Those who pray the Litany of Loreto know that Gate of Heaven is considered one of Mary’s titles. Gate is a sturdy phrase signifying a actuality acknowledged in each time and in each place. Whether or not a metal barrier secured by a lock and key or a shepherd mendacity within the opening of an enclosure, his physique the gate between the flock and its predators, all folks in all places know of gates and their features. Mary would be the technique of egress, the best way by which Jesus leaves her womb and goes into the world to name it to the Father. Via her trustworthy witness on earth and her prayers earlier than the throne of God in heaven, Mary grew to become the doorway into life with Christ. And, just like the poorest shepherd, Mary’s physique would be the gate. Within the infancy narratives of Luke’s Gospel, Mary’s physique because the gate is acknowledged by angelic and mortal beings alike. The angel Gabriel acknowledges Mary because the Gate of Heaven when he tells her that she is going to conceive and bear a son, who,
Might be nice and can be known as the Son of the Most Excessive, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he’ll rule over the home of Jacob ceaselessly, and of his kingdom there can be no finish. (Luke 1:32-33).
Elizabeth acknowledges Mary because the Gate of Heaven when she cries out to her cousin, “And the way does it occur to me, that the mom of my Lord ought to come to me?” (Luke 1:43). Even John, Elizabeth’s unborn youngster, acknowledges Mary because the Gate of Heaven. When he hears Mary’s voice, John leaps in his mom’s womb. From Mary will come forth the promise, the restoration, the salvation of the world.
Door is one other sturdy phrase. But, doorways have a thriller which gates lack. Entrance and egress give method to the boundaries between one actuality and one other. We will by no means make sure what we are going to discover after we open a door. It’s, in spite of everything, a closet door, that almost all extraordinary of doorways, in an outdated man’s home which opens onto the dominion of Narnia for the younger Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund in C.S. Lewis’s traditional story. “Who’s there?” we ask after we hear a knock on the door. We ask earlier than we open as a result of the very act of opening the door poses questions: What’s ready for me there? Who’s on the opposite aspect? The place would possibly this lead? There’s a motive doorways determine prominently in tales of suspense and horror. Who, or what, is standing behind the door? What lies past? Doorways converse of openings onto—onto thriller, onto revelation, onto vistas unknown.
And when you have ever helped put together a baby to obtain First Holy Communion, you realize youngsters are beckoned onto a mysterious door. You’re asking them, inviting them, to obtain the Physique and Blood of Christ into their very own our bodies, to eat and drink, as Jesus bids his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel:
Whereas they had been consuming, Jesus took bread, stated the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples stated, “Take and eat; that is my physique.” Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for that is my blood of the covenant, which shall be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:26-28).
The one consuming of our bodies and consuming of blood most second graders have heard whispered beneath the covers late at evening includes zombies. These youngsters know the knowledge victims in horror motion pictures by no means appear to be taught, “Don’t open that door!” Which is why catechists and fogeys must be ready for the objection because it has been shyly posed to me time and again, “I don’t assume I wish to eat Jesus’ physique.” Although the youngsters wouldn’t use the phrase, cannibalism is their concern. We have to present them Mary, the Door to the Eucharist. We have to welcome them to Mary, the Door to the Eucharist, and bid them stroll by.
The worry of the Eucharist as cannibalism, worry stoked by tales of formality gatherings through which human flesh is consumed and human blood drunk, just isn’t a brand new concern, having been leveled towards the Church for the reason that first century. Cannibalism, together with atheism and incest, was one of many three major accusations introduced towards the early Christian church.
Within the second or early third century the Roman lawyer and Christian convert, Marcus Minucius Felix, wrote Octavius, an imagined dialogue held by the shore of Ostia between Octavius, a Roman convert to Christianity, and Caecilius, a pagan. Caecilius provides a speech laying out his objections to Christian observe and Octavius replies. Right here is Caecilius on what he calls “this wicked lifestyle”:
The notoriety of the tales advised of the initiation of recent recruits is matched by their ghastly horror. A younger child is roofed over with flour, the item being to deceive the unwary. It’s then served earlier than the individual to be admitted into their rites. The recruit is urged to inflict blows onto it—they look like innocent due to the masking of flour. Thus the child is killed with wounds that stay unseen and hid. It’s the blood of this toddler—I shudder to say it—it’s this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; these are the limbs they distribute eagerly; that is the sufferer by which they seal their covenant; it’s by complicity on this crime that they’re pledged to mutual silence. These are their rites, extra foul than all sacrileges mixed.
