Saturday, July 8, 2017

"a sword will pierce through your own soul also"

"God wills that Mary be in time the Mother of his Son; [and] this on the condition that the extremely exalted bond of affinity by which Jesus belongs to her will be the foundation of a grace that will separate her from him all the more.  She will be his Mother not in order that she might revel ecstatically in the sweets of his presence while he is afflicted with exhaustion [(ennui)] and consumed by sorrows; it is rather in order that he might be in her womb a bouquet of extremely bitter myrrh, and that she might be for him, in the flesh that she supplies and the nourishment that she provides him with, a living source of displeasures [(dèplaisirs)]. . . . Her motherhood [(qualité de mère)] detaches her from her Son, and her extremely exalted affinity with the incarnate Word is a cross that crucifies [both] God and Mary."

     Louis Chardon, La croix de Jésus (Paris:  Cerf, 2004 [1647]) 1.28.369, as quoted by Aaron Riches, Ecco homo:  on the divine unity of Christ, Interventions (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2016), 242n28 (translation mine, though I see that a translation by Murphy & Thornton was published in 1957-1959).  Apparently Chardon goes on to sketch out the "pilgrimage of faith" by which Mary is led to embrace ever more concretely this ever more wrenching separation (242-246):
The whole 'weight' of Jesus' life leading to the Cross is the weight of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit who drove Jesus into the wilderness (cf. Mark 1:12) now drives him to the Cross where he offers himself without blemish 'through the Spirit' (cf. Heb 9:14).  The Spirit is the 'crucifier,' the unio that joins Son to Father in his being and in his abandonment.  The vinculum amoris pours forth in the moment of total sui exinanitio [(self-emptying)] in order to realize the living death and dying life that is the Christian vocation perfectly revealed and lived by Mary in the moment of the Sacrifice of Calvary [(245-246, underscoring mine)].

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