Ave Maria! Draft

Ave Maria!

The Council of Ephesus (431) officially bestowed upon the Blessed Virgin Mary the glorious title of theotokos, Mother of God, which was already well used, in an effort to combat the heresy of Nestorius who taught that Christ had two distinct natures that were only loosely united, contrary to the Nicene Creed, written a century earlier. Christians today universally recognize the error of Nestorius, but few recognize the sublime tactic by which it was crushed. Keep in mind that Mary had nothing to do with the debate at hand, and yet the Council’s teaching wonderfully addresses the problem at hand, for in declaring Mary, an ordinary human, to be the Mother of God, it made Christ the product of human generation, no different than you and me, but in making Mary the Mother of God it reasserted His divinity. Because Christ was born from Mary, He was human, but because He was also fully God, Mary was the Mother of God. She is surely not the mother of divinity, that is the nature of the Trinity before the beginning of time, but the true Mother, by means of human generation, of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. The Council could have just as easily reasserted the Nicene Creed’s almost obnoxious list of attributes concerning Christ’s nature: “the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. ”, but enlightened by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit they chose to use Mary as the vehicle of squishing Christ’s two natures into one person.

Through Mary Christianity becomes a human creed, one that embraces every facet of our humanity from our anxieties and fears, to our happiness and joy, for it is through Mary that the incomparably sublime fact of God made man was made reality. The Incarnation was not necessary for God to accomplish man’s salvation “for God with His omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways”, says St. Thomas Aquinas (ST: III, 1, 2), and yet St. Augustine also affirms that, “there was not a more fitting way of healing our misery” (De Trin. Xii, 10). With all of creation subject to his almighty reign, the Father chose to Incarnation not out of necessity, but because of the incomprehensible beauty of this plan of salvation, by which, “the only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in His divinity, assumed our nature, so that He, made man, might make us gods” (Opusc. 57:1-4).

The first words of the glorious salvation given to us were, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” (Lk 1:28). God Himself saw the Incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin to be the most fitting method of our salvation, and through the mediation of the angel Gabriel He commenced salvation by saluting the Virgin. What the Council of Ephesus realized was that our salvation was not a matter of metaphysics or scriptural interpretation, but a matter of God made man in the person of Christ and imitation God’s plan, the Council reaffirmed that one of the most proper way to honor our Savior and to thank him for the humiliation He endured for our salvation is to honor His Holy Mother. In fact, when we fail to honor the Mother of Jesus, we fail to honor the Father, for we reject His plan of salvation and substitute our own. When we fail to give Mary the pride of place in salvation history God gave her we fail to love the effects of God, and in so doing fail to love God Himself.

In fact, failure to adore the entirety of God’s plan for the salvation of man, Holy Scripture gives us reason to believe, was the reason for the downfall of Lucifer and his followers. The 12th chapter of Revelation has “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: and being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered”, representing the Blessed Virgin Mary and the twelve Apostles, the means through which Christ would be brought into the world. St. John continues, “and behold a great red dragon... that stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered; that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son,” representing Satan who, with malice directed towards God, rejected the idea that God should humiliate Himself to be born of a woman, and further that the faithful would have to give this woman the honor due to a mother of God. The woman brings forth the child and then, “there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil”. The chapter tells us that rejecting and despising the Incarnation, which by Divine decree exalts the Mother of God, is the great sin of the devil and his followers.

Yet the Christian life is never about fear, as St. John reminds us in his first letter, but about love, and we need not fear damnation from our lack of honoring the Blessed Virgin in the past, but rather fly to her now and give ourselves to her completely, for she is not only the Mother of Christ, but Our Mother. While all of the Apostles are certainly unworthy of the duties Christ entrusts them with, John shines above the rest as the most worthy of the disciples, for not only was he the beloved disciple, but he was also the only disciple to remain with Jesus under the Cross. As a final gift to the disciple who He loved, Jesus gave His own mother, entrusting her to John and John to her with the words “woman, behold your son” and “son, behold your mother” (19: 26-27). Further, let us realize that the Evangelist does not use his name in this passage, but rather refers to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, assuring us that Jesus gives His mother to all of His disciples whom He loves. To the disciple who remains loyal to Jesus He gives the most precious gift of His Mother and therefore, let us not despise the gifts of Christ, but rather beg him to grant them to us, make a feeble attempt to be found more worthy of them, and embrace them when we receive them!

The most appropriate devotion of often addressing ourselves to Mary as our Mother, imploring her to plead our cause with our Father as all mothers plead their child’s cause with their fathers, reaches its perfection in the recitation of the Most Holy Rosary. In this devotion, given to the faithful by the Virgin herself in the 13th century in an apparition to St. Dominic, one meditates on the mysteries of Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection, while reciting the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be. As with all Marian devotion, the Rosary’s ultimate focus is not on Mary, but rather it uses the Hail Mary as a means for meditating on Christ. This is most appropriate, for Mary knew her Son far better than any of His disciples from whom we get the Holy Scriptures, and her love for Him was far greater than any man’s. And far from being exhaustingly long or repetitious, for one who immerses himself in it, the Rosary truly is the rose garden that its name means, for not only does it inundate one with the sweetness of divine grace and mystery, but it offers the thorn-less and most fragrant rose of love to the Blessed Virgin and her Son.

So pleasing is this devotion to Almighty God that in all modern apparitions the Blessed Virgin has implored the faithful to pray the Rosary every day. In the 1917 apparitions at Fatima, 3 weeks before the October Revolution in Russia, the Blessed Virgin urged the three children present to consecrate Russia to her, lest its evils spread throughout the world and God is truly the only one who knows what great service these three children’s prayer provided for our world today. We see that the Rosary is a most powerful tool against the activities of evil in the world, which the faithful have a duty to make frequent use of for the good of their neighbors. Not only is the Rosary a powerful means for by which the whole world is aided, but through the Rosary the Blessed Virgin promises to lead us in a life of true virtue and good works and to obtain for us from God the grace of final perseverance.

So, like the Council of Ephesus, yes, like the Father Himself, let us Christians cast aside our arguments which so quickly descend into a loveless pedantry and embrace the love of the Virgin Mary. Let us sing her praises loudly, for in so doing we sing the praises of Our Glorious God, and the marvelous salvation which He wrought for us!

Ave Maria!