Part 1

The Mirror of the Months

THE MIRROR OF THE MONTHS

BY

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

LONDON: THE SOCIETY OF SS. PETER & PAUL LIMITED WESTMINSTER HOUSE GREAT SMITH STREET S.W.1

_Made and printed in Great Britain at the_ KYNOCH PRESS BIRMINGHAM _for the Society of SS. Peter & Paul Limited_

CONTENTS

JANUARY, P. 1 _Month of the Holy Infancy_

FEBRUARY, P. 6 _Month of Light in Darkness_

MARCH, P. 12 _Month of the Passion_

APRIL, P. 17 _Month of the Resurrection_

MAY, P. 24 _Month of Mary_

JUNE, P. 29 _Month of the Sacred Heart_

JULY, P. 34 _Month of the Precious Blood_

AUGUST, P. 44 _Month of the Most Pure Heart of Mary_

SEPTEMBER, P. 49 _Month of the Sorrows of Mary_

OCTOBER, P. 53 _Month of the Holy Angels_

NOVEMBER, P. 60 _Month of the Holy Souls_

DECEMBER, P. 65 _Month of the Incarnation_

January _Month of the Holy Infancy_

The year begins—on a January morning, cold and early. The earth lies frozen under her strewings of snow. There is no wind, and a great silence broods over the fields; the faint bleating of a winter lamb only accentuates the stillness, as it creeps from the lambing-hut with its tale of life beginning in struggle and distress. It is the only sound of life in all that frost-bound stillness, and it is a sound of woe.

No promise shows in all that hard, dark soil. Surely nothing can live on the frozen grass, or in the waters of the pond that lie black under their scum of ice. The sun himself looks feeble as he tries in vain to disperse the January clouds, and the long beam that at last goes down into the woods contains no warmth and only the palest light. The fields are bound—water-logged ditches, half-frozen soil, hedges of bare, spindled thorn. The fields are silent—birdless, windless, lifeless; they have no voice but the cry of the winter lamb.

* * * * *

It is a week now since “when all things were in a quiet silence and that night in the midst of her swift course” the Eternal Word leaped from the throne of the heavens to the throne of straw. For a week he has shared the bed and shelter of the ox. Unable to do more than feed and cry, he has lain in Mary’s arms and cried for her breast. Out into the star-pricked winter darkness creeps the wailing of the speechless Word. He is the Word—he cannot speak. He is the Energy that set the worlds in motion—he lies helpless on his mother’s lap.

But now a new note has come into his cry of hunger and helplessness—the note of pain. He who is the End of the Law submits to the means he has ordained for approaching himself. He who is the Light of the World enters the thick darkness where Moses found God. He will make Sinai a foothill to Calvary.... “