Posted on 07/07/2018 6:53:16 AM PDT by Salvation
Below is a touching video of a hearing-impaired infant who, after being fitted with a hearing aid, hears the voices of his parents for the very first time. Initially, the child fidgets, afraid of what is happening. But as the voices of his parents reach his soul, a smile of joy and recognition blossoms on his face.
In the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil is a beautiful line regarding an infants first recognition of his mother. In this case it refers to seeing, but the same could be said of hearing.
Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.
Begin, little boy, to recognize the face of your mother with a smile.
Spiritually, this video speaks to those of us who may have fidgeted as we were introduced to the voice of our Heavenly Father and Holy Mother Church. At first, we objected to the voice of truth and resisted those who sought to help us to hear. But, prayerfully (and I am a witness), many of us adjusted and began to smile at the beautiful voice of truth.
Faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes through the Word of Christ (Romans 10:17).
Enjoy the video!
Monsignor Pope Ping!
Please watch the video!
Later
I just had an odd thought. The church is the bride of Christ, who is God the Son. Wouldn't that make the church, not the mother, but the daughter-in-law of the Father?
T Y 4 posting video!
Beautiful, isn’t it?
OK, works for me!
But look at the Church in another context, the context of Mary.
It doesn't exactly map out dot-for-dot nuclear-family-wise --- keep this bolded caveat in mind --- but you can surely say that Mary is a "daughter" of the Father (not by virtue of being a begotten daughter, but by virtue of being a regular human being in the State of Grace, and thus being made in the Imago Dei) --- again, not parallel to Jesus, but more parallel to Eve who, with Adam, was created in His Image...
Mary is the Mother of the Son and therefore she's the Mother of the Body of Christ, the Church...("Behold your mother.")
And Mary is the Bride of the Spirit, Who spousally "overshadowed her" (to use Luke's Biblical language) to bring about the conception of Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Mary is also an image of the Church (Holy Mother Church) as well as the primordial enemy of Satan ("I will put enmity between you [Serpent] and the woman, between your seed and her Seed) you can see in Genesis 3 and Revelation 12, bringing the Incarnate Christ into the World. Likewise an image of Daughter Zion, Daughter Jerusalem, Israel-as-Church and Church-as-Israel.
The images kaleidoscope around a bit: as usual, a multivalent Sign. Not "this only" but this AND that AND that.
This is wonderful food for thought.
And I'd love to muse over it lovingly with you and anybody else. But. I'm not going to argue about it. So if anybody just wants to take up the usual blunt-force-weapons, beat the poetry to death and argue over the remains ("no Mary's not! Not none 'o' that, Nope!") I say bless you, and bye!
I'm going to tread lightly here, as you asked...
Mary is the Mother of the Son and therefore she's the Mother of the Body of Christ, the Church...("Behold your mother.")
The "original" Greek/Syriac term is Θεοτόκος Theotokos, which means "bearer of God," demonstrated in part by the German equivalent Gottesgebärerin. It's only later, after the Nestorians were responded to, that the phrase "Mother of God" in its various iterations becomes prevalent in the West.
I think "Theotokos" threads the needle between the humanity of Mary that could not progenit divinity, and the fully divine nature of God the Son that conjoins itself with a fully human nature in the Incarnation.
This leads to a profession which I hope my LCMS pastor never discovers :-) the more deeply I dive into Marian teaching, the more I find myself in agreement with, not the Catholics, and not Martin Luther (with whom almost all Lutherans today disagree when it comes to Mary), but with the Orthodox. You can read here a summary of what that is. The pull quote: "All Marian piety, in other words, is an expression of christological dogma. It points beyond the Virgin herself and focuses on the significancefor her as for usof the One whom she bore, our Lord Jesus Christ." This is the essence of the prayer of St. Patrick, that everything we experience, and everything we become, point to Christ, and not to Mary or the saints or to us.
The Incarnation is about Christ. This makes Our Lord the God-Man, and the carne of the Incarnation is from Mary's flesh (who else?) --- so we're all related to Him, on His mother's side.
It's interesting, your attraction to the Orthodox Mary. In Russian Orthodoxy, I've noticed that wherever the West has 4 paragraphs of doctrine, the Orthodox will have 400 lines of poetry. I love it.
I read somewhere that at the time of the Russian Revolution, Russia had --- could it be? --- 2000 churches, monasteries, convents and shrines named for Mary. (They are so incarnational, so all-out.) Russia was colloquially known as the house of Mary, since there were more shrines and churches dedicated to Our Lady than in any other country at the time.
All of my childhood, we (Catholics) were praying rosaries for the conversion of Communist Russia, and I have not one doubt that Mary was praying along with us, or we with her, to her Son, Lord and God, for this conversion. Has anyone ever reflected sufficiently on the amazing collapse of Soviet Communism without oceans of blood, a continent-wide blood-tsunami?
When we were hardly paying attention. A couple deep breaths, and the USSR was gone.
I have quite often mused over Acts 1:6-14:
“When they had gathered together they asked him, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? He answered them, It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven. Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath days journey away.
“When they entered the city they went to the upper room where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.”
I think about those waiting for the apostles in the upper room; the women, Mary, his brothers. I picture the apostles getting ready to leave the upper room to gather together with Jesus as He instructed them to do. They are asked by the brothers what they think Jesus will say to them. One of them responds, saying that he thinks Jesus will tell them about His plans to restore the kingdom.
So the eleven leave, and the women, Mary, and the brothers wait, likely speculating with one another about what is happening. After what seems like forever, they faintly hear in the distance voices which gradually get louder as the apostles get closer to the upper room. They are all excited and talking at once, and Mary with a chuckle says, whoa, wait a minute, one at a time.
So Peter, as usual, is the one to speak. As he describes the things that Jesus said and how He was lifted into the clouds, and how to men dressed in white garments told them that Jesus would come back in the same way as they saw Him going into heaven, a sense of wonderment and awe overwhelmed them.
As Peter is speaking, I can imagine those in the room stealing glances toward Mary, and thinking about how she is the mother of Jesus. I would think that they held her in high esteem and might have addressed her as Mother Mary.
And think of this: in Luke, the Holy Spirit overshadows Mary, causing her to conceive Jesus, her Lord and her God, in her womb. It's like Mary's little inward Pentecost.
In Acts, the Holy Spirit comes and overshadows all the Apostles and disciples gathered in that Upper Room, including Mary.
It must have reminded her, in the supreme joy in her heart, of that first overshadowing, when she became the God-bearer.
And the other disciples, if they realized that's how Christ was incarnated and took flesh at the beginning of His earthly life, must have been beside themselves with awe and wonderment. It's their 'big" Pentecost.
Now they, too, would be "God-bearers," in their own way "bearing Christ" to the world.
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