This is the sixth and final post on Redeemer
in the Womb: Jesus Living in Mary by John Saward.
You can find Post #1 here.
Post #2 here.
Post #3 here.
Post #4 here.
Post #5 here.
Summary
Chapter 7: The Witness of Three Women
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 by 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.” 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. 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.
###
Michelle’s Comment:
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."
Michael’s Reply to Michelle:
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!
My Reply to Michelle:
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.
Michelle’s Reply:
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!
Michelle’s Comment:
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.
Michael’s Reply to Michelle:
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.
###
My Comment:
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.
###
My Comment:
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.
Michelle’s Reply:
"...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!
###
My Comment:
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.
###
My Comment:
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.
###
My Comment:
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 was a marvelous advent devotional.
Frances Comment:
Beautiful image, Manny. Thank you.
