Catholic Thought discussion

Summary

Chapter 7: Our Lady of the Sign: The Liturgy and Sacred Art

Saward opens the chapter with this from St. Pope John Paul II:

John Paul argues that there are spiritual qualities that are peculiarly feminine. Woman, he says, in the unity of her material body and spiritual soul, is disposed by the Creator to motherhood, to the welcoming of new life. At her body’s center is a space to be occupied by another human being, a child, the fruit of married love and a gift of God. This is the physical predisposition for the spiritual receptiveness that, though often suppressed or corrupted, distinguishes the minds and hearts of women, both married and unmarried.

The chapter follows the meditations of Jesus in the womb of three women in the church: St. Catherine of Siena, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, and the mystic Caryll Houselander.



Chapter 8: Revelation in the Womb

Saward outlines the chapter with the following:

The revelatory work of Jesus in the womb is mysterious and silent. He reveals, first of all, simply by being who he is (the eternal Son) and what he has become (true man, a real human embryo). He reveals by the miraculous manner of his conception and birth: “Such a birth befits God.”8 The first human person privileged to receive this revelation and ponder it in prayer is the Ever-Virgin Mother. From her it is communicated to St. Joseph, St. John the Baptist, St. Elizabeth, St. Zechariah, and so, through the Apostles and Evangelists, to the Church of every age. Our Lady’s faith in the incarnate Word has a chronological and theological priority in the history of salvation; as St. John Paul II says, she “precedes” us in faith.9 The believing Church first exists in her. More specifically, the Church first exists in the fiat of faith and loving obedience through which the Word took flesh and dwelt within her. Our Lady, great with child, is the image and beginning of the Church that with her “magnifies the Lord.”

The fact that Christ is hidden in the womb and then made manifest with His birth, parallels the Divine hiddenness of God and revealed in the manifestation of the Son.

Sorry it took me so long to get to the last section. Let's discuss the final chapters here and we can move on to a new book.

I had never heard of Caryll Houselander until reading her thoughts here, and I purchased one of her books. She had some lovely and introspective thoughts. I had highlighted this insight from her:

"In becoming a child, God the Son united himself to every child. Every little one of the human family is a reminder of the Infant God, of the divine humility the demons so despise. Every child preaches the Gospel just by being what he is. He embodies the simplicity needed for entry to heaven (see Matt. 18:3). He calls his parents out of self-absorption into self-giving."

In Chapter 8, this stood out to me:

"Studiousness, the humble quest for understanding, can be perverted into curiosity, the proud craving for information."

I have this fault! I can get lost down the rabbit-hole for hours looking up countries, customs, NASA, Antarctica, the Penninsula Wars, etc. I have been trying not to do this anymore. I read something St. Padre Pio once said which is inline with the above quote. Someone asked him what the gravest sins were, and he named curiosity as one of them.

Also in this chapter, I thought the comparison of the tiny Jesus in the womb beginning as a zygote to a mustard seed was very profound. He grew into the Tree of Life over all.

Michelle wrote: "I have this fault! I can get lost down the rabbit-hole for hours looking up countries, customs, NASA, Antarctica, the Penninsula Wars, etc. I have been trying not to do this anymore. I read something St. Padre Pio once said which is inline with the above quote. Someone asked him what the gravest sins were, and he named curiosity as one of them."

I think curiosity, like everything else, can be good or bad, Michelle. When the Apostles tell Jesus what people are saying about him, he asks them, "Who do you say that I am?"
Perhaps this means that as long as the engine of our curiosity is God, it's good. But when curiosity leads you down the path of obscurity, it can be a bad move. Occultism, for example, is all about curiosity about magic and similar stuff.

Michelle wrote: "Every child preaches the Gospel just by being what he is. He embodies the simplicity needed for entry to heaven (see Matt. 18:3). He calls his parents out of self-absorption into self-giving."

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing!

Manny wrote: "Sorry it took me so long to get to the last section. Let's discuss the final chapters here and we can move on to a new book."

Thanks for the reading guide, Manny!

