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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Virgin and the Unicorn

The Virgin and the Unicorn

Thomas Merton, who is, after God and herself, the agent of my own conversion, has made some powerful statements about the Blessed Virgin. He says – ‘without her, the knowledge of Christ is only speculation’ and ‘what people find to say about her sometimes tells us more about their own selves . . .’. It may be that what I write of her reveals too much of my own nature. I hope it is not so.

The holiness of Almighty God seems terrible to a sinner. To him that holiness looks like Everest, crowned with blizzards and sunlight, to the eyes of a mountaineer in a little valley. ‘Do not go there,’ his heart tells him, ‘or you will die among the avalanches.’

And even the face of the Son of Man, father and friend of the poor, troubles him. It is the face he has most offended. It calls him, however gently, to stretch himself on the right-hand Cross and receive the words and the secret look given to Dismas. In that look the history of all human sanctity is contained; except the sanctity of Mary, who had no sins of her own to expiate.

The sinner is torn two ways. He desires to obey and yet fears the Cross. And to that man, any Catholic man, standing on Golgotha, the Blessed Virgin turns her eyes, and says: ‘My child, it is not difficult. One step at a time is enough. Go to Confession. I will obtain for you the contrition you need. If you do not leave me, I will never leave you.’ And so that man takes his first uncertain step.

There are many things spoken between a child and its mother which would seem foolishness to an outsider. Complaints, loving rebukes, gifts of no value (the child brings a pebble, and the mother pretends it is a jewel, both knowing otherwise), irrational fears banished by a word or touch, household humour.

Many modern men have had no true childhood. Unbaptised, pulled apart by conflicting passions, growing up under the enigmatic weight of a sky where no God lives, they travel early into the desert of sin and seem doomed to perish there. The face of a natural mother may console them, but cannot reach or dispel the deepest terrors of interior darkness. For such men (among whom I would count myself to be) Mary, their supernatural mother, comes like an unhoped-for spring, driving out the devils by a look, and captivating the soul with the reflected beauty of God.

I remember when I saw her image first, with inward as well as outward sight, surrounded by daffodils (for it was spring) and floating above a sea of bright candles, Our Lady of Good Counsel. My soul came out of darkness into sunshine, into a world it had never known, a world where evil was kept in chains and the Blessed walked among men. All the later tears and errors and betrayals could not dispel that moment of recognition; indeed they could onlypage 515 strengthen it.

When someone says, ‘How did you become a Catholic?’ – what reply should one make? Perhaps – ‘I came to the Church to get rid of my sins’ – or – ‘the Holy Spirit gave me faith.’ But the truest answer, for me, would be that of a child – ‘I wrote a letter to God’s mother and she obtained the gift of Faith for me.’

‘But,’ such an enquirer may reply, ‘you are an educated man! You are able to read and write. How did you find it wrestling with Aquinas? What is your view of Papal Indulgences?’

I think the best answer is contained in an old fable. The unicorn lives in a dark forest, far from human dwellings. The bravest hunters who go out to catch him are slain by him. But a Virgin goes out without weapons, and seats herself on the ground, and the terrible unicorn comes out of the forest and sees her. Against her beauty and her sanctity his rage is powerless. He lays his head on her lap, sleeps, and is taken by the hunters.

This fabulous unicorn, to my mind, is the ‘wild living intellect’ of which Newman speaks with dread. Its single horn symbolises the power of a self- centred universe: the analytical power of science or art divorced from God. The hunters are the great theologians and their spears are forged in the smithies of reason. But the unicorn cannot be wounded by them, because they do not touch its heart, which rests in an inhuman purity of self-contemplation.

At the centre of the forest is a cave and a pool. The unicorn sleeps in the cave, and in its dreams a sterile universe revolves endlessly to no purpose. At dawn it emerges and gazes at its own image in the pool, thinking, ‘What am I? Who made me? Why is my existence never free from pain?’

The Virgin symbolises nature in union with God. The unicorn of an archaic human reason is spell-bound at the sight of her. He must sleep and be slain in order to be reborn as a living man.

The human heart often expresses its deepest need in symbols. But God is scarcely a symbolist. His thoughts are acts and the acts issue in creation. He has given us no mere symbol, no Byzantine Sophia crowned with jewels, trembling between being and not-being, but an actual human person in whom nature and the life of God are in perfect harmony.

One cannot see the necessity that God should have a perfect sinless Mother. It is not the necessity of His own holiness, however, but the answer of divine generosity to our deepest human need, which gripped our souls when, in the middle of His passion, He gave us the Blessed Virgin as our own mother. He was not content to redeem us. He gave us as well a living protector and guide, in herself the archetype of human sanctity, who would lead us easily and gently, as children, into the pattern of redemption.

Learned and unlearned men, tough sailors, tidy diplomats, anxious housewives, innocent children, men and women hardened in sin, nuns and priests, the rigid and the careless, speak daily and nightly to Mary, settingpage 516 before her their various problems, without constraint, in trust and love and hope – and to each she gives the graces they most need. She places upon the backs of her children ‘crosses as heavy and deep as the sea.’ But she obtains for them also the strength to carry them.

The presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is the first great secret of Catholic life, incommunicable to those who do not believe, however much we may desire that they should share in it. The second is the Marian secret; for in Mary is the pattern of material Church itself, entirely subject to the will of God. Her prayer contains and sustains the prayer of the whole Mystical Body. And she does not waste one iota of what is offered to God through her.

Each country rightly sees Our Lady as its own – in Japan, a Japanese woman; in Mexico, a Mexican. For she is the Mediatrix who perfectly measures the gifts of God to the varying needs and natures of races and individuals. She gives birth to Christ again and tends Him and nourishes Him in each faithful soul. These statements seem hyperbole; but they are attested by the doctrines of the Church and the experience of multitudes.

Mary, cause of our joy, pray for us.

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