The prayerlife of the Blessed Virgin Mary ... Who but the most pure can ever hope to gain access to it, unless we all have been asked by invitation? Have we been invited? Two Popes have declared that Our Blessed Lady was so intimately joined to Her Son that there was but one and the same Decree of Predestination involving them both. If She was, and if it has been revealed to us, that this divine Decree consisted of two distinct parts, then Our Lady must have known the full extent of that union in order to give Her consent.
And when, on another occasion, one of these two Holy Fathers has declared that already in Her sacred womb Christ was present there as the Head of His Church, then we understand that this could only be because He had found a Body fitted for such a Head. And who but Our Blessed Mother could have given Him that Body?
At that time there was no St. Peter, no St. Paul, no St. John. The only one who could have been the Church for such a Head was the one who must have had full knowledge of the totality of that Decree at the time of the Annunciation and had accepted every aspect of it, when in obedience to that Decree She gave Her consent to the Incarnation. The Council Fathers were right: to provide the Son of God with a human as well as with a mystical body appears as the two aspects of but one Mystery, as the two halves of but one Decree of Predestination.
And with such revelations and pronouncements Mary’s mystical life has been incorporated into the prayerlife of the Church, and have we indeed been encouraged by the Holy Catholic Church to enter into that intimate domain in order to understand for our own benefit how our heavenly Mother was led by the Sacred Scriptures and by the Holy Spirit to the threshold of the revelation of this fathomless Decree, and to Her acceptance of all that it entailed in name of Herself and of the whole human race.
Encouraged by considerations such as these let us look then in some detail to the actual wording in which some of those Mysteries contemplated by Our Blessed Lady are veiled. Unencumbered by modern attempts to make the Bible say what the various translators think the Bible ought to say, or what they wish the Bible had said, Mary’s perception of the Word of God was pure and direct, not wrapped in any additional veil imposed on the text by human interference. This is no idle remark. We know e.g. that Our Blessed Lady read Eve’s words in Gen.4:1 in the Hebrew text as “I have gotten a man, Yahweh.” To Her penetrating understanding of the impression the Fall and the Promise had made on our first parents, these words were perfectly natural, even if Eve was mistaken in thinking that Yahweh had already fulfilled His Promise.
Although premature (as we know from hindsight) these words of Eve were there, inserted by the Holy Spirit for a meaning beyond human understanding. And so for Our Lady these words stood, and would one day have the meaning the Holy Spirit had given them!
Thus in tracing Our Blessed Lady’s meditations on the Word of God in order to catch a glimpse of Her supernatural insights, we cannot be guided by mere human attempts even at mitigating the starkness of a difficult text, let alone at making the Word of God mean what Modernism and other corruptions of the human and Catholic mind wish it to mean by simply rejecting or rewriting what seems unacceptable to the follies of those minds.
Yet, to appreciate the trigger point in Our Lady’s mind, the threshold, where advanced human thinking cannot go any further until it is lifted up by God’s Revelation into participation in the Act of Divine Thinking: to become, in other words, an act of Infused, Divine and Supernatural Faith, Eve’s words are central and indispensable! Many Jews knew about the intimate relationship between Yahweh, personally coming to the aid of His people, and His suffering Servant. But not even in their wildest dreams would it ever occur to them that these Two would be the one and same Person, that the Suffering Servant would be more than human: that in fact He would be God!. That one day a certain Woman would truthfully exclaim Eve’s words: “I have gotten a man: God”.
When it was revealed to Her by the Angel Gabriel that there are Three Persons in God, a Trinity of Persons in the one and undivided Godhead, only then did the most advanced of all human thinking accept the Truth in the Supernatural Light of Faith, that the Second Person of this Blessed Trinity wanted to be Her Son, and so enabled Her to say at last in all truthfulness what Eve had prematurely exclaimed in Her honour: “I have gotten a Man, God!”. Only then did it occur to Mary how Yahweh Himself could be the suffering Servant, coming to the aid of His people, and how good people everywhere could rally to His cause.
And so the finer points of the Old Testament came to the notice of the prayerful Mary “and were pondered by Her in Her Immaculate Heart”. There is, all will agree, a distinct difference between a general willingness to cooperate, and the specific generosity to obey a certain way in which God wants this cooperation to take place. For all ages there had been hidden in God a Decree which had predestined that His Son would have Two Bodies; that He would redeem the human race not only in His human body, as a human Individual, though not as a human person, but also as the Head of a corporate Body of other human individuals, which collectively had been foretold by God in Paradise as “the Seed of the Woman”.
Scattered throughout the Old Testament in the Messianic part of the Sacred Text, these valuable references begin the first outline of the Church, which, as the Body of the Head, had been made by that Divine Decree just as indispensable as the Head itself. Due to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, these valuable clues had not escaped the penetrating power of the prayerful Mary. Lying in Her heart and mind at the threshold of human understanding, they there awaited the graciousness of God to be lifted beyond themselves into the cohesion of God’s everlasting knowledge.
1. Mary had read and pondered about texts such as these:
“Thine O Lord is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all.” [1 Chr. 29:11]. And:
“Thou didst deliver Me from strife with the peoples; thou didst keep Me as the head of the nations; people whom I had not known served Me.” [2 Sam. 22:44], which is substantially the same as Ps. 18:43, in which texts the joy of the Psalmist is expressed over the fact that the future Deliverer will be the Head of the New Creation.
But here, as in so many other texts which are truly Messianic, what is being said about the Messiah has previously been said about Yahweh. [The all-time classic is, of course, what Christ Himself threw up at His adversaries: “If David can call Him ‘Lord’, how can He be his Son?” (The Lord, Yahweh, said to my Lord, the Messiah ...)
In the first of the two texts I have quoted here, the Lord God is called the Head, and in the second one, it is the Messiah on whom this unique title is being bestowed. The awareness of the closeness of this wondrous relationship between Yahweh and His Messiah in a prayerful life as that of the Blessed Virgin Mary was of course a source of great joy and consolation, but, as remarked before, not until the Revelation of the existence of the Trinity of Persons in the one Godhead, could the true relationship be believed and understood.
2. If the Headship of the future Redeemer was revealed by God in the Old Dispensation, what about texts which refer to the Body belonging to such a Head? Even in this we do not find the Old Testament wanting in clarity. Does not the author of the Letter to the Hebrews quote the Psalmist in ch. 10, vs. 5-7 with the words:
“You, who wanted no sacrifice or oblation, prepared a body for Me. You took no pleasure in holocausts or sacrifices for sin; then I said, just as I was commanded in the scroll of the book: ‘God, here am I! I have come to do Your Will’.”
And we can hear Our Blessed Lady meditate:
If it goes without saying for any intelligent creature to acknowledge before God that his or her body comes from the Creator, why is it so special for the Messiah to mention this fact? Who might He be, this Messiah? Did He not have a body beforehand?Moreover, would it be possible to come across some texts anywhere in Sacred Scripture which would substantiate that the Messiah, in addition to referring here to His Human Body, could also have been pointing beyond this body to another Body, that Corporate Body which He requires as Head? For Head He had been ordained to be. Without a shadow of a doubt the Holy Spirit would have directed the deep, prayerful attention of His future Bride to that wonderful part of the Old Testament, the Song of Songs, from whose scented pages the lyrics, extolling the desire of the beloved for his bride, reveal the ardour, almost the pain, of the Messiah, once He appeared in the flesh, to be united with His Bride, His very own Church, to become one body with her. A body that would share with Him whatever the ‘New Eve’, the ‘Woman of the Promise’, would have to suffer with the ‘New Adam’ from ‘the seed of the serpent’.