The Blessed Virgin Mary

Today is the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. Incidentally, this also happens to be the day that Sheldon Vanauken, about whom I have written much elsewhere, was received into the Catholic Church.

However, Catholics are not the only ones who remember Mary on this day. The Anglican Communion does as well. One of the readings for today is as follows....

Luke 1:39-56

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, 'Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.'
And Mary said,'My soul magnifies the Lord,and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;for the Mighty One has done great things for me,and holy is his name.His mercy is for those who fear himfrom generation to generation.He has shown strength with his arm;he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,and lifted up the lowly;he has filled the hungry with good things,and sent the rich away empty.He has helped his servant Israel,in remembrance of his mercy,according to the promise he made to our ancestors,to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.'
And Mary remained with her for about three months and then returned to her home.

C. S. Lewis has a brief comment on this passage of Scripture in his book, Reflections on the Psalms....

I think, too, it will do us no harm to remember that, in becoming Man, He bowed His neck beneath the sweet yoke of a heredity and early environment. Humanly speaking, He would have learned this style, if from no one else (but it was all about Him) from His Mother. "That we should be saved from our enemies and from the hands of all that hate us; to perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant." Here is the same parallelism. (And incidentally, is this the only aspect in which we can say of His human nature "He was His Mother's own son"? There is a fierceness, even a touch of Deborah, mixed with the sweetness in the Magnificat to which most painted Madonnas do little justice; matching the frequent severity of His own sayings. I am sure the private life of the holy family was, in many senses, "mild" and "gentle", but perhaps hardly in the way some hymn writers have in mind. One may suspect, on proper occasions, a certain astringency; and all in what people at Jerusalem regarded as a rough north-country dialect.) (pp. 5-6)

What did Lewis think of devotion to the Virgin Mary? He wrote in a letter to Mary Van Deusen on June 26, 1952....

... Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one's hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in R.C.'s) where the B.V.M. is treated really as a deity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think that such salutes are better avoided. And if the Blessed Virgin is as good as the best mothers I have known, she does not want any of the attention which might have gone to her Son diverted to herself.

Sheldon Vanauken, in his book A Severe Mercy, also records a conversation with Lewis on this subject....

At one point Davy asked him about prayers to enlist the help of the Blessed Virgin. Lewis would never commit himself on anything having to do with differences between high church and low. He did say, though, that if one's time for prayer was limited, the time one took for asking Mary's help was time one might be using for going directly to the Most High.

Though Lewis did not hold to all of the Roman Catholic doctrines regarding Mary, he did hold her in high regard, almost always referring to her as "the Blessed Virgin Mary". To my mind, Lewis had a balance in his attitude toward Mary which many Protestants would do well to learn from and model.

Comments

Clay said…

Thank you for these sources. I was interested by his cautions on asking the intercessory prayer of heavenly saints. In his letters to Malcolm of course, one finds his famous articulation of these cautions; there he is lead (while not doing them himself exactly) to defend and even subtly endorse them for others if it does them good.

He seems to have evolved a little bit on this point by the mid-60s. An interesting man, ever open minded to all historical Christians.

11:04 AM

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