Mary the Morning Star - Part I

Excerpt from Mariae Corona, Chapters on the Mother of God and Her Saints

With Advent fast approaching I thought it appropriate to contemplate the Mother of Our Lord —the Blessed Virgin.

This meditation is taken from the book Mariae Corona, Chapters on the Mother of God and her Saints by Reverend Patrick Augustine Sheehan, D. D. (Browne and Nolan, LTD., 1902, pages 1-8).

In this meditation we consider Mary’s Immaculate Conception, her relation to God the Father and His Son, and of her Divine Maternity.

As you begin to make ready the preparations of receiving our Lord at His birth I hope this reflection helps you also to appreciate His dear Mother, the second Eve, by which the world received her Savior and Redeemer.

Yours in Jesus and Mary.

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Mary the Morning Star

“Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” Wordsworth

There is always difficulty in our treatment of the supernatural. However, we may have tried to bring it home to our understandings, and to master it in all its details, there is always a consciousness that we have failed. Even when we call to our assistance the Word of God, and the Fathers of the Church, to enable us by study to comprehend our subject fully, yet there remains an uneasy feeling that we have mastered not our subject, but our idea of it—that our words have merely gone to express our own ideas, but have been utterly inadequate to describe that supernatural truth to the minds of others.

In a certain sense, this is truer of the mystery of the Immaculate Mother of God than of any other mystery of Christian Revelation. Because in approaching all other mysteries we acknowledge them to be mysteries, and confess our own inability to comprehend them; but in speaking of God’s Mother, we grow through familiarity, perhaps, into the mistake of believing that we are speaking of a subject that comes within the range of human knowledge. And it is only when we have recognized the truth that if the Incarnate God be the greatest of all mysteries, the Mother of the Incarnate God must participate in that mystery, that we shelter ourselves under our humility, leaving to God the knowledge of His mysteries, and retaining only our wonder and admiration for Him and them.

This mystic character has been given to the Mother of God by her close relations with her Divine Son. The Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ conferred upon His Mother a dignity proportioned to His humiliation. He humbled Himself, and she was exalted in the humiliation. He became Man, and she became the Mother of God. The deeper He descended, the higher she ascended. He emptied Himself of His glory and clothed her with it. He concealed all His supernatural powers and qualities, and descended upon earth to mingle amongst men, and behold! He raised His Mother at the same time from her place amongst men and endowed her with supernatural powers and supernatural graces. He robbed earth of a great deal that He might make a larger compensation to earth—taking from earth a Mother and giving it a Son; taking from earth its purest and holiest daughter, from men their best-loved sister, and giving Himself in return; infinitely purer, infinitely holier than she, and yearning to be better beloved through her and for her sake. And thus, Jesus met His Mother halfway betwixt heaven and earth; she, raised to meet Him, and He, descending to meet her; there Mother and Child were united, and there united and inseparable they live for ever in the thought of Christians.

The mystery of the Mother and Child, therefore, remains the great mystery of Christian Revelation. It is the one great central mystery upon which the others converge. And they who try to separate the Mother from the Child are consciously or unconsciously undermining the truth of His Incarnation. They are counteracting the designs of God’s Providence and undoing the very work upon which God has been laboring from eternity.

Among those who are capable of comprehending this subject, there is nowadays but a very narrow field for discussion on the privileges of the great Mother of God. It would be difficult in our days to find anyone who would have the hardihood of asserting that the Angel Gabriel might have been sent to any other Hebrew woman as to Mary; or that the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin was a mere instrumentality which conferred no privileges upon her, needed not the special preparation of the Spirit, and left no dignity or unsurpassed holiness. There are few who do not recognize that there is a close connection between the functions assigned to her and the grace conferred upon her; and though not often spoken of in Scripture, they who understand its spirit, and that there is a meaning in its silence, as well as in its utterances, acknowledge, that the Word of God assigns to her the very place which is given to her in the Litanies of the Church: Queen of Patriarchs, of Prophets, of Apostles, of All Saints, surpassed in holiness only by the Author of all sanctity Himself.

This gives us large ideas of the dignity of the Mother of God; but they fall far short of the reality. Because here we are tracing her dignity only to the moment of Incarnation, whereas Mary filled the mind of God years before creation and entered largely into the designs of God in fashioning His Universe and perfecting it.

The greatest privilege of Mary, next after her Divine Maternity, is that of her Immaculate Conception. And to us it has a special significance, inasmuch as it proves that our Venerable Church, as it grows year after year, and century after century, under the protection and patronage of Heaven, increases at the same time in its love and veneration for Christ its Spouse, and Mary its Mother. And whilst the world outside the Church is yearly growing more and more estranged from God and is therefore engaged in paring down the privileges of Mary, and the attributes of Jesus, the Church is gaining a clearer insight into the workings of the Spirit of God in the past, and a clearer knowledge of the effects of His omnipotent grace in these souls, which He designed for Himself. The world, having lost the love of God, has lost the knowledge of His power and of His mercy; the Church, growing in the love of God, is gradually gaining a fuller insight into the secrets of His wisdom and His power. And thus, while men are losing all belief in the supernatural, and measuring God by their own thoughts, the vision of the Church into eternity grows brighter and clearer, and therefore is her faith more fervent and profound. Now, let us see how this is exemplified in the preparation of Mary as Mother of God.

