For today’s blog, I want to encourage readers to contemplate the beauty of Our Blessed Mother. Here is an excerpt from The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty (Pp.122-123) by John Saward to reflect on this topic:
Grace, as the poet says, is “God’s better beauty,”[1] the splendour of the soul. From the beginning of her existence, Mary is radiant with a fulness of spiritual beauty in proportion to her dignity as Mother of God. “O pure Theotokos,” sings the Byzantine Church on the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the temple, “thou hast a clean and shining beauty of soul, and art filled from Heaven with the grace of God.” [2]
Grace conforms the soul into the likeness of Christ. So it is with Mary. Her plenitude of grace gives her by anticipation a likeness to the Son who will take His flesh from her. Hers is a reflected beauty. The women poet catches the play of light: “Christ’s mirror she of grace and love.”[3] In face and in grace, Mary is like Jesus. When Dante reaches Paradise, St Bernard tells him that contemplating the countenance of the Mother is the best way of preparing to see the glorious face of the Son:
Now to that face which most resembles Christ
lift up thy face; its radiance alone
can grant to thee the power to look on Christ.[4]
The Virgin Mary, in all her splendor and beauty always orients us towards her son. Even in her being she reflects Christ. This is another example of how she is Mediatrix: by mirroring Christ’s grace and love, she shows us her son. How amazing it is that by looking at her face we see the reflection of Christ!
Thoughts? Reflections? Please comment below.
-Holly
[1] ‘To What Serves Mortal Beauty’, in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. N.H. Mackinzie (Oxford 1990), 183.
[2] The Festal Menaion (London, 1969), 190.
[3] ‘Feast of the Annunciation’ in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, new ed., vol 2 (London, 1986), 238.
[4] Paradisio 32, 85-87; 672; ET, Sayers and Reynolds, 336.
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