Our Lady Saint MaryBarry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Religion
Our Lady Saint Mary
Barry, J. G. H. (Joseph Gayle Hurd)
Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint -- Meditations
This was the starting point of Blessed Mary. She was filled with all
the fulness of God from the moment of her conception, and was never
separated from the joy of the great possession. We are born in sin and
have to travel the road to the very end. Yet we, too, begin in union,
because we are born of our baptism into Christ soon after our natural
birth, and our problem is to achieve in experience the content of our
birthright. In other words: our feet are set in the Way from the
beginning, and our part is to keep to the Way and not wander to the
right hand or to the left; that this may be possible for us Christ lived
and died and to-day is at the Right Hand of the Father where He ever
liveth to make intercession for us. We need never walk without Christ.
The weariness of the journey is sustained by His constant and ready
help. The way is lighted by the Truth which is Himself, and the life
that we live is His communicated life. "I live, yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me." There are those who find the road godward, the road of
the Christ-life, wearisome because they keep their eyes fixed on the
difficulties of the way and treat each step as though it were a separate
thing and not one step in a wonderful journey. The way to avoid the
weariness of the day's travel is to keep one's eye fixed on the end, to
raise the eyes to the heavens where Jesus sitteth enthroned at the Right
Hand of the Father. The day's song is the Sursum Corda,--"Lift up your
hearts unto the Lord!"
The mediatorial office of our Lord is exercised chiefly through His
Sacrifice. He ever liveth to make intercession for us; and this
intercession is the presentation of the Sacrifice that He Himself
offered once for all in Blood upon the Cross, and forever presents to
the Father in heaven "one unending sacrifice." This heavenly oblation of
our Lord which is the means wherethrough we approach pure Divinity, is
also the Sacrifice of the Church here on earth. The heavenly Altar and
the earthly Altar are but one in that there is but one Priest and one
Victim here and there. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the Church's
presentation of her Head as her means of approach to God, as the ground
of all her prayers. These prayers make their appeal through Jesus Who
died and rose again for us and is on the Right Hand of Power. We know of
no other way of approach, we plead no other merit as the hope of our
acceptance. Let us be very clear about this centrality of our Lord's
mediation because I shall presently have certain things to say which are
often assumed to be in conflict with his Mediatorial Office, but which
in reality do not so conflict, but exist at all because of the Office.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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