such restrictions and, therefore, less oppressive. It is certainly true that religions have rules and it is also true that within each tradition there are those for whom the rules are the religion. The textbook case of this. perhaps unfairly, are the Pharisees as depicted in the Gospels. In the history of Catholicism too there have been periods where outward observance has been seen as more important than the inner spiritual life. Providentially in such times God has raised up prophetic figures like St Catherine of Siena or St Francis of Assisi to guide it back into the path of authentic spirituality (something I looked at in my Girl Power blog.) Rules do serve a purpose other than social control however. The spiritual journey is about transformation. We are changed by it. Every gain involves a loss, we must shed, sometimes painfully shed, parts of ourselves which we are quite comfortable with. Our rough edges need to be smoothed our smoothness needs to be roughed. Most of all our ego needs to be irretrievably shattered a process beyond our own power to achieve. Rules against which we chafe, decisions which we can only accept in the first instance with faith hoping that reason will follow it in due course, these are the tools by which our square peg can be shaped to slot into the round hole. We should not fly from restrictions because they are difficult to adhere to and hard to understand, these are the very reasons that we should accept them when we know that generations before us have passed through the precise same crucible and so arrived at the point where they can say from experience 'the kingdom of God is within.'

It is false anyway to think that we are free if we are not bound by external forces. Our internal forces hold us fast in their grip. We are oppressed by our desires, our appetites our fears and inhibitions, our demons. Jesus put it like this Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. (John 8:34) It is all too often the case that when we wish to do something good or avoid doing something bad a force inside us overrides our good intentions and we find ourselves acting in ways that we ourselves think hateful. The choice before us is not freedom or slavery but involuntary slavery to our lower selves or voluntary obedience to the Divine One. And when each act is a free will offering to the Highest of the High, the Sweetest of the Sweet the Lord who has granted us our freedom to reject or accept Him then it is an escape from oppression not a retreat into it. When we can share in Mary's joyful exclamation Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word. (Luke 1:38) then we will have entered into a loving relationship between ourselves and the Persons of the Blessed Trinity who form the one underlying truth to all that is. Then spirituality and religion lose their distinction because we have become absorbed into the life of God Himself.

It is in the nature of humans to be spiritual seekers, to recognise the God-shaped gap in their lives and look for ways to fill it. Many grasp at substitutes, the immediate sensual gratifications that the world offers so abundantly. Others seek more ethereal experiences but are resolved to be the master of my fate.. the captain of my soul (Invictus, William Ernest Henley.) Such a resolution, though, is a delusion. We are never the masters (or mistresses) of our fate, we cannot control illnesses, the death of loved ones, the collapse of the firm we work for, the bomb that explodes on our aeroplane. Neither can we captain a soul which we cannot even compel to stop eating chocolate when we want to lose weight. We are both less free and more free than we think we are. Less free because we carry a cross without realising it, more free because we can choose to carry it with the help of Christ when we do realise it. And with Him nothing is impossible.

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The Bible & The Virgin Come To A Conclusion

Why Bible-believing Christians should honour Mary

In this series I have been looking at what the Gospels say about the mother of Jesus. I have argued that on the basis of these scriptures alone Christians of all traditions have an explicit warrant, if not a mandate, to give great honour and praise to Mary. In this conclusion to the series I propose to look at references to our Lady in other parts of the New Testament and to demonstrate the cumulative effect of the undisputed biblical references to the Virgin.

All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers
Acts 1:14 (NRSV)

The "all these" referred to are the Apostles. This passage is significant for many reasons. It tells us that Mary was a woman of prayer. It tells us that she formed part of the core group of believers gathered together in Jerusalem at the beginning of the life of the Christian Church. And once again, as I have highlighted in the previous parts of this series, it shows that the mere presence of Mary is something that the Holy Spirit wishes to draw out attention to. This verse is situated between the Ascension of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The probability is that Mary was present at both occasions but we cannot be certain of this. However, so far as Pentecost goes St Luke writes When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place (Acts 2:1 NRSV) The "they" in this case referring to all the believers, about 120 in all, which certainly included Mary. Pentecost marks the birth of the Church as the body of Christ and the presence of the mother of the head of the body at this event clearly is no accident but a deliberate act of Divine Providence.

Throughout this series I have been pointing up the fact that the Virgin was present at a number of key moments in salvation history the time has now come to summarise these moments and allow their cumulative effects to speak for themselves. I will also look at what we learn about the personality of the Mother of Jesus from these references-