The Almighty God has said: “My thoughts are not as your thoughts, nor My ways as your ways, but as far as the heavens are removed from the earth, so far are My thoughts above your thoughts and My ways above your ways.” The Almighty Creator reaches from end to end; His knowledge is from eternity unto eternity, and all things are clear and manifest to His eyes. In His eternal word He ordains all things and decrees all creations. And at the same time He looks onward far before Him, and, contemplating the end of His works, He contemplates means unto the end, and subordinates the intermediate means to the final end. And if this be true of the most ordinary acts, how much more true is it of that great act which is the embodiment of all God’s dealings with the world, I mean the Incarnation of His Adorable Son.

First of all in the designs of God, then, is the Incarnation of His Divine Son. It was decreed and determined from eternity that the Second Person of the ever-adorable Trinity should become Man in time. And how? How was this mystery of Divine Love to be effected? How was that body to be fitted for Jesus in which He should die, and by that death redeem the world? The Almighty Creator could have easily raised for Him a body out of the slime of the earth, as He had done for Adam; or He could have gifted Him with a purely celestial, spiritual body, as some heretics supposed. But no! At the same time that it was decreed that Jesus should be born it was also decreed that He should be conceived and born of a woman. That woman was Mary, and therefore we find that the idea of Mary co-existed in the Divine mind with the idea of the Man-God, that she existed from all eternity before the mind of the ever-adorable Trinity—Mother and Son, Jesus and Mary, the mystery of God made Man, and the mystery of the woman through whom that mystery was to be effected.

It is on this account that the Church applies to Mary these words in the Sapiential Books: “Then the Creator of all things ordered and said to me; and He that made me rested in my Tabernacle. And He said to me, let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel, and take root in my elect. From the beginning, and before the world, was I created, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be, and in the holy dwelling place I have ministered unto Him. And so was I established in Sion, and in the portion of my God His inheritance, and my abode is in the full assembly of the saints—and I perfumed my dwelling as storax and galbanum and onyx and aloes, and as the frankincense not cut, and my odor is as the purest balm. I am the Mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth: in me is all hope of life and of virtue. Come to me all you that desire me and be filled of my fruits. For my spirit is sweet as honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb. My memory is unto everlasting generations.”

"And, when time commenced, and man endowed with free will, began to abuse it, and that mighty sin was committed which inaugurated the beginning of this world’s horrors, at the same time a promise of a Redeemer was held out to a fallen world. The Redeemer, it was said, was to be given through one of the very race of him who had so grievously offended his Creator. As the Messias was to be the second Adam, Mary was to be the second Eve. As through Adam sin entered into the world, and through sin death, so through Jesus, grace should be given to the world, and with grace, life. But as Eve was the first cause of the fall, though it was not through Eve sin entered into the world, so Mary, the second and superior Eve, was to be the means through whom life entered the world in the Person of Jesus, though she herself was not the Life. Sin then was introduced into the world by Adam through Eve; and grace was introduced into the world by Jesus through His Mother Mary. There is an exact parallel, and if we may justly conclude that Jesus, the second Adam, was infinitely superior to the first, we may also conclude that Mary, the second Eve, was superior to the first, and that therefore, she could not be subject to the misery of sin which Eve inflicted upon the world.

As time went on, whenever the reign of evil seemed specially to predominate in the world, men looked forward to the fulfilment of that first great promise. They looked for the Messias that was to come and save His people; and they knew that He was to be recognized by a sign, and that sign was Mary, His Mother. “A Virgin,” said Isaias, “shall conceive and bear a Son whose name shall be called Emmanuel.” “A woman,” said Jeremias, “shall encircle man,” Now in all these provisions of the Prophets, one thing was hoped for, one thing expected, and that was the salvation of the people of God, the Redemption of the world from the tyranny of sin, and as it had never entered the minds of these Holy Prophets that the Redeemer Himself could be the slave of the enemy He had come to conquer, neither could it have been believed by them, that she who was so closely associated with Him, through whom His Divinity and great mission were in a measure to be proved, could ever be the slave of sin. For, if God could say to Jeremias the Prophet: “Before I formed thee in the womb of thy mother, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nation,” how much more truly might He have said of the Mother of His Son: “Before I created thee, I knew thee, and gave thee as a Mother unto my Son.”

The Almighty said: “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” and how clearly this is evidenced in the Immaculate Conception of Mary! My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways. If they had been, alas! how different would not Mary have been—Mary who is now to the Church, “the glory of Israel—the honor of her people.” “A Virgin shall conceive,” said Isaias. A Virgin did conceive, says the Church, and that Virgin is Mary. And if it be true, that to give greater honor to her Divine Son, or for some other design beyond our ken and known only to Almighty God Himself, the Sacred Scriptures do not give utterance to any elaborate panegyrics on her virtues or her dignity, we have supplied the place, and we have scrutinized the designs of God, and tried to understand Mary as she appeared from the beginning to the Most Holy Trinity, and to the angels at the moment of her Immaculate Conception. And we have taken one or two expressions, so remarkable, so wonderful, that they can only have been spoken of a Being very dear to Almighty God, and from them we have built up in our minds an idea of what Mary is, and of the distinguished place she occupies among the children of God.