The growing science of Mary, Mary: Day 363

The growing science of Mary

Fr. Frederick Faber compares the grand truth about Mary to the great truths of science: In both cases, a truth so grand and complex has endless applica- tions and lessons to teach us.

Mary is like one of those great scientific truths whose full import we

never master except by long meditation, and by studying its bearings on a sys- tem. Then at last the fertility and grandeur of the truth seem endless. So it is with the Mother of God. She teaches us God as we never could otherwise have learned him. She mirrors more of him in her single self than all the rest of the intelligent and material creation. In her the prodigies of his love toward our- selves became credible.

She is the hilltop from which we gain distant views into his perfections, and see fair regions of him of which we otherwise would not have dreamed. Our thoughts of him grow worthier by means of her. The full dignity of creation shines bright in her. Standing on her, the perfect mere creature, we look over into the depths of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, which otherwise would have been a gulf whose edges we could never have reached.

The amount of knowledge in the present age is overwhelming. Yet the deep- est thinkers deem science to be only in its infancy. Many things indicate this truth. Just as science is yearly growing, yearly outgrowing the old systems that held it within too narrow limits, so is the science of Mary growing in each loving and studious heart all through life, within the spacious domains of vast theol- ogy. And in heaven it will outgrow all that earth’s theologies have laid down as limits—limits made necessary more by the narrowness of our own capacities than by the real magnitude of the one they define. Yet we would ill use Mary’s magnificence, or rather we would show that we had altogether misunderstood it, if we did not use it as a revelation of God, and an approach to him.

—Fr. Frederick William Faber, Bethlehem

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . .  .

In what ways has my own understanding of “the science of Mary” increased as I’ve read these meditations throughout the past year? In which matters do I seek a fuller, clearer understanding of her?

CLOSING PRAYER

From a prayer of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: You, Mary, are the vessel and cham- ber containing all mysteries. You know what the patriarchs never knew; you have experienced what was never revealed to the angels; you have heard what the prophets never heard.

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