-The Archangel Gabriel tells Mary that she has "found favour with God"
-Mary is the first person in the world to hear about Jesus.
-Immediately she becomes the first person to have faith in Him, i.e. Mary is the first Christian.
-She gives her joyful consent to God's plan
-She is (necessarily) present at the Incarnation of the Son of God which takes place in her womb.
-The sound of the Virgin's voice is the agency which God uses to cause St John the Baptist (and St Elizabeth) to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
-The divinely inspired St Elizabeth declares our Lady to be Blessed among women.
- Mary was (necessarily) present at the birth of the Son of God
- The shepherds and the Magi found Jesus with Mary
-Mary treasures and ponders all these events in her heart.
-Mary was present when Jesus was offered, in accordance with the Law, as a symbolic sacrifice to the Father in the Temple.
-The Virgin was the subject of a prophecy by the inspired Simeon which specifically refers to her and to the closeness she will have to the sufferings of her Son.
-Jesus, Mary and Joseph become political refugees seeking asylum in Egypt in order to save the life of the Saviour.
-Mary's suffering for three days while Jesus is missing, hidden in the House of His Father, prefigures the events of the Passion.
-Jesus willingly subjects Himself to the authority of Mary and Joseph
-Mary displays a delicate and charitable sensibility by being distressed at the potential humiliation of the newlyweds at Cana.
-Prompted by this she prays to Jesus and by her prayers brings about the first public miracle of Jesus' mission.
-In giving her counsel to the servants 'do whatever He tells you' Mary anticipates the words of Jesus at the Last Supper 'if you love me you will keep my commandments'
-Mary accompanies Jesus from Cana to Capernaum where our Lord begins His public mission of preaching, teaching and healing.
-Mary accompanies Jesus to the Cross and stands steadfastly at its foot sharing in His agony.
-Jesus, in the final depths of that agony, takes thought for His mother and gives her into the care of His beloved disciple and gives the beloved disciple into her care. Until He had done this, St John suggests, His mission was incomplete.
-Having been present at the birth of her Son in the flesh at the first Christmas Mary was also present in the birth, as it were, of her Son in the Spirit as the the Body of Christ appears in the world at Pentecost.

Taking all of these things into consideration a Christian would have to be hard hearted indeed not to frequently offer up thanks to God for the gift He gave us in Mary. And if that is not enough one other consideration should be borne in mind, Jesus Himself undoubtedly loved His mother and what is good enough for Him is surely good enough for us.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law 
Galatians 4:4 (NRSV)

One of the title which Catholics give to Mary "Mother of God" often  causes Christians from the Reformation traditions (also called Protestants) to wince. They seem to think that it was a title invented with no other purpose than to elevate Mary into a position for which there is no scriptural warrant. This stems, I think, from a misunderstanding. The title was agreed at a council of the then undivided Christian Church at Ephesus in the 5th Century in order to defend against an heresy which attacked the divinity of Jesus. In its original Greek it is Theotokos which can also be translated as 'God bearer' or 'birth-giver of God.' The point about the title is that it primarily tells us something about Jesus, that from the moment of His conception we was both fully God and fully human, and only secondarily something about our Lady, that she was the mother of the Incarnated second Person of the Trinity. What it does not do is suggest that the second Person of the Trinity had no existence until He appeared within Mary's womb. I am always slightly puzzled by Protestant objections to the use of "Mother of God" since they are willing enough to acknowledge that St Elizabeth was perfectly correct to call her "the mother of my Lord" (Luke 1:43 NRSV) and that it is quite orthodox to refer to Mary as the mother of the Son of God. It is almost as if the idea of conceding anything to Mary is some sort of surrender to Rome.

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars
Revelation 12:1 (KJV)
      
This text, sadly, does not come under the heading of undisputed references to Mary. While Catholics certainly accept it to be such most Protestants prefer to see in it a reference to Israel or the Church. It is not my purpose in this series to enter into such matters of controversy so I will not insist upon this interpretation but I will make a couple of points in regard to it. Firstly, it is in the nature of divinely inspired Scripture that it contains multiple levels of meaning not all of which are instantly understandable at first reading. This means that for some texts at least we are not faced with the choice 'either it means this or it means that' but can instead say that 'it means both this and that.' Catholics take the view that this is one such scriptural passage arguing that it certainly does refer to the Church/Israel as well as Mary the mother of God. Protestants do not have to accept this interpretation but I would argue that they should at least acknowledge that it is a plausible understanding of it. Which leads on to- Secondly, Reformation tradition Christians react with something akin to horror to the title of 'Queen of Heaven' being applied to Mary. Yet, if this scripture can reasonably be understood to refer to her then a woman in the heavens possessed of a crown can equally reasonable be understood to be a Queen and her realm clearly is heavenly.

As an aside, a further reason for such strong reactions to the title lies in the previous use of it in reference to a pagan deity Ishtar. It seems specious to me, however, to argue that because pagans used a title therefore it becomes forever barred for use by Christians. The pagan king Nebuchadnezzar, for example, is referred to in Daniel (2:37 KJV) as King of Kings yet this does not prevent the same title being applied to our Saviour Jesus. Similarly the pagan god (or gods) Baal are frequently referenced in the Bible but the word itself simply means 'Lord' and if we disallow pagan title in Christian usage then it would be a sin to say that Jesus is Lord which is manifest nonsense.

In conclusion I would simply say this, Christians of all traditions have in the Scriptures a common treasure and treasury. Part of that common heritage is Mary, the mother of Jesus. By honouring her we do not dishonour Him in any way but by ignoring her we do dishonour Scripture and the clear purpose of the Holy Spirit.

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