Octavius solutions Caecilius, “There’s a man I ought to now like to deal with, and that’s the one who claims, or believes, that our initiations happen by way of the slaughter and blood of a child.” He turns the accusation on his opponent, reminding him that it’s the Roman, and never the Christian observe, “to reveal your very personal youngsters to birds and wild beasts, or at instances to smother and strangle them, . . . and there are ladies who swallow medication to stifle in their very own wombs the beginnings of a person to be.” He goes on to accuse the gods of Rome, naming Saturn as one who devoured his personal youngsters and whose followers sacrifice their youngsters to him. He defends the Church towards the cost of kid homicide, however he by no means discusses or defends the eucharistic practices. He by no means solutions the query of what distinguishes consuming the Physique of Christ and consuming the Blood of Christ from cannibalism.
Round 176 A.D. a Greek thinker and convert to Christianity named Athenagoras writes a letter addressed to “the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Anoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus.” He writes them as “conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, and greater than all, philosophers.” He means to current a convincing argument, “to put a press release of our case earlier than you,” as to why Christians ought to “stop to be assailed.”
A lot of the letter addresses the cost of atheism. Athenagoras writes:
However to us, who distinguish God from matter, and train that matter is one factor and God one other, and that they’re separated by a large interval (for that the Deity is uncreated and everlasting, to be beheld by the understanding and motive alone, whereas matter is created and perishable), is it not absurd to use the identify of atheism?
He then turns to the cost of incest, what he calls “Edipodean intercourse.” Once more, his reply is direct:
In accordance with age, we acknowledge some as little kids, others we regard as brothers and sisters, and to the extra superior in life we give the glory attributable to fathers and moms. On behalf of these, then, to whom we apply the names of brothers and sisters . . . we train the best care that their our bodies ought to stay undefiled and uncorrupted.
However what can Athenagoras say to the cost of Christians taking part in “Thyestean feasts,” “impious feasts,” that’s, cannibalism? He can not say that Christians don’t devour the Physique and Blood of Christ. He can be rejecting the very religion of the Church. The place Athenagoras takes direct purpose on the fees of atheism and incest, he sidesteps the query of cannibalism, selecting to argue that Christians will not be murderers. He writes, “We can not eat human flesh until we now have killed somebody.” He continues, “We can not endure even to see a person put to loss of life, although justly.” Christians can not benefit from the spectacle of killing as both ritual or leisure. He asks, “Who doesn’t reckon amongst issues of best curiosity the contests of gladiators and wild beasts, particularly these given by you? However we, deeming that to see a person put to loss of life is far the identical as killing him, have abjured such spectacles.” In that approach it could be stated he responds to the accounts like these of Caecilius, tales of infants lined in flour, murdered and consumed. However, like Marcus Minuscius Felix, he by no means even mentions, to precisely both describe or defend, the eucharistic meal—the reception and consumption of Christ’s Physique and Blood—on the coronary heart of his religion and life.
I’m inquisitive about these defenses, however unhappy. Marcus Minuscius Felix and Athenagoras argue Christians don’t homicide and so can’t be cannibals, however they don’t deal with how Christians can nonetheless take and obtain into their our bodies the flesh and blood of the crucified Christ. The objection, whether or not by second century Romans or second grade Catholic youngsters, is just about the identical: “We’re going to eat Jesus’ Physique and drink his Blood? That appears form of gross.”
After I get that query, I converse of Mary, the Mom of God. I converse of pregnant Mary, and her unborn youngster, Jesus. I converse of the moms of the youngsters earlier than me. I converse of their lives inside their moms’ wombs. And I ask: How had been you fed earlier than you had been born? How was Jesus fed?
Mary is the door opening onto the thriller of the Eucharist. Mary can also be the reply to the cost of cannibalism, whether or not introduced by the traditional Romans or twenty-first-century seven- and eight-year-olds. As a result of it was Mary who fed Christ that Christ would possibly feed us.
