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Three Sketches,
Some Outlines And Additional Notes
Leonard
Feeney, S. J. Sheed
and Ward, 1939
Christianity
is not the religion which holds that God exists. Every religion holds this
dogma, whether it conceives God to be one or many. Christianity is the
religion which holds that God became man, that He entered our ranks, assumed
our nature, translated Himself into our idiom, “sifted Himself to suit our
light,” and was born in Bethlehem in a temporal generation, Who was born in
eternity in an eternal generation. When
we betake ourselves to the crib on Christmas morning, it is not to see just
another baby, nor even to see just another mother. This is the most different
child and the most different mother who have ever existed. Nobody like them
ever was before, or ever will be again. Take the mother. Her
child was born of the love of the Holy Ghost; sheer Love made her fruitful.
She is the fulfillment of a thousand prophecies uttered in the Old Testament.
As a special preparation for this most holy prerogative, she was herself conceived
free from Original Sin, never tainted by the evil that beset our nature when
Adam spoiled us all in Paradise. A
few brief notes in connection with the Lady who bends over her child with
such awe and reverence on the first Christmas night, may be not unwelcome
even to those who know in substance the details of the mystery. There was
established between this young girl and God Himself, a sublime relationship
which we call the state of Sanctifying Grace. This relationship was
determined by God to be a permanent quality of human nature. Adam and Eve,
the father and mother of the human family, were endowed with the gift of
sanctification and were given the opportunity of establishing it as a
permanent possession of mankind, and of handing it on as an heirloom to their
children. God’s plan was excellent and simple. By applying the gift of
Sanctifying Grace to human nature at its sources, in the persons of the
parent mother and father who contained potentially the natures of all human
children, God could devise most generously and expeditiously to sanctify all
mankind without compromising, as He never could, the gratuitous character of
His gift. But,
by a most contemptible abuse of their liberty, this man and woman desecrated
our nature and unsanctified it by sin. They were false to their trust and
robbed the human race of the supernatural excellence which God had attached
to it. We are the children of that sinful pair, and we pay the toll. We come
into this world deprived of the heavenly adornment which would make us
eternally desirable in the sight of God. There is a lack in us of something
God’s love had wanted to be there. Our nature is now crippled and unable to
achieve its primal destiny. There is a void in us, a darkness, an incapacity
for fulfilling our original purpose. We bear a wound, a guilt; we are soiled
with a stain, a macula, which is called Original Sin. To
restore human nature to the Divine excellence it once possessed, God became
man. He wanted to redeem us and adopt us back again into our original state
of Divine childhood. Nineteen hundred years ago He came to fulfill this task.
He took possession of a human nature and made it his own; He came to pay the
price of our ransom and be our Saviour. Please
do not think I am attempting to exaggerate this mission of Our Lord in coming
into our world. About Baptism, the normal means by which a Christian is
restored to the state of Sanctifying Grace, Our Lord has said: “Unless a man
be born again of water and the Holy Ghost he shall not enter into the kingdom
of Heaven.” And of Sanctifying Grace, the “living water” of which He spoke to
the woman of Samaria, He said: “If thou didst know the gift of God.”
Sanctifying Grace is no catchword. It is the fundamental benefit Christianity
has to offer the world through the Incarnation. Its realization and
fulfillment in the souls of men is the only reason for the existence of the
Catholic Church. A sanctifying Jesus Christ has been the Catholic Church’s
Messias from the beginning. God did not become man to make us contented with
this world; He came to make us discontented with this world. He came to amaze
us with a revelation about a world to come. He came to talk about a pearl of
great price, a wedding garment of incomparable beauty which humanity could
put on and thus enter the wedding feast of Eternal Life. Listen
to the way Christ prayed for us to His Heavenly Father on the night before He
died: Sanctify
them in truth . . . that they all may be one, as thou, Father, in
me, and I in thee; . . . that they may be one as we also are one: I
in them, and thou in me; . . . and the world may know that thou
hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast also loved me. Father, I will
that where I am, they also whom thou hast given me may be with me; that they may
see my glory which thou hast given me, because thou hast loved me before the
creation of the world. . . . And I have made known thy name to
them, and will make it known; that the love wherewith thou hast loved me, may
be in them, and I in them. What
is the meaning of this constant repetition of one . . . one
. . . on Our Saviour’s lips? With whom are we to be made one? With
God? “Yes,” said Saint Augustine, “God became man that man might become God.”
He became man to adopt us into the sunlight of His everlasting beatitude, to
make us participators of the life of God, to unite us to the perfection of
His single nature and take us to live in eternal ecstasy with the Blessed
Trinity. To
the young Mother who stands in silence and wonderment beside the manger-box
in the cave of Bethlehem, this gift of Sanctifying Grace was bestowed in its
fullness. Our
Blessed Lady was a little Jewish girl. She lived in the northern province of
Palestine, which is called Galilee, and was the only child of an aged couple,
Joachim and Anna, and her name, as we know, was Mary. Nine months before her
birth, Mary of Nazareth was conceived in the womb of Anna. Her physical
conception occurred naturally, according to the manner of every other human
child, through the humble processes of her father and mother cooperating as
husband and wife. This much of her was usual and ordinary. But
being destined, as she was, to become the Mother of Jesus Christ, she was
pre-sanctified for this sublime function by being given, at the first moment
of her conception, the gift of Sanctifying Grace. The darkness which exists
in human nature in the first phase of its development was not allowed to
enter the soul of Mary. As a beautiful gesture of Divine courtesy and filial
respect, Our Saviour saw to it that this maiden, from whose body He would one
day derive the substance of His own, should enjoy the benefits of Redemption
in a fashion all her own. At the first earliest instant when there was life
in the womb of Anna, God sanctified it. He destined Mary at that moment for
the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the Immaculate Conception. The
Immaculate Conception has nothing to do, as is commonly supposed, with Our
Lady’s chastity, nor with the chastity of her father and mother. The
Immaculate Conception refers to Our Lady’s Christianity. Its meaning
is best studied, not in connection with the Nativity or the Annunciation, but
in connection with the third chapter of Genesis and with the discourse of Our
Lord at the Last Supper; for there is a world of difference between the doctrine
of the Immaculate Conception and that of the Virgin Birth. The Immaculate
Conception refers to Our Lady at her own birth and the sanctified
condition of her soul in the nine months that preceded it. The Virgin Birth
refers to her at Our Lord’s birth, and to the fact that she conceived
Him without the aid of man. The Immaculate Conception refers to Our Lady as
a child; the Virgin Birth has to do with her as a mother. The
Immaculate Conception has reference to the condition of Our Lady’s soul at
the instant of its creation; the Virgin Birth to the condition of her body
before, during, and after the time that she became fruitful with the
Divine Child. This is the woman, the miracle woman of all the centuries, who
stands so quietly by her Infant in the cold of the first Christmas Eve, and
at whose side stands meekly her husband, Saint Joseph, marveling at the Child
of predilection which was not his own. And
now about the Child Himself. One does not go down to Bethlehem to see an
ordinary child, for the little Jesus is the wonder child of our Earth,
fashioned and structured in a way no child has ever been since the human race
began. To begin with, He possesses two natures, the nature of God and the
nature of man: He possesses the Divine Nature because it was such that the
Eternal Father gave to Him in Its fullness when He generated Him in eternity.
He is true man because He possesses a human body and a human soul. But there
is only one person in Him, the person who coexists in beatitude with the
Father and the Holy Ghost in Heaven. The same “I” who says, “I am the
Father’s only begotten Son,” also says in truth, once Bethlehem has occurred,
“and I am also Mary’s Child.” The theological implication behind this great
mystery should not be ignored simply because of the strangeness of our
Emmanuel. To love Him we must know Him, and we must know Him as He is, and
realize that there is no one in this world like Him. He has two minds, two
wills, two spirits (one of them a human soul), one body. From the very first moment
of His conception by the power of the Holy Ghost, He was in possession of the
Beatific Vision, and saw with His human mind the eternal beauty of God face
to face. He was also gifted with infused knowledge to enable Him to fulfill
His rôle as Messias and prophet; and lastly, there came through the medium of
His little senses, through the windows of His eyes, and the doorways of His
ears, human sights and sounds just as they come to any other child, and this
we call His “experimental knowledge.” Having
known the Eternal Beatitude in the bosom of His Father, it was most terrible
that He should ever experience suffering in the temporal sphere into which He
moved. This little Child should never have been cold, should never have been
abandoned or neglected or forced to go into exile. No one should ever have
been unkind to Him, or ungrateful. Never should His poor body have been
scourged at the pillar, His beautiful head crowned with thorns, and nails
impressed into His sacred hands and feet. He should never have been covered
with mud and spittle, never been called a sinner and a fool; not even after
His death should the Centurion, save for fulfilling the prophecy, have
pierced His side with a spear. But
we will forget at Christmas time that such things are to happen in the course
of His short life. We shall only be glad that a Child is born to us who is
the salvation of the world, and we shall join our minds and hearts to some
simple shepherds, adore Him, and be glad there is another Christmas. |