Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess's
Was deemed, dreamed.
One of Gerard Manley Hopkins' most striking poems compares Our Lady 'to the air we breathe.' The image provokes Hopkins into some wonderfully evocative, creative writing, and rather diverts our attention from what he is saying doctrinally. Mary 'mother each new grace / That does now reach our race'; she continues to conceive Christ in us; she herself is not merely our almoner, but is identified with God's 'sweet alms.'
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
In these beautifully paced lines, Hopkins is seducing us into an account of the Blessed Virgin Mary's role in the life of all believers that many would instinctively qualify or reject were it put in a more prosaic form: everything we know of the light of God comes to us refracted through Mary. Blessed Virgin Mary's presence is greater than had ever been attributed to any of the pantheon of goddesses, because the life of the one true God is a life of self-giving, a self-giving into which Mary is mysteriously and uniquely incorporated, a self-giving of which she becomes in some way a part.
Hopkins was, of course, an imaginative genius; he was also given to original theological speculation. But the instinct to assign a special role to Mary was one that he shared with the ordinary Roman Catholic piety of his day. Mary was Mother of God, not simply 'Saint Mary the Virgin':
The saints are high in glory
With golden crowns so bright;
But brighter far is Mary
Upon her throne of light.
The invocations of the Litany of Loreto were common coin - 'tower of David, house of gold, ark of the covenant.' Catholics were proud of their devotion to Mary, and prepared to defend it against hostile Protestant criticism:
When wicked men blaspheme thee
I'll love and bless thy name.
In the 1960, following Vatican II, this exuberance began to feel awkward, and therefore to vanish. The downplaying of devotion to Mary was one of the most obvious effects of the council on mainstream Catholic life, rivaled perhaps only by the disappearance of the Latin liturgy. The council's decision - one which was quite controverted on the council floor - not to write a decree specifically about Mary, but to deal with her in a chapter of its Constitution on the Church, was taken only very narrowly: a large number of the council Fathers wanted indeed to make a dogmatic proclamation of Mary as mediating all graces.
What prevailed, however, was a more ecumenically sensitive presentation, avoiding new titles, and setting Mary within the perspective of salvation history. It became fashionable to base any account of what we might want to say about Mary on what Christianity must say about human beings in general. In such a light, the dogma of the assumption appears simply as an affirmation that Mary models (perhaps by anticipation) what will ultimately be true of all of us. Similarly, the immaculate conception appears as an affirmation that grace prevails over original sin even at the origins of the human race. Influentially, Raymond E. Brown, the noted Roman Catholic biblical scholar, often centered his account of Mary in the Bible on the concept of the 'perfect disciple.'
What prevailed, however, was a more ecumenically sensitive presentation, avoiding new titles, and setting Mary within the perspective of salvation history. It became fashionable to base any account of what we might want to say about Mary on what Christianity must say about human beings in general. In such a light, the dogma of the assumption appears simply as an affirmation that Mary models (perhaps by anticipation) what will ultimately be true of all of us. Similarly, the immaculate conception appears as an affirmation that grace prevails over original sin even at the origins of the human race. Influentially, Raymond E. Brown, the noted Roman Catholic biblical scholar, often centered his account of Mary in the Bible on the concept of the 'perfect disciple.'
This tendency influenced even official teaching. Paul VI's 1974 Apostolic Exhortation on Mary, Marialis cultus, acknowledged the difficulties which many - especially Christians of the other Churches - had with devotion to Blessed Virgin Mary. Paul was aware of 'the discrepancy existing between some aspects of this devotion and modern anthropological discoveries and the profound changes which have occurred in the psycho-sociological field in which modern man lives and works.' In authentic Roman Catholic devotion to Mary, 'every care should be taken to avoid any exaggeration which could mislead other Christian sisters and brothers about the true doctrine of the Catholic Church.' When Paul describes an authentic devotion to Mary for his time, he stresses how she can serve as a model for Christian humanity: She is worthy of imitation because she was the first and the most perfect of Christ's disciples. All of this has a permanent and universal exemplary value.
