May – Month of Mary

(Part I Rose in a Mystery)

May is dedicated to Mary because, as Blessed John Henry Newman explains in his meditations on the invocations to her in the Litany of Loreto: just as the earth harmonises with all nature during this season bursting forth in celebrating the beauty and joy of the Paschal Mystery of Christ, who has triumphed over death, so it is most fitting for Christians to praise God’s greatest work of art, Mary, the ‘Mystical Rose’. 

But, why is Mary called the Rosa Mystica? The reason is really quite simple. It is because this most mysteriously beautiful flower of the earthly garden, which is regarded as a perfect emblem of love, appropriately symbolises Mary, whom the poet Wordsworth called “Our tainted nature’s solitary boast”. (“Ecclesiastical Sonnets”, pt. ii, No. xxv. The Virgin.) None better than Mary, who is also addressed as the “Seat of Wisdom” (Sedes Sapientiae), understood the privilege of being especially cultivated and enveloped by the wonderful mystery of God’s love. The hidden mysteries of divine love were treasured in Mary’s heart and also unfolded in her life (cf. Lk 2:19, 51), which opened beauteously, like a rose’s blossoming, in response to the Spirit’s dew of grace. This is expressed in a 16^th century German hymn, which alludes to Isaiah’s prophecy (cf. Is 11:1): Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, translated in English as Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, a Christmas carol. Like her, the woman wrapt in silence, the community of faith is plunged into contemplating the wonderful divine design of restoring all creation in Christ. 

This truly contemplative spirit creatively flourishes in the finest works of art, for it participates profoundly in God’s delight with his creation which he found very good and beautiful in so far as it is an “epiphany” of beauty, reflecting the image of his glory. (Cf. St John Paul II’s Letter to Artists, Easter 1999, 1.) Thus, for example, the greatest architects of the Middle Ages did not weary of admiring the mysteriously fascinating form of the rose, which they integrated into their designs of the windows of the soaring Gothic cathedrals, like that of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore. The West window of these magnificent buildings was like an eye focused on the sacred place of the East towards which the Church is oriented in celebrating the mystery of God’s saving love illuminating our lives as the Light of the world. 

Faithful to this traditional perspective, Dante could thus describe what he learned to behold from his guide to the highest realms of Paradise, St Bernard, who told him:

Now to that face which most resembles Christ

Lift up thy gaze; its radiance alone

Can grant to thee the power to look on Christ.

(English translation by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds Cf. Paradiso XXXII 85-87)

A little after these lines the same Florentine poet recalls the Archangel Gabriel’s greeting to the Virgin of Nazareth: “Ave, Maria, gratia plena”. He goes on to say that grateful admiration for her generous cooperation with God’s design of salvation resounds for all eternity of heaven in the song of the saints and blessed. (Cf. Paradiso XXXII, 97.99.) It would be no exaggeration, thus, to say that this poet’s Paradise ultimately has an entirely Marian form, as the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar observes (cf. The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. III, [ET] T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1986, p.82.) This does not mean, however, that the joy of heaven does not consist in praising and thanking God for his own being and work of love. In fact, the whole of Dante’s Paradiso itself offers a most rich witness to the deepest attitude of praising the glory of divine love. From the beginning to the last strophe of Dante’s masterpiece of piety in poetry it is clear that the poet passes from the statement of a somewhat dry Aristotelian concept regarding “the first unmoved Mover” to the often cited richly evocative expression of the highest Christian contemplation:

The love that moves the sun and the other stars. (Paradiso, XXXIII, 145.)

The undertaking of the spiritual journey – from Hell to Purgatory up to Paradise - which Dante himself made in Holy Week of the first Jubilee Year (1300) and which he invites the reader to make in any age, entails nothing other than that movement called conversion of heart. All the saints, and even the Queen of heaven in a manner par excellence from the beginning of her immaculate life, exemplify this movement, through which they participate in the mystery of the Risen Lord’s Passover. Thus in Dante’s perspective, not only the Virgin Mary, but also all the redeemed together with her form a single resplendent rose, which reflects the rays of the glorious light of the divine kingdom of love. “This is the supreme image,” according to von Balthasar, “of Dante’s inspiration.” (The Glory of the Lord, loc.cit., p.77.)

Mary was also the inspiration of the young Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who in the opening stanza of one of his poems written as a May-day homage to be placed in her honour by the statue in the grounds of the Jesuit college, St Mary’s Hall Stonyhurst, wrote:

The rose in a mystery - where is it found?

Is it anything true? Does it grow upon ground?

It was made of earth’s mould but it went from men’s eyes

And its place is a secret and shut in the skies.

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Image above:

The Virgin Mother and Child surrounded by saints - Fra Angelico, Altarpiece, San Marco, Florence.