John Saward, The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty

 

 

 

The Beauty of Humility     

Pride is ugly. It inflates and swells, brings disorder and deformity into the soul. Humility, by contrast, is the reassertion of order. St Bernard saw a deep correspondence between the beauty of Our Lady's virginity and the humility of her approach to the Father. The spotless virginity of her body was, in a way, a sacrament of the childlike humility of her soul. According to St Bernard, there was a beautiful mingling ('pulchra permixtio') of virginity and humility in Our Lady; without humility, her virginity would not have pleased God.   She was humble of heart, emptied of self and therefore ready to be filled by God. Yes, virginity and humility coincide in this quality that, for want of a better word, the English Catholic writer Caryll Houselander called  emptiness'.

 It is not a formless emptiness, a void without meaning; on the contrary, it has a shape, a form given to it by the purpose for which it is intended. It is emptiness like the hollow in the reed … like the hollow in the cup . . .like that of the bird's nest. .

The pre-Advent emptiness of Our Lady's purposeful virginity was indeed like those three things. She was a reed through which the Eternal Love was to be piped as a shepherd's song. She was the flowerlike chalice into which the purest water of humanity was to be poured, mingled with wine, changed to the

66 Ibid., ad 2, quoting St Ambrose, (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 2, 1, 27; PL 15, 1553.) crimson blood of love, and lifted up in sacrifice. She was the warm nest rounded to the shape of humanity to receive the Divine Little Bird.

Our Lady's virginity is good earth made ready by God to receive the seed of His Word. The Akathist Hymn of the Byzantine Church praises this beautiful receptiveness in the Virgin: 'As a clear and untilled space thou madest the divine Ear of Corn to burst forth; hail, thou living table having space for the Bread of Life ' 69 The world may see virginity or celibacy as something negative, a void. But the Mother of God reveals that it is empty only as everything receptive is empty, as a chalice is empty so it may contain first wine and then the Blood of Christ.