Vigils Reading

ENTIRELY TURNED TOWARDS GOD

By Lucien Legrand6

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The significance of Mary’s virginity is entirely different from both cultic

virginity and philosophical continence. Mary knows that her virginity has no

value of its own and no power but that of the Spirit. She does not speak of the

greatness of her virginity. For her, it is not virginity that makes her great: it is

the Lord. As far as she is concerned, she is nothing and her virginity seals her

nothingness. Because she is a virgin, she is ‘poor’, a contemptible thing,

considered worthless by the world. Of course, in the case of Mary as in that of

the ‘Poor of Yahweh’ in the Old Testament, poverty should be taken in the

biblical sense. It is not merely negative. It does not mean only destitution…

Poverty is a religious attitude which underlies the spiritual development

of the Old Testament and prepares the way for the abasement of the cross, the

imprint of which it bears by anticipation. Biblical poverty does indeed mean life

deprived of any human hope but also and mostly at its deepest, radical

detachment, total humility and consequently utter confidence in God. Mary’s

virginity belongs to this type of poverty. It is a form of that religious attitude

made up of faith and abandon, joy and confidence; it is akin to humility and can

be summarized as an attitude of religious expectation. It is silence, readiness,

emptiness. And her greatness comes from the faith and confidence in god which

spring in the heart on that emptiness, and from the answer God gave to that

faith and confidence.

Virginity of this kind differs entirely from its pagan counterparts. It does

not represent an attempt to substitute our influence for God’s power: on the

contrary, Mary has no other ambition than to be the handmaid of the Lord.

Neither does Mary’s virginity correspond to a merely human longing for purity

and moral greatness. Her virginity does not belong so much to the moral as to

the theological virtues. It manifests an attitude before god rather than an effort

of moral perfection and of self-achievement. Luke’s Gospel of the Infancy does

not describe in Mary a heroic form of the virtue of chastity. What it sees in her is

sheer faith and hope which has no reliance in creatures but is entirely turned

toward God.