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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Our Lady in the Bullring

Our Lady in the Bullring

One should not ever have to defend or justify among one’s fellow-Catholics a life which pivots on devotion to Our Lady. We know from the authoritative statements of the Church, and equally from the vast communal experience of all Catholics, that where devotion to Our Lady is strong, allegiance to Our Lord is also strengthened. The critics who think otherwise are self-deceived.

Yet every now and then some fairly wise man or woman is disturbed by ‘excesses’ – they have struck a Marian prayer perhaps, in which the atmosphere of devotion seems to them too womb-like, or they suspect that somebody else likes making Novenas better than going to Mass.

These possible ‘excesses’ do not worry me. Like a man groping in a dark room for the light switch, I like to know where the switch is – and when I say the name of Mary, I have found it. I think no man is likely to be worse for having a ferocious, untameable and passionate devotion for something, or especially for some person – a rock-shattering love, of the kind that Chesterton expressed so exactly in that great, neglected poem, ‘Regina Angelorum’ –

. . . and she has not forgotten to call to her old companions,
To call and crave;
And to hear her calling a man might arise and thunder
On the doors of the grave . . .

Mary was not necessary to our salvation; God could have redeemed us by a single act of His omnipotent Love. But He chose to accommodate grace to nature, to become a man and speak our language, and remould us gently as the potter moulds the clay, and in such a way that no scrap of the clay need be lost. And it is, I think, in the choice of a woman as the vessel of His Divine power and love that He brought redemption not just to the market-place, or to our back door, but to the innermost recesses of the human heart.

One can understand readily the devotion of a good housewife to Our Lady her sense that every decision and trial can be shared with the Housewife ofpage 706 Nazareth. One can understand, too, the devotion of a callgirl – the devotion that survives real and apparent evil, in the heart of someone who needs to know that one road to God is never closed. One can understand the devotion of children, who simply kneel down to a Mother in Heaven – and perhaps this element is never wholly absent from the heart of an adult Catholic – it would be a pity if it were. But the devotion of a grown man to Our Lady needs a little more explanation. I think the undertones of such a devotion are made explicit in those words of Chesterton – he says, ‘a man might arise and thunder’ – not a child, not a eunuch, but a man, possessing the peculiar strength and vulnerability of the male tribe.

The jaws of this world, seen under the aspect of a grave, close on a man early. He is obliged to learn a number of disciplines, intellectual and physical, while segregated with other adolescent males. A certain combative energy is necessary to him, even to work and raise a family – let alone to stand on the football field, or in the boxing ring, or in the trenches during a war. He will be a rare and lucky individual if he does not share, at least in his manner of thought and speech, something of the intemperance and sensuality which are often regarded as the masculine vices. A woman will generally shield herself from these; but a man can’t in the same degree. His very friendships will betray him.

With ungrudging respect for those who hate that sport, I tend to see the core of my life, or any man’s life, in terms of the bullring. The bull represents those forces of death and chaos inside and outside the human heart, which a man must encounter daily – meet, dodge, fight, overcome – on the slippery sand wet sometimes with his own blood, sometimes with the blood of the bull. Those who are watching do not matter much – except that in this fight one is protecting them – the battle lasts as long as life itself, and is a very solitary thing.

It is, as I have implied, a peculiarly masculine struggle. At the moment of choice a woman’s help or advice will very likely not be of service – she would say, ‘Why are you here at all?’ – or – ‘Run for shelter’ – when one knows it is necessary to go within reach of the horns. There is one exception however. Our Lady, having a share in God’s wisdom, knows the masculine heart as well as she knows the feminine. It is she who gives the man his sword, she who lifts him up when he slips, she who takes away the cloud of weariness from his eyes – and in the battle it is her he serves, as in the forgotten times of chivalry, and her to whom he gives whatever trophies he may gain. A look from her eyes is the reward. Certainly she is Our Lord’s agent. But he chose that our prayers should be offered by her, and all graces come to us through her hands.

I like that passage near the end of the Fifth Canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, which describes the death of an unshriven Catholic –

page 707

. . . The stream called Archian runs, whose springs well out
Above the convent in the Apennino.
There where its name is lost, I came on foot,
Stabbed in the throat and fleeing; and as I fled
My life-blood dabbled all the plain about.
There my sight failed me, and my last word sped
Forth in the name of Mary; there headlong
I fell; there only left my body dead . . .

Dante finds this desperate soldier, a man of many evil deeds, redeemed and waiting at the foot of the Purgatorial Mountain. An instinctive and ineradicable devotion to Our Lady has saved him – or rather, she herself has saved him, because he called on her. I take him as a type of common manhood.

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