“And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.’ But [Jesus] said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it’ (Luke 11:27-28).
These words form part of the Gospel reading for several feasts of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos. They remind us of the true motive for our veneration of her and, more importantly, of the key element of the spiritual life which we share with her.
We fallen human beings so easily become wrapped up in externals. We allow the trappings of life to captivate us rather than the substance of living. As our Lord reminds us over and over in the Gospels, it is what is within that counts. In the first place, the face we present to the world may or may not reflect our inner reality. Often we cover a soul seething with passions under a bland and pious exterior. Secondly, when we concentrate on externals, we very often become enthralled by the trivial and the superficial. We must maintain our relationships with God our Creator, with others, and with our world on the most profound and serious level. Yet, too often, our attitudes to the world, our dealings with others, even our spiritual life are governed by the petty and the frivolous. We evaluate others, and even ourselves, based on attributes which pertain only to this world, and not to the Kingdom of God.
This second obstacle to spiritual health is most insidious because it usually does not derive from temptation or a will to sin. Most often we become enmeshed in the trivial and superficial simply because we have become complacent in our religion, in its routines and practices. If faced with a direct enticement to sin, we might readily recognize it and resist. Complacency creeps in, however, as a blurring of our attention and a softening of our inner awareness, a self-satisfaction through which our discernment and moral courage slowly, silently seep away.
The routines of spirituality and piety are not bad in themselves. Indeed a strong spiritual life depends on the disciplines of fasting according to rule, of regular prayer and Scripture reading, of the structures of public worship and participation of the Mysteries. But these things are valuable, not in themselves, but as means to an end. We cannot be content with controlling our diet through fasting. We must turn the self-control so acquired against temptations outside and the passions within. We must use our knowledge of Scripture to evaluate our lives and to discern the next steps on our path to virtue and holiness. We must use the communion of prayer and the sanctification of the Mysteries to deepen our love of God and of neighbor.
Our sins have pushed God outside of us; we try to make Him a mere spectator in our existence. We have denied the power of Christ’s death and Resurrection and shut out the Holy Spirit. We are surrounded by divine power and grace, yet we bar the doors against it. The image of God, imprinted upon our very souls, yearns for fulfillment in Him, yet we smother it under blankets of sin and the detritus left by shameful behavior and perverse pursuits. The goal of the spiritual life is to let the power of divine grace enter the heart, where it will nourish the divine image and bring us into the fullness of holiness and love. The true purpose of the spiritual life is not to teach us to fast, to pray, to behave with decorum and piety in church. Rather, the aim of the spiritual discipline, the externals of the Faith, is that we may enjoy “the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus” (I Timothy 1:1).
Complacency rooted in routine observance of externals, however, saps the spiritual disciplines of their power and hinders our receiving their benefits. Already, long before our Lord’s coming, the prophets had identified this weakness in their people Israel. The Hebrews, like us, often grew too comfortable in their religion. They felt they were secure in their status as members of the Chosen People and contented themselves with perfunctory observance of rituals such as circumcision which were signs of that status. The prophets countered complacent superficiality by pleading for them to accept God’s offer and promise of a deeper religion of the heart. “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances” (Ezekiel 36:26-27) “‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ says the Lord: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ says the Lord; ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.’” (Jeremiah 31:33-34). The last and greatest of the prophets, the Forerunner and Baptist John challenged his hearers with the reproach, “Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Matthew 3:8-9).
These same attitudes confronted our Lord in His dealings with His contemporaries. He addresses them in the incident we cited above: “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.’ But he said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it’ (Luke 11:27-28).
Our Lord redirects the comments of the woman in the crowd, turning their attention from the external role of His mother to the inner reality of their own relationship to God. As Saint John Chrysostom notes, “ … the answer was not that of one rejecting his mother, but of One who would show that her having born Him would have nothing availed her, had she not been so very good and faithful. Now if, setting aside the excellence of her soul, it profited Mary nothing that the Christ was born of her, much less will it be able to avail us to have a father or a brother, or a child of virtuous and noble disposition, if we ourselves be far removed from his virtue.”
It is good that we honor the Theotokos for her role in the mystery of salvation. She is our representative, from whom the incarnate God took the human nature which He redeems and purifies and shares with us. But if honoring her is all we do, she remains a figure peripheral to our spiritual life and divorced from our spiritual struggle. The characteristic of the Theotokos for which we honor her is not the simple and superficial one of being mother of the Messiah, marvelous as that may be. We need to pass beyond it, to appreciate the depth of faith and love which made her a proper mother for the Savior, and to understand that we too are called to embrace the same faith and burn with that same love. This is our hope and the goal of our spiritual struggle, for, as St John Chrysostom points out, “ … we have always need of faith, and a life shining and bright, since this alone will have power to save us.”
St Simeon the New Theologian writes, “When we confess Him with our mouths and repent our former lawlessness from the depths of our souls, then immediately – just as God, the Word of the Father, entered into the Virgin’s womb – even so do we receive the Word in us … We do not, of course, conceive Him bodily, as did the Virgin and Theotokos, but in a way that is at once spiritual and substantial … we conceive the Word of God in our hearts like the Virgin – given, that is, that our souls, too, are virginal and pure. And just as the fire of divinity did not consume her who was all-undefiled, so neither will it burn us up who keep our hearts pure and clean. Instead, the fire comes to us as dew from heaven, and as springs of water unto everlasting life.” This great Father is merely expanding upon our Lord’s own words. Let us, like the Theotokos, hear the word of God and keep it always in our hearts and our thoughts. May the fulness of love and grace in our soul then spill over into our words and deeds. Then our heart too shall be like that womb which gave birth to Christ and those breasts at which He nursed. We shall experience a rebirth of His grace and peace in our lives and, through us, the world around us shall be nourished and renewed in His mercy and love.
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