Vigils Reading – Memorial of BVM

SHE OBEYED THE WORD

By Han Urs von Balthasar7

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Mary is a prototype of the Church, and this for two reasons: she is the

place of the real and bodily in-dwelling of the Word in the most intimate union

of Mother and Child sharing the same flesh; and, in the spiritual sphere, she is

a servant, in her entire person, body and soul, one who knows no law of her

own, but only conformity to the Word of God. Because she was a virgin, which

means a pure, exclusive hearer of the word, she became mother, the place of the

incarnation of the Word. Her womb was blessed, only because she “heard the

Word of God and kept it”, because she “kept all these words and pondered them

in her heart”. She is the model which should govern contemplation, if it is to

keep clear of two dangers: one, that of seeing the word only as something

external, instead of the profoundest mystery within our own being, that in

which we live, move and are: the other, that of regarding the word as so interior

to us that we confuse it with our own being, with a natural wisdom given us once

and for all, and ours to use as we will…

The hearer par excellence is the virgin who became pregnant with the

Word, and bore him as her own and the Father’s Son. She herself, even when

Mother, remained a servant; the Father alone is the Master, together with the

Son, who is her life and who molds her life. She lives wholly for the fruit of her

womb. Even after she has given him birth, she continues to carry him within

her; she only needs to look into her heart, to find him. But she does not omit,

on that account, to turn her gaze uninterruptedly upon the child growing up by

her side, upon the youth and the man, whose ideas and actions seem to her ever

more unpredictable and astonishing. More and more, she “understood not”

what he meant when he stayed behind in the temple without telling her, when

he failed to receive her, when, in his public life, he concealed his power and

spent himself in vain and, in the end, detached himself from her as she stood at

the foot of the cross, substituting for himself a stranger, John, to be her son.

With all the force of her body, she obeys the word that resounds ever more

strongly and divinely but seems more and more alien and almost tears her

asunder, although, in spite of all, she has given herself to it wholly and radically

in advance. She lets herself be led where she “knows not”; the word she follows

is far from being her own wisdom. Yet she is wholly in accord with its leading,

so surely is the word she loves “engrafted” in her heart.

7 London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1963, pp. 22-24.14