How was Jesus fed and nurtured by the 9 months from his conception to his beginning? Infants—all infants, Jesus included—obtain their obligatory vitamin from their moms by the umbilical wire and the blood, the mom’s blood, which connects the child and its mom. A child is actually fed by, and on and in and from, the flesh and blood of its mom.
Is that this cannibalism? Cannibalism is when one human devours one other. A cannibal eats one other up. A life is destroyed. Just one individual survives cannibalism. However the mom just isn’t consumed by the child. She just isn’t diminished. In a wholesome being pregnant, that’s, most pregnancies, she prospers and features weight and lives. Certainly, what’s most frequently stated a couple of pregnant girl is that she is glowing. The connection between the mom and her unborn youngster is considered one of unity, a unity of two distinct beings—distinct in methods as important as a male youngster in a feminine physique or a baby with a blood sort totally different from her mom’s—distinct and, nonetheless, certain as one. Within the case of Mary and Jesus, the unity of two distinct beings is much more astonishing, the divine youngster carried, sheltered, and guarded, inside a human womb. It’s in each case a union of feeding and being fed, a sharing that neither diminishes nor destroys. Fairly this sharing provides life, strengthens life, alone makes life potential.
In that relationship of distinction and variety held in unity, the connection Mary and the unborn Christ knew, we now have a glimpse of the life throughout the Divine Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For what’s the important mark of that relationship? It’s full and complete sharing. Jesus says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:7-9). Does that imply the Father is diminished, lessened, as a result of we see him totally within the Son? Jesus says this of the Holy Spirit, “The advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will ship in my identify—he’ll train you every part and remind you of all that I advised you” (John 14:26). Does that imply Jesus has not taught us every part? That Jesus has not revealed the fullness of God? No.
Quite the opposite, it means that there’s a full and complete sharing with out lower or diminishment. The Father is full and full. The Son is full and full. The Spirit is full and full. And so is their sharing.
St. Hilary of Poitiers, fourth-century bishop and physician of the Church, wrote in On the Trinity, “This unity has no range, nor does it matter from whom the factor is obtained, since that which is given by the Father is counted additionally as given by the Son.”
I think about these phrases once I think about my prayer. What identify do I name out once I cry out in want? After I reward? Typically I name to the Father, different instances to the Son and different instances to the Spirit. Is a prayer to the Father not heard by the Son and the Holy Spirit? Is a prayer to Jesus not heard by the Father and the Holy Spirit? Is the cry, “Come, Holy Spirit,” not heard by the Father and the Son? Is a prayer to the Father a dismissal of the Son and the Spirit? Is a prayer to the Son a denial of the divinity of the Father and the Spirit? Does a prayer to the Spirit cut back or reduce the authority of the Father and the Son?
No, as a result of they’re one. “This unity has no range, nor does it matter from whom the factor is obtained,” Hilary writes, and, I dare so as to add, does it matter to which member of the Divine Godhead the prayer is addressed—since, as he reminds us, “that which is given by the Father is counted as additionally given by the Son.” And that which is given by the Father should even be counted as having been given by the Spirit, the amor unitivus duorum, as St. Thomas Aquinas places it, the love that unites the 2.
However it’s all the time laborious to think about life throughout the Trinity, throughout the Divine Family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They’re immortal; we’re mortal. They’re omnipotent; we’re weak. Our experiences are earthly and home. Right here, once more, human Mary, Mom Mary, is our information and our reward. She reveals us how the life she shared on earth along with her son, Jesus, lifts the veil on the thriller of the heavenly life the Son shares with the Father and the Spirit. And she or he reveals us how that sharing, in which there’s neither diminishment nor lower, by no means loss of life, however solely life and extra life, permits us, the youngsters of the residing God, to obtain and devour, as from our mom, the Physique and Blood of Christ.
Mary leads us to the Eucharist, to that place the place heaven and earth are joined. She opens the door to the place the place Jesus first dwelled, Mary herself the bearer of the promise made to Israel. The unborn Christ discovered refuge and safety beneath her flesh, inside her womb. The toddler Christ discovered refuge and safety beneath her cloak, at her breast. In her womb, at her breast, there, each want was met. And we, like Jesus, discover refuge in Mary, the Mom of God, and our mom. We, like Jesus, are beneath her safety. The Door to the Eucharist, Mary fed Christ from her mortal physique and blood. And Christ, the Everlasting, Immortal and Ever-living God, feeds us.
