Ave Maria Meditations
The first fruit of humility is JOY. No creature has ever rejoiced as Mary did. No joy was ever so deep, so holy, so beautiful, as hers. It was the joy of possessing God in a way in which none had possessed him heretofore, a way which was the grandest work of his wisdom and his power, the greatest height of his inexplicable love of creatures. It was the joy of presenting to God what was equal to himself, and so covering his divine majesty with a coextensive worship. It was the joy of being able by that offering to impetrate for her ‘fellow-creatures wonderful graces, which were new both in their abundance, their efficacy, and their excellence. It was the joy of the beauty of Jesus, of the ravishing sweetness of his Countenance, of the glorious mystery of every look and touch of him, of the thrilling privileges of her maternal love, and of the contagion of his unspeakable joy, which passed from his Soul into hers.
The whole world, by right of its creation, by right of having been created by a God so illimitably and adorably good and bright and loving, is a world of joy. Joy is so completely its nature that it can hardly help itself. It blossoms into joy without knowing what it is doing. It breaks out into mirthful songs, like a heedless child whose heart is too full of gayety for thought. It has not a line or form about it which is not beautiful. It leaps up to the sunshine, and, when it opens itself, it opens in vernal greenness, in summer flowers, in autumnal fruits, and then rests again for its winter rest, like a happy cradled infant, under its snowy coverlet adorned with fairy-like crystals, while the pageantry of the gorgeous storms only makes music round its unbroken slumber.
Mary, the cause of all our joy, was herself a growth of earth, a specimen of what an unfal1en world would have been; and it was on an earthly stem that Jesus himself, the joy of all joys, blossomed and gave forth his fragrance. Thus nature and life tend to joy at all hours. Joy is their legitimate development, their proper perfection,-in fact, the very law of living; for the bare act of living is itself an inestimable joy. Nothing glorifies God so much as joy. See how the perfume lingers in the withered flower: it is the angel of joy who cannot take heart to wing his flight back from earth to heaven, even when his task is done.
It is self which has marred thie joy. It is the worship of self, the perpetual remembrance of self, the making self a centre, which has weighed the world down in its jubilee and almost overballasted it with sadness. It is humility above all other things which weakens or snaps asunder the holdfasts of selfishness. A lowly spirit is of necessity an unselfish one. Humility is a perpetual presence of God; and how can self be otherwise than forgotten there? A humble man is a joyous man. He is in the world, like a child, who claims no rights, and questions not the rights of God, but simply lives and expands in the sunshine round about him. The little one does not even claim the right to be happy: happiness comes to him as a fact, or rather as a gracious law, and he is happy without knowing of his happiness,-which is the truest happiness of all. So is it with him whom humility has sanctified.
Morever, as joy was the original intent of creation, it must be an essential element in all worship of the Creator. Nay, is it not almost a definition of grace, the rejoicing in what is sad to fallen nature, because of the Creator’s will? Thus Mary’s devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem was one of transcending joy. There is no worship where there is no joy. For worship is something more than either the fear of God or the love of him. It is delight in him.
With Mary’s joy, if not out of it, came also a fresh increase of her unutterable purity, a grace whose perfection is the complete loss of self in God. There is something in purity which is akin to infinity.
Fr. Frederick William Faber