The excesses complained about by Christians of the Reformation 'are not connected with the Gospel image of Mary nor with the doctrinal data which have been made explicit through a slow and conscientious process of drawing from Revelation':
The reading of the divine Scriptures, carried out under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and with the discoveries of the human sciences and the different situations in the world today being taken into account, will help us to see how Mary can be considered a mirror of the expectations of the men and women of our time. (nn. 35-7)
A contemporary theologian sees a theology of Mary as indicating ... that God's redemption in Jesus Christ has taken root and has started in the rest of humanity which is not Jesus Christ, so that affirmations about Mary are actually also affirmations about the nature of human salvation. - Johnson 1984: 155-82 (181) -
This approach to Mary - Mary as the preeminent hearer and keeper of the Word - may have served a useful, even necessary purpose in the period immediately following the council. Many were helped by the encouragement to think of Mary in less obviously exalted terms, to imagine her as a human being, faced with the normal challenges of the human condition. Preconciliar accounts of original sin certainly needed to be complemented by a doctrine of an even more original grace, and it may be that the traditions of Mary's Immaculate Conception were indeed a useful pointer. Similarly, heaven was all too easily spoken of in terms of an unreal and inhumane beatific vision; perhaps the doctrine of the assumption, dogmatic as it was in 1950, had some effect in encouraging us to take seriously the communion of saints and the resurrection of the body, and to recognize that our glorified life must still - whatever we want to say about divinity - be a human life.
Some, like the German theologian Wolfgang Beinert, lamented how 'the choral praise of the mother of God in the days of Pius XII' had been 'succeeded by a deep silence'; certainly the relative eclipse of Marian devotion in the period was not the intention of the council, of Paul VI, or the theologians most influential over the council's Marian statements. Others, however, saw this eclipse of Marian rhetoric as salutary, an ecumenically sensitive corrective to earlier exaggeration. It was high time we learned to focus on the woman of Nazareth; we needed to divest her of a greatness associated with goddesses, and see her instead as a human being under God. If the rhetoric of Marian privilege - of immaculate conception and assumption into heaven body and soul - helped us understand better what it was to be human under God, well and good; if not, then it was ripe for demythologization.
Some, like the German theologian Wolfgang Beinert, lamented how 'the choral praise of the mother of God in the days of Pius XII' had been 'succeeded by a deep silence'; certainly the relative eclipse of Marian devotion in the period was not the intention of the council, of Paul VI, or the theologians most influential over the council's Marian statements. Others, however, saw this eclipse of Marian rhetoric as salutary, an ecumenically sensitive corrective to earlier exaggeration. It was high time we learned to focus on the woman of Nazareth; we needed to divest her of a greatness associated with goddesses, and see her instead as a human being under God. If the rhetoric of Marian privilege - of immaculate conception and assumption into heaven body and soul - helped us understand better what it was to be human under God, well and good; if not, then it was ripe for demythologization.
The changes in the Church's Marian devotion and rhetoric can never, of course, be understood in isolation. As we have already noted, ecumenical considerations played a part; perhaps feminism too, and more generally the profound changes in gender relations in the twentieth century, had some influence. Here, however, I want to concentrate on how these changes in Mariology connect with broader trends in the history of theological ideas. Vatican II was concerned to situate the distinctive elements in Christian revelation - Jesus, Scripture, Church - within the whole sweep of salvation history, presenting the Church as the Sacrament of Salvation. Theologians might then tease out what this must imply for our understanding of Christian uniqueness: the Church is not the ark in which alone God's grace can be found, but something at once more richly generous and more unassuming: the definitive presence of a grace diffused over the whole creation.
Such an approach leads some to hesitate and others to criticize. Precisely because it tries to understand the central elements of Christianity in terms of what we must say about human beings at large, it can never - so it is claimed - do justice to a Jesus who claims to be not simply the 'real and proper man' of the 1970s liturgical ditty, but rather, uniquely and singularly, 'the Way, the Truth, the Life.' The Church is surely instituted 'from above'; it is not simply a matter of devout human beings organizing themselves. And Mary is Mother of God: Catholic tradition requires that we not simply understand her as the model of human response to God. The Church's liturgy - particularly the Marian solemnities - seem to imply something stronger than a Mariology of perfect discipleship.