Michelle wrote: "I had never heard of Caryll Houselander until reading her thoughts here, and I purchased one of her books. She had some lovely and introspective thoughts. I had highlighted this insight from her:

..."
Oh you must read Caryll Houselander. She is a brilliant writer. I have read The Way of the Cross and thought it a great Lenten read. I have a review here on Goodreads if you can find it. I highly recommend it for the upcoming Lent if you're looking for a book. I don't remember it being that long. She has such mystical insights. Actually I've been thinking of picking up another one of her books.

I have that one on my list and two others. I bought Little Way of the Infant Jesus and haven't been in the right frame of mind to read it yet. Good to hear that she's worth reading!

I was surprised to see Saward included St. Catherine of Siena. As some of you may know, I consider her my patron saint. Though she prayed to the Blessed Mother, she was not Marian centric. She was more focused on the incarnate Christ, and I guess Christ is there in the womb. Despite hidden in the womb, the fetus is incarnate and so is physically there.

For St. Catherine, as much as for the early Christian author Tertullian, “the flesh is the hinge of salvation.” Her genius, says François-Marie Léthel, is “to give bodily expression to all the spiritual realities.” So, when she speaks of the Holy Spirit, and of the charity he pours into our hearts, she thinks of the fire by which he revealed himself at Pentecost. Christian ‘interiority’ is not a disincarnate abstraction but the Christian’s participation in the mysteries of the Word incarnate’s life in his Virgin Mother’s womb and of the Church’s birth from his wounded side on the cross.

Saward goes on to quote from a prayer of St. Catherine of Siena. I’m not going to quote Saward’s quoting of the prayer, but I will quote from my edition of the collected prayers. Saward quotes from a Cavallini translation, but I think the Suzanne Noffke translation is more to his point.

Oh Mary, my tenderest love! In you is written the Word from whom we have the teaching of life. You are the tablet that sets this teaching before us. I see that this Word, once written in you, was never without the cross of holy desire. Even as he was conceived within you, the desire to die for the salvation of humankind was engrafted and bound into him. (The Prayers of Catherine of Siena, 2nd Edition, Suzanne Noffke, OP, Translator and Editor, pp. 193-4)

Actually that translation came out in 2001, after Saward had published Redeemer in the Womb. But you can see the metaphor St. Catherine uses, Mary is the book on which the Word is written. Noffke lists that prayer as Number 18, prayed on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, 1379 in Rome. Another factoid, March 25th happened to be St. Catherine’s 32nd birthday, and she was about thirteen months from her death on April 29th, 1380.

Saward develops further from St, Catherine’s prayer, and he concludes the meditation from St. Catherine with this observation.

St. Catherine sees Our Lady of the Annunciation as not only speaking for mankind but embodying all that is best and most beautiful in mankind, whether by nature or by grace.

I continue to find St. Catherine of Siena one of the most brilliant of persons to have lived.

I don’t know that much about St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. I have come across excerpts of her writing as meditations in the daily readings of Magnificat. I have been impressed and would love to explore more. I know she had a spirituality focused on the indwelling of the Trinity. Here is how Saward opens his section on her meditations.

The spiritual doctrine of the Dijon Carmelite St. Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880–1906) is centered on the indwelling of the Trinity in the souls of the just. She came to see the Advent Mary, the expectant Virgin, as the highest model of the contemplative, within whose heart Christ lives by grace and charity and prayer.

Then he quotes this from one of her works.

It seems to me that the attitude of the Virgin during the months between the Annunciation and the Nativity is the model for interior souls, for those whom God has chosen to live inwardly, in the depths of the unfathomable abyss.

That sounds like the central thesis of the whole book. If one needed to summarize Redeemer in the Womb in one sentence, that’s hits it spot on.

Saward also quotes St. Elizabeth from a letter to her sister Guite.

Think what must have been going on in the Virgin’s soul after the Incarnation, when she possessed within her the Word incarnate, the Gift of God. . . . In what silence, what recollection, what adoration she must have buried herself in the depths of her soul in order to embrace this God whose Mother she was. My little Guite, he is in us. O let us stay close to him in this silence, with this love, of the Virgin. That is the way to spend Advent, isn’t it?

I think other writers have been quoted in this book as such as well: the contemplative life is an act of gestating Jesus within us just as the Blessed Mother carried Jesus for nine months.

