The Silence before the Fire
Mary teaches us how to wait and pray for the Holy Spirit, and what to do when He arrives
We are waiting with Mary for the coming of the Holy Spirit. It’s notable that after the Lord instructs the Apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the power that will make them His witnesses to the ends of the earth, we find them in the Upper Room, with Mary. In this way Luke tells us that she who was supremely “filled with good things,” filled with the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation such that she conceives the Lord, who finds Him teaching in the Temple as a lad, but with authority, who with a handful of women and the Beloved Disciple stand at the Foot of the Cross, whose heart a sword also pierced, is at the heart of the expectant Church whose leaders are gathered in prayer and, let’s be honest, in fear, as they hide from the authorities who want to kill them while they await they really know not what or when is the fulfillment of the promise of power Jesus has just given them.
Mary, Daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, also awaits the coming of the Spirit. I have to think that she alone waits in joyful hope. She who knew by faith and declared at her Magnificat that the Lord does not abandon his people and fills them with good things came to know by direct experience that fullness of life within her exceeded every fulfillment every other mother had had or will ever have. She knows the promises of the Lord reach their fulfillment in ways that surpass every human imagining, even when we have some intimation of what may be coming our way. She knows that Life conquers death, for she has witnessed it, with the others, in the Lord’s Resurrection. Now He is gone, ascended, but the sorrow of his new absence is nothing like the sorrow at his death and burial, for she knows that while he is not physically present to them, He lives.
She also knows sorrow, too. We should not suppose that because of her unique privileges Mary was exempt from the suffering that is our lot. She knows suffering, rather, because of her privileged sinlessness, the fulness of Redemption gifted her at her immaculate conception, in a way we never will. She knows the suffering that comes from knowing the future will be hard. She knows what it is to leave kith and kin, hearth and home in the dead of night to seek refuge in a land that is not altogether welcoming. She knows the pain of separation as the boy becomes a man and begins to set a course in life in which his parents are no longer at the center of his doings. She knows the suffering of watching an innocent Son suffering physical pain, ignominy, and rejection for no fault of her own and the suffering that comes from knowing there is nothing she can do to make it better. She knows the suffering of watching a Child die, after losing her husband. She knows the sorrow of preparing that Child for his burial. She knows the sorrow of death’s finality, when the earth itself swallows the remains of the deceased. No, her sinlessness does not impart to her a serene indifference to the sufferings of the human race nor exemption from participation in those sufferings. She knows our lot as no one else can and suffers as a mother for her children in a way no else can even imagine, and so she can intercede for us with such effectiveness, such untainted love.
Her faith, in her sorrows, in the One who never abandons His own and Who always fulfills in His own time and way all the promises He freely offers them, gives her hope. We might say she teaches us there is no hope without loving acceptance of sorrow and suffering as part, as heart, of God’s plan of redemption. She has not angrily rejected suffering as something she does not deserve; she does not angrily demand recognition of her unique status, privileges, and gifts as Mother of the Redeemer. She has not given in to the fear that God will not fulfill his promises. She evades nothing of her duties so as to mitigate unwanted suffering. She accepts all that God gives, and all that comes as consequences of His gift, with faith, with hope, and with love.
The Church’s liturgy tells us that she is “more powerful than an army in battle array.” The phrase should give us pause. That’s an army ready for the battle, eager to enter into the fray. That’s an army that’s fresh, full of energy and determination, ready to take on all that threatens the welfare of the people it defends. That’s an army eager to show its Captain that it is ready to do His will, to go forth and conquer with Him. She is more powerful than all that youthful vigor, wiser and more knowing than all those battle-hardened veterans, readier than all others to ride forth and conquer all that challenges God’s glory and threatens God’s own.
She is a pillar of strength, her serenity the fruit not only of her sinlessness but of her serene confidence in the power of God to save. And so the Apostles are in the Upper Room, with her, drawing strength from her faith and her serene confidence, learning from her how to have and live hope in the face of natural fear, how to love as we await God’s mighty action.
Our own times are sorrowful. We see the onslaught against the Church. We see the gleefully scornful disdain with which the powerful of the world seek to throw off the restraints the Church has always preached and taught. We see forces teaching incessantly that the Faith is a relic of the past, a fossil, a refuge for those who cannot compete, irrelevant to the work of the world, which those forces understand as a work of self-perfection, independent of God. We see the chaos of modern life. We see the pain it unleashes on one and all. We don’t just see it: we live in that chaos and are touched, deeply, by it as it taunts us to accept our supposed powerlessness to stop or face what is coming and invites us to surrender to itself.
Mary will teach us how to wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Holy Spirit, that Power that is the Spirit of Love and that contains within it all wisdom, knowledge, and virtues. She teaches us how to receive that Spirit, and how to let that Spirit reign in us. That Spirit, freely and copiously poured upon the Apostles and their successors, is poured upon the entire Church. The entire Church went on to grow exponentially despite the world’s persecution, reaching China, Africa, and Northern Europe within her first hundred years. The same Spirit fell upon monks and martyrs, priests and laity, who traveled the globe for centuries to coming, preaching the Faith and living it, showing the newness of life that always arises when we live in faithful hope and loving obedience to the Lord’s commands, teaching that love is always the answer, a love so strong that it makes us more than conquerors: it makes us heralds of the Gospel of peace that liberates rather than subjugates. If we want an increase of the Holy Spirit, it must be so that we can be more faithful heralds to a world that is dying for good news.
Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you.