There are different possible responses to such criticisms. One is simply to accept them. and hence conclude that much post-conciliar theology is misguided, a sell-out of Christianity to the spirit of the 1960s. Another denies their validity: religious maturity consists precisely in our abandoning any sense of Christian pre-eminence, precisely in our replacing the language of special divine initiative in Jesus with that of an ever more authentic commitment to serve the world in humane partnership. Both of these approaches, however, violate a fundamental principle of Christian theology. Both proceed as if you resolve the tensions in the Christian message by option either for an approach 'from above' prioritizing the 'divine' or from below, prioritizing the 'merely human.' Central to Christianity's witness is that such ways of thinking miss the point. Claims about the divinity of Jesus are not made at the expense of claims about his humanity; claims about Scripture's divine inspiration must not imply a denial of the human agencies through which it came to be.
We must therefore not understand 'Mary woman of Nazareth' and 'Mary Mother of God' as somehow on competition, as though one of these descriptions is true only to the extent that the other is false. We have to find ways of understanding them together, as complementary truths. This suggests, then, the need for a third and rather different response. This understands the divine and human life of Jesus (and therefore also of Mary) within the context of the divine life given to all human beings in grace. But it also attempts to do justice to rooted intuitions about their special role within this universal grace, to a sense that they represent the presence of God among us in a particular and distinctive way.
At this point, I introduce the figure of Karl Rahner SJ and in particular one idea from an essay which he wrote in 1954 in honor of its being a Marian year, marking the centenary of Pius IX's proclaiming Mary's Immaculate Conception to be a dogma, declares that 'from the first moment of her conception' Mary was 'preserved from all stain of original sin.' This occurred through a 'singular grace and privilege of Almighty God'; by implication, the rest of us are conceived and born in sin, and grace is given to us only later, when we are baptized. (as least by desire) Politely, Rahner points out that there are problems with such a way of thinking because it seems unduly pessimistic about the unbaptized infant:
This child... is already, as unbaptized an object of God's infinite mercy, in spite of original sin; it is included in God's vision of God's only-begotten Son, and thus it has, if not yet realized, at least a 'remote' claim to inheritance with the Son.
Simply by virtue of its existence, its creation, the child is 'already comprehended within God grace and love.' It is only because this love of God is already there that the child's salvation 'takes a sacramentally visible form.' It follows that nothing of decisive significance turns on just when baptism takes place - as Rahner asks ironically, '[H]as anyone ever seriously regretted having been baptized after a fortnight instead of as a two-day-old?' And hence,
... the whole mystery of Mary's Immaculate Conception cannot simply consist in the fact that she was graced a little earlier, temporarily speaking, than we were. The distinction must lie deeper, and this deeper distinction must condition the temporal difference.
Karl Rahner SJ is writing diplomatically here, but the force of his argument is that the idea of a temporal difference between when grace begins in Mary and when it begins in the rest of us must be merely a figure of speech pointing to something much more significant. If the doctrine of the immaculate conception is to mean anything significant, it must point to some stronger sense in which Mary's relationship to sin and grace differs from that of human beings at large.
Rahner, good Thomist that he is, can simply assume that divine grace and human freedom are compatible: to say that God wills Algernon to perform an action is not to deny that Algeron freely performs that action. Thus Mary's free response to God's call, expressed in the Gospel of Luke's Annunciation story, is nevertheless - for Rahner - something which is predestined in the designs of God, just as is Jesus' free acceptance of his mission even unto death. It is in this context, of freedom and predestination, that Rahner makes what he sees as the necessary distinction. God's predetermining will to become incarnate in Christ entails that 'an earthly Mother of the Son was likewise predestined' - an earthly Mother who gives free consent; and for her, 'the divine purpose of salvation' is 'the predestination of Christ himself:
That is to say, if she had not been willed as the Holy one and the perfectly Redeemed, then Christ himself would not have been willed by God in just the way he stands before us.
