MARY SHOWS US THE WAY

This year June has been rich in important feasts—the Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart and Saints Peter and Paul.But there are few major feasts in July and August: the Transfiguration and the Assumption in August, and, if Madonna’s Jesuit connections can be forgiven, St Ignatius at the end of July.

Mostly, July and August will be ordinary time, just extending the power and meaning of Pentecost through more days and weeks and months of another year in a new millennium. They take that power and meaning into the big and small details of our ordinary lives.

And so we keep ourselves open to the subtle inspiration of the Holy Spirit day after day. We know the Spirit more often as a gentle whisper than a mighty wind: we listen carefully to the delicate shifts of feeling in our hearts, and note the fine play of our thoughts that can bring us closer to understanding, to wisdom.

We keep the fires of love burning through the commonplace months that come our way. We sense the small kindnesses of friends and of strangers—a smile, a wave, the paper brought to our door, some flowers or a jar of marmalade left there, a surprise phone call, the offer of a lift.

We find that our hearts are more and more grateful for these tiny details: we learn to place great trust in the slight lift in feeling this brings us, and allow ourselves to whisper our appreciation to the Lord of all things, especially small things. The Holy Spirit inches into our lives.

We learn that suffering can be finely pitched too, as we are nudged more and more to take account of the suffering of others, whether the lonely person down the street or the children of distant Iraq, or whoever touches us with a flicker of their pain.

Peacefully, the Spirit brings us to stand alongside all those who have been pushed aside, or are bereft, or lost. Somehow we discover that this alerts us more to the presence in the world, and in our lives too, of the Father God who opens his arms behind the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross. It’s all very quiet.
The liturgical colour for all this ordinariness is green, which signifies hope or reminds us of the everydayness of grass growing.

Not surprisingly, our tradition associates this holy attentiveness with Mary, who is often pictured amongst the disciples at Pentecost, and whose place in the Church is to make room for the rest of us and show us how to make ourselves at home there. She keeps pointing out to us where her Son is and what he is doing. Again, she is often pictured carrying him, bringing him to us. Her love of him makes her attentive and active at once.

Maybe women are better at this than men, and maybe that’s what men pray for when they pray to her for help. St Ignatius had a lifelong devotion to her, and this can make him more approachable if we find him rather hard to connect with.

When Ignatius at last gained the property in Rome that became the site of the Church of the Gesu, he insisted on preserving there the local devotion to Our Lady of the Way—Santa Maria della Strada. That ancient and rather simple painting is still there in its special chapel.

Copies of it are frequent in Jesuit houses; there’s one on the turn of the stair leading to our chapel here at JTC. It’s the ordinary Marian devotion in the Ignatian tradition. And maybe we Jesuits could revive our habit of saying a prayer to her when we set off on a journey—especially if a Jesuit is driving.

More seriously, the devotion suits the Ignatius who described himself in his autobiography as the Pilgrim. If you are a pilgrim in need of help on the way (and you cannot possibly be a pilgrim without needing help), then the offer of help from the Mother of the Lord under the title of Our Lady of the Way is more of a grace than a coincidence.

So she is there for us in all this ordinary life we have, as we share in what Christians have always called The Way:

Lady, your presence
and prayer
make wherever we go
home and holy.
The stony tracks of Galilee,
Judea’s bitter hills,
the blood-flecked streets of Jerusalem
reveal your holy way.
Your child is always with you,
cradled in your arms;
you place him in our care.
We are straw; take our lives;
love is in our care.

Andrew Bullen SJ