"...the contemplative life is an act of gestating Jesus within us just as the Blessed Mother carried Jesus for nine months." This is a lovely way of looking at things!

Saward ends the book on a chapter on how the hiddenness of Christ in the womb leading to His birth is a reflection of the revelation of God through Jesus Christ’s incarnation. Saward quotes Dei Verbum from Vatican II:

Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, sent “as man to men,” “speaks the words of God” (John 3:34) and accomplishes the saving work that the Father gave him to do (cf. John 5:36; 17:4). It was therefore he himself—to see him is to see the Father (cf. John 14:9)—who completed and perfected revelation and confirmed it by divine testimony. He did this by his whole presence and self-manifestation: by words and deeds, by signs and wonders, but especially by his death and glorious Resurrection from the dead, and finally by sending the Spirit of Truth.

Saward seems to imply that the gestation time and subsequent birth for Jesus’ birth was fitting as a process for revelation. He also quotes St. Bernard of Clairvaux. “He who is incomprehensible and invisible, said St. Bernard, wanted to be comprehended and seen.” This brings Saward to a concluding statement.

The same is true of the Word’s first nine months as man. Even then, as truly as when he “preached on the mountain,” he was at the work of revelation; by the simplicity of his embryonic life, Christ revealed God.

Saward expounds the thought further, but I think that’s the gist.

I also found this passage in the final chapter beautiful.

For nine months, Mary’s faith and love are embodied in the physical and emotional experience of pregnancy. It begins, as it does for every expectant mother, with “a blind sense of touch, with the bodily sensing of a presence.” Touch, as Aristotle and St. Thomas well understood, is not a deficient form of sensation, but the foundation of all the other senses; it can even supply for sight and hearing in those born blind and deaf. The other senses operate through a medium, but touch is direct encounter. This first sensation, in which the Son of the Most High is felt deep within the Virgin Mother’s body, as he draws his bodily substance and sustenance from her, will not be cast aside but be incorporated into all her later seeing, hearing, and holding. She knows with unique authority what it means to say that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” And Our Lady’s experience is more than simply individual. It is utterly unique, yet completely Catholic: in some way, it can be shared in the communion of saints. For the sake of the whole Church, by touching the marks left by the nails and the lance, St. Thomas the Apostle, who could not at first believe, proved the bodily solidity of the risen Christ. Similarly, for us all, by her touch, Mary, who never wavered in her faith, felt within her the reality of God’s taking of flesh. The mind and heart of the Holy Virgin, while she is with Child, are the beginning and the permanent measure of the Church’s confession of the realism of the Incarnation. A Christology that does not have something of Mary’s wonder at the Verbum abbreviatum, the embryonic Word within her, is destined for Docetism, the heresy that imagines that God assumed the semblance of a human body.

The point of the last sentence is interesting. Jesus nine months of gestation shows He was truly man, not the illusion of a man as per the Docetic heresy. He didn’t just show up on earth one day. One might also conclude that a natural fertilization of Mary’s egg occurred in her womb. It wasn’t just something planted in her.

I also found in this passage the beauty in the touch that developed between mother and child during the nine months. I’ve never obviously been pregnant with child (:-P) but I can imagine the tactile relationship was as great or if not greater than that of St. Thomas the Apostle when he put his fingers into Christ’s wounds.

Finally Saward ends the book not with Mary, not with Jesus, but with St. Joseph who Saward feels is the vocation of every Christian, “to welcome Jesus living in Mary into our souls by faith alive with love and for their sake to welcome and keep safe every unborn human child and his mother.” He continues:

St. Joseph was the first man to grant the Virgin Mother of God “a room in his abode.” Before ever he sought for her the hospitality of the innkeepers of Bethlehem, he took her into his own heart and home (see Matt. 1:24). He is the model of the chivalry of Catholic faith and charity. He offered a house, a roof but also a lineage, to the unborn Jesus. He gave sanctuary to God incarnate and his Ever-Virgin Mother. May St. Joseph by his prayers keep us faithful to the Gospel of Life first preached by the Redeemer in the womb.

Does this seem like a sequence of Russian nesting dolls? Jesus inside Mary inside Joseph inside Me!

I thought this a marvelous advent devotional.

Beautiful image, Manny. Thank you.