Had Mary said `No' to the invitation represented by Luke's angelic message to her, had God's saving will not included Mary's consent, Jesus Christ quite literally would not have existed. This cannot be said of any other creature. Peter and Judas, to say nothing of countless later Christians, may reject Christ, be ambivalent about him, and in an extended sense, therefore, affect whose Christ is. But their rejection would not bring about the withdrawal of the promise which Christ, crucified and risen, represents for us: 'in every other case Christ could exist and be predestined by God without its being necessary for the individual concerned to be one of the redeemed.' Mary, by contrast, 'stands within the circle of Christ's own predestination':
and thus she is different from us not merely through her having become the graced one at a temporally earlier point in her existence. The mystery that really gives the temporal difference between her and us in the mystery of her immaculate conception its proper meaning is, rather, the mystery of her predestination.
Christ incarnate, crucified and risen represents to us a promise that a life without sin is possible. Christ embodies the promise; the rest of us receive it and hand it on. We are not talking here about a divine reality being communicated to human beings. We are talking, rather about a God who exists in self-giving to the creation, about all humanity (not just that of Jesus) caught up in the very life of Christ - 'I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am', as Hopkins reminds us. What makes Jesus distinctive is not that God is somehow `more' present in him than in the rest of creation, but rather that he alone reveals that presence definitively. He assures us that sin will be overcome. Rahner's rather abstract argument about Mary's predestination in connection with Christ's then amounts to claim that Mary is not simply a recipient of this message: her saying `Yes' is, rather, a constitutive - if duly subordinate - element within the message.
The ideas in Rahner's 1954 essay on the immaculate conception need to be linked with what Rahner wrote elsewhere about salvation. In the 1954 essay, Rahner talks about redemption in rather conventional terms that he elsewhere challenged. There are powerful reasons for asserting that the primary agent in our salvation is the love of God, which is eternal and changeless. Christ's death and resurrection must not be understood as if they made any difference to that - as if, for example, they could somehow convert the anger of God into graciousness. Christians have all too easily used religious language as a vehicle for expressing their own hostilities, and forgotten that - as Julian of Norwich so memorably put it - 'it is the greatest impossibility conceivable that God should be angry, for anger and friendship are two contraries.' Christ causes God's will to be salvific only in a very carefully qualified, transferred sense of the term `cause.' `Cause' here simply means that in Christ's death and resurrection, God's salvific will is expressed as an irrevocable promise to us who must accept it and work it through in faith; his uniqueness consists in his embodying the promise, whereas we must receive it.
If we combine this idea with what Rahner wrote in 1954, the conclusion is clear: within this properly Christian (more so than most conventional ones) understanding of redemption, Mary is Co-Redemptrix. The promise of sin's being overcome that God made in Christ involved her too in a subordinate way that was quite unique to her. It would obviously be crassly offensive were Roman Catholic authority to make a dogma out of this title. But that does not mean that there is no truth in the idea. Christ transforms us by giving us in his person, his message, his death and his resurrection, God's assurance that what we call sin is overcome. In so far he is essentially dependent for his very existence on Mary, she too is not merely the most perfect recipient of redemption, but rather part and parcel of its proclamation. Feminist theology has, happily, begun to reform our conceptions of God, and to deconstruct the use of Mary in Catholic Christianity as a safety-valve within an inhumanly patriarchal system. But the abuses are rooted in something positive, something which it would be a pity to lose completely.
Too easily Christians are trapped in ways of thinking that will not allow them to express Christian truth. Too easily, we think we need to choose between Christ as divine and Christ as human, Mary as Mother of God or Mary of Nazareth, the perfect disciple. One of the reasons why standard Mariologies appear either too extravagant or too reductive is that we imagine revelation as a divine message to a godless humanity. We need, instead, to think of the world as bathed in grace from the start; revelation in one sense changes nothing, although by giving us assurance of God's irrevocable love it also changes everything. As Christina Rosetti's hymn reminds us, the effect of Christ's coming is to shatter conventional cosmology:
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
Mary is `great as no goddess' because she is one factor defining a world in which powers and domination are overcome and being a god or a goddess has ceased to have meaning, a world in which the only God there is lives in irrevocable solidarity with creatures, even the lowest and most despised. Christ's manifestation of this mysterious truth inevitably involves his mother, and that is why she will always have a special place in any healthy Christian theology. As Hopkins put it, Mary's `presence, power' has `this one work' to do:
Let all God's glory through
God's glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
BY REV. FR. PHILIP ENDEAN, S.J.
