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Vigils Reading – Memorial of the BVM
February 1
SHE HEARD THE WORD OF GOD
AND KEPT IT
By Fr Hans Urs von Balthasar
◊◊◊
Mary is a “prototype of the church,” and this for two reasons: she is the
place of the real and bodily indwelling of the Word in the most intimate union of
Mother and Child sharing the same flesh; and, in the spiritual sphere, she is –
and to this the former is due – 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 whither she
“knows not”; so far is the word she follows 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.