Genesis 3:9-15.20 Ephesians 1:3-6.11-12 Luke 1:26-38
St Anselm, one of the great medieval champions of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, wrote some beautiful prayers addressed to Our Lady. The first of the three included in his famous Prayers and Meditations is spoken from the position of a grave sinner. Not so much sinner in the general sense, as in “we are all sinners by virtue of our fallen nature”, but from the position of someone who has actually sinned, recently and gravely. To a modern reader a sexual sin inevitably comes to mind, but that may be saying more about our current cultural climate, or about me as this particular “modern reader”, than about St Anselm or the people he thought of as possible users of the prayer he'd composed. Be it as it may, the psychological state of someone who has just sinned and feels soiled by his deed, weighed down with guilt, is captured with an almost alarming precision in this beautiful poem. The utterer of the prayer is so desperate that, at one point, he even addresses the sins themselves: “My sins, my wicked deeds,” he says, “since you have destroyed my soul with your poison, why do you make it a horror with your filth, so that no one can look on my misery? If your weight is so great that I have no hope of being heard, why by your shame do you block the voice of my prayer?”
Our wicked deeds not only take away any hope of being heard by God, not only throw us into utter despair, but also bring about a certain “dullness of mind”, as St Anselm puts it elsewhere, and dullness of the senses, a torpor, resulting in an inability to say anything, even seemingly pointless words, thrown against a wall of dead silence. Nothing isolates and imprisons more effectively than sin. Above all, an overpowering sense of being ugly to look at comes over the sinner.
And yet this sinner, though he can in no way place himself before God for sheer lack of hope, nevertheless feels able to, though not without great difficulty, turn to Mary. He cannot speak at all, let alone pray, but he manages a look directed at Her. “Mary, Holy Mary... I long to ask that by your powerful merits and your loving prayers, you will deign to heal me,” he describes his state of mind. He longs to ask Her, that's all he's got. This bare longing is his last remaining link to God. But on this bare longing, like on a small raft in the middle of an ocean, a kind of a holy dance begins. “Already dying I long to be seen by such kindness, but I blush before the gaze of such purity,” he writes, torn and conflicted.
Our Lady's unrivalled sanctity comes over to him as kindness and purity then, and he begins to oscillate between the two. When Mary appears as all kindness, he draws closer, when She is purity, he pulls away, even though its brightness is immensly beautiful to behold. He pulls away because he feels ugly, like someone covered in mud who is keeping his distance from a beautiful woman wearing a spotlessly white dress. Then a slow breakthrough begins to take place. In his confusion the author of the prayer finally grasps at crumbs of reality and truth. “I shudder, Lady, to show you all my foul state, lest it make you shudder at the sight of me,” he says, “but, alas for me, I cannot be seen any other way.” What do I have to lose, in other words? I am a sinner, that's the truth about me. Then comes another crucial step: “The brightness of your holiness confounds the darkness of my sins, but surely you will not blush to feel kindness towards such a wretch?” The breakthrough arrives through sheer logical reasoning which breaks this ultimately self-indulgent psychological dance, this inner deadlock. Rays of sound doctrine begin to penetrate the mental prison of his thoughts, which until then have been going round in endless circles. Surely it would be wrong to say that my sin is too great for Mary's kindness, that would be to undervalue Her holiness! To hold that I could be more evil than She is holy would be to make myself greater than Her. This cannot be! So Her incomparable purity confounds and makes me blush, yes, but at the same time guarantees that ultimately She will never turn away in disgust. It triumphs over my sin.
All this rings true, but true as seen from our perspective. The author of the prayer projects his mental states onto Mary, they are reflected back to him through Her holiness. Does this back-and-forth mean that She pushing him away or is something happening hare, a real connection taking place? But when what you see reflected in Her gets better and better, then you realize that She is taking it, that She is looking back and not just standing aloof covered in Her supreme holiness, still less pushing you away. But how is it like to be Mary in all this? We can only speculate, but certainly Her kindness and purity are one and the same thing. She is not oscillating, She is not pushing and pulling. She dances the Trinitarian dance in God, but with regard to us She is steady like a tower, like a fortress. Our Lady's unique, unsurpassed holiness, holiness to the point of freedom from the original sin, does in no way threaten Her connection with us. On the contrary, it guarantees that the connection can never be broken, even by the worst of sins. She sees sin for what it is, a sickness passed on from one generation to the next, and has nothing but compassion for us.
“Hear me, Lady,” St Anselm concludes, “and make whole the soul of a sinner who is your servant, by virtue of the blessed fruit of your womb, who sits at the right hand of his almighty Father and is praised and glorified above all for ever. Amen.”
DSP