Page 1
Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
We must therefore not understand 'Mary woman of Nazareth' and 'Mary Mother of God' as somehow on competition, as though one of these descriptions is true only to the extent that the other is false. We have to find ways of understanding them together, as complementary truths. This suggests, then, the need for a third and rather different response. This understands the divine and human life of Jesus (and therefore also of Mary) within the context of the divine life given to all human beings in grace. But it also attempts to do justice to rooted intuitions about their special role within this universal grace, to a sense that they represent the presence of God among us in a particular and distinctive way.
At this point, I introduce the figure of Karl Rahner SJ and in particular one idea from an essay which he wrote in 1954 in honor of its being a Marian year, marking the centenary of Pius IX's proclaiming Mary's Immaculate Conception to be a dogma, declares that 'from the first moment of her conception' Mary was 'preserved from all stain of original sin.' This occurred through a 'singular grace and privilege of Almighty God'; by implication, the rest of us are conceived and born in sin, and grace is given to us only later, when we are baptized. (as least by desire) Politely, Rahner points out that there are problems with such a way of thinking because it seems unduly pessimistic about the unbaptized infant:
This child... is already, as unbaptized an object of God's infinite mercy, in spite of original sin; it is included in God's vision of God's only-begotten Son, and thus it has, if not yet realized, at least a 'remote' claim to inheritance with the Son.
Simply by virtue of its existence, its creation, the child is 'already comprehended within God grace and love.' It is only because this love of God is already there that the child's salvation 'takes a sacramentally visible form.' It follows that nothing of decisive significance turns on just when baptism takes place - as Rahner asks ironically, '[H]as anyone ever seriously regretted having been baptized after a fortnight instead of as a two-day-old?' And hence,
... the whole mystery of Mary's Immaculate Conception cannot simply consist in the fact that she was graced a little earlier, temporarily speaking, than we were. The distinction must lie deeper, and this deeper distinction must condition the temporal difference.
Karl Rahner SJ is writing diplomatically here, but the force of his argument is that the idea of a temporal difference between when grace begins in Mary and when it begins in the rest of us must be merely a figure of speech pointing to something much more significant. If the doctrine of the immaculate conception is to mean anything significant, it must point to some stronger sense in which Mary's relationship to sin and grace differs from that of human beings at large.
Rahner, good Thomist that he is, can simply assume that divine grace and human freedom are compatible: to say that God wills Algernon to perform an action is not to deny that Algeron freely performs that action. Thus Mary's free response to God's call, expressed in the Gospel of Luke's Annunciation story, is nevertheless - for Rahner - something which is predestined in the designs of God, just as is Jesus' free acceptance of his mission even unto death. It is in this context, of freedom and predestination, that Rahner makes what he sees as the necessary distinction. God's predetermining will to become incarnate in Christ entails that 'an earthly Mother of the Son was likewise predestined' - an earthly Mother who gives free consent; and for her, 'the divine purpose of salvation' is 'the predestination of Christ himself:
That is to say, if she had not been willed as the Holy one and the perfectly Redeemed, then Christ himself would not have been willed by God in just the way he stands before us.
Had Mary said `No' to the invitation represented by Luke's angelic message to her, had God's saving will not included Mary's consent, Jesus Christ quite literally would not have existed. This cannot be said of any other creature. Peter and Judas, to say nothing of countless later Christians, may reject Christ, be ambivalent about him, and in an extended sense, therefore, affect whose Christ is. But their rejection would not bring about the withdrawal of the promise which Christ, crucified and risen, represents for us: 'in every other case Christ could exist and be predestined by God without its being necessary for the individual concerned to be one of the redeemed.' Mary, by contrast, 'stands within the circle of Christ's own predestination':
and thus she is different from us not merely through her having become the graced one at a temporally earlier point in her existence. The mystery that really gives the temporal difference between her and us in the mystery of her immaculate conception its proper meaning is, rather, the mystery of her predestination.
Christ incarnate, crucified and risen represents to us a promise that a life without sin is possible. Christ embodies the promise; the rest of us receive it and hand it on. We are not talking here about a divine reality being communicated to human beings. We are talking, rather about a God who exists in self-giving to the creation, about all humanity (not just that of Jesus) caught up in the very life of Christ - 'I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am', as Hopkins reminds us. What makes Jesus distinctive is not that God is somehow `more' present in him than in the rest of creation, but rather that he alone reveals that presence definitively. He assures us that sin will be overcome. Rahner's rather abstract argument about Mary's predestination in connection with Christ's then amounts to claim that Mary is not simply a recipient of this message: her saying `Yes' is, rather, a constitutive - if duly subordinate - element within the message.
The ideas in Rahner's 1954 essay on the immaculate conception need to be linked with what Rahner wrote elsewhere about salvation. In the 1954 essay, Rahner talks about redemption in rather conventional terms that he elsewhere challenged. There are powerful reasons for asserting that the primary agent in our salvation is the love of God, which is eternal and changeless. Christ's death and resurrection must not be understood as if they made any difference to that - as if, for example, they could somehow convert the anger of God into graciousness. Christians have all too easily used religious language as a vehicle for expressing their own hostilities, and forgotten that - as Julian of Norwich so memorably put it - 'it is the greatest impossibility conceivable that God should be angry, for anger and friendship are two contraries.' Christ causes God's will to be salvific only in a very carefully qualified, transferred sense of the term `cause.' `Cause' here simply means that in Christ's death and resurrection, God's salvific will is expressed as an irrevocable promise to us who must accept it and work it through in faith; his uniqueness consists in his embodying the promise, whereas we must receive it.
If we combine this idea with what Rahner wrote in 1954, the conclusion is clear: within this properly Christian (more so than most conventional ones) understanding of redemption, Mary is Co-Redemptrix. The promise of sin's being overcome that God made in Christ involved her too in a subordinate way that was quite unique to her. It would obviously be crassly offensive were Roman Catholic authority to make a dogma out of this title. But that does not mean that there is no truth in the idea. Christ transforms us by giving us in his person, his message, his death and his resurrection, God's assurance that what we call sin is overcome. In so far he is essentially dependent for his very existence on Mary, she too is not merely the most perfect recipient of redemption, but rather part and parcel of its proclamation. Feminist theology has, happily, begun to reform our conceptions of God, and to deconstruct the use of Mary in Catholic Christianity as a safety-valve within an inhumanly patriarchal system. But the abuses are rooted in something positive, something which it would be a pity to lose completely.
Too easily Christians are trapped in ways of thinking that will not allow them to express Christian truth. Too easily, we think we need to choose between Christ as divine and Christ as human, Mary as Mother of God or Mary of Nazareth, the perfect disciple. One of the reasons why standard Mariologies appear either too extravagant or too reductive is that we imagine revelation as a divine message to a godless humanity. We need, instead, to think of the world as bathed in grace from the start; revelation in one sense changes nothing, although by giving us assurance of God's irrevocable love it also changes everything. As Christina Rosetti's hymn reminds us, the effect of Christ's coming is to shatter conventional cosmology:
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
Mary is `great as no goddess' because she is one factor defining a world in which powers and domination are overcome and being a god or a goddess has ceased to have meaning, a world in which the only God there is lives in irrevocable solidarity with creatures, even the lowest and most despised. Christ's manifestation of this mysterious truth inevitably involves his mother, and that is why she will always have a special place in any healthy Christian theology. As Hopkins put it, Mary's `presence, power' has `this one work' to do:
Let all God's glory through
God's glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
BY REV. FR. PHILIP ENDEAN, S.J.
Page 1
Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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