LETTER No. 6: MAY 2008
Dear All,
The May Devotions, that is the devotions to
our Lady that have grown up and been practiced during or about the month of
May, have two aspects.
First of all, they are grounded upon belief
that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a legitimate, and, more than that, an
important, focus of the devotion of Christians. That devotion takes the
form of a fellowship and identification with her, analogous to that with
the apostles who are the core and framework of the Church, that is intensified
by the recognition of Mary’s unique status in the scheme of the world’s
salvation, by a proper recourse to her as Mother of the Church, and by a
conviction of the effectiveness and intimacy of her prayers. The natural
bonds of familial affection are experienced as renewed in the context of
the saving community; the Church understands her to have a special place in
the divine economy as she did in the earthly one, and thus trusts that she
was assumed, body and soul, into heaven, and conceives of her as “crowned”
with the glory of her Son.
But to arrive at to the second aspect, let us
look a little at the history of these Devotions, which are to be truthful
specific only in the Church of England to certain rather determinedly
Catholic parishes, where people’s perspective on the life of the Church
spills over beyond the bounds of synodical “Anglicanism” and these
particular islands. We know that few people in Churches round about us will
know what “May Devotions” are, let alone respond positively to them! And
many Anglicans, both contemporary and those in years gone by, will find it
difficult to subscribe to those beliefs outlined in the first paragraph.
So, turning to the past that out of it we may look to the future…
It’s no surprise that the principal means and
manifestation of the devotion to Mary that marks this season of late
spring, the month of May, is flowers. Nature literally blossoms in
May: the blossom is brought to the signifier and precursor of human
blossoming that is Christ, namely the Virgin who accepted the Word, and
brought him into the world. Alfonso X, King of Castille (1221-1284) praised
Our Lady in his song "Ben venna Mayo". The Blessèd Henry Suso
(1295-1366) related the “spiritual May-time” to the Cross, at the foot of which
our Lady stood. And although it’s no surprise that the roots of the May
devotion go back quite a long way, it may be a surprise that in anything
like its present forms it’s quite a recent development. Indeed, the
original use of the phrase, “May Devotions,” referred in Catholic Germany,
Suso’s homeland, to what we call in England “Rogationtide.” There was no
Marian connection at all. The
earliest known examples of May Devotions centred around Our Lady, with the
characteristic use of flowers, date from Verona in 1739 and Genoa in 1747;
but these were domestic, and it was only in Ferrara in 1784 that we learn
of a public rite.
But this was a fortuitous time. The devotion
spread rapidly, and most rapidly in France. The Revolution quickly became
avowedly pagan, and moved against the Church with consequences we still
feel today, but which dominated the 19th (and even early 20th) century. May
Devotions to Mary proved a potent way of acknowledging the natural world
within the context of the Gospel and the church, demonstrating the
recapitulation of all things in Christ. From Italy, via the work of Fr
Pierre Doré in Lorraine in the first two decades of the century, the
Devotion sop read like wildfire throughout France, the Low Countries and
German-speaking Europe. Bishops encouraged it everywhere on the Continent,
and the promulgation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary
in 1854 gave it an enormous boost, both theologically and liturgically – it
was the May Devotions that were widely used in 1855 to proclaim the
doctrine. The 1800s saw the dawn of hard and bitter years for the Church as
the West changed socially, politically, economically and philosophically
around her, and science, industrialism and imperialism changed the face of
the earth. The May Devotions were just one example of patterns of devotion
that for very good reasons came to prominence in what’s been called “the
Marian Century,” a designation that’s come to be applied to the Church’s
deeply traumatic era between 1850 and 1950. They continued to be central to
much Catholic piety for all this time, receiving fresh impetus from Papal
initiatives during both World Wars, and even as late as Mediator Dei
in 1947. In countless Catholic parishes there were household and parochial
devotions every evening in May: “May, the whole of it, was dedicated to the
Blessèd Virgin Mary and was marked by the public recitation of the rosary,
processions and crownings of statues of our Lady.” (J D Crichton, As It
Was) At the same time, domestic piety flourished with private prayers
and household shrines and “altars.”
Out of all this emerges the second aspect of
the May Devotion, its central
reality, revealed afresh, (paradoxically but perhaps unsurprisingly) by the
rapid evaporation after Vatican II of this lush pattern of worship that
took its impetus from an emphatic assertion of the encounter of divine and
human in the sacralised womanhood of Mary. The use of flowers (nature), the
crowning (the assertion of the identity and significance of the person)
with flowers, and the importance of seeing this (the participation
of the faithful), of having it on display in processions (movement and
change made concrete) – these are powerful and simple pointers to the
redeeming work of God in Christ. They are elaborations, stated dramatically
and even playfully, of the spiritual framework that I sketched in the
second paragraph. They make a
claim, state a truth, of how God has pushed us towards himself with love. Nature
is our realm, splendid and fallen, and within it there is a focus – a
significant person - where the work of God (most miraculously, by the
accession of part of nature to his will) emerged and by the exercise of
divine priesthood returned nature (including us) to real relationship with
him; we, who are so redeemed, see, look at, and are caught up in
this sign of ambiguous nature interpenetrated with the sign (Mary) who
brought to birth the world’s
saviour, the one (Jesus Christ) who finally and definitively set
everything again in its proper focus (which is God); and we being so
affected can move afresh towards the reality given us in the Church
and her sacraments, the life of the Spirit, the Vision of God.
Fr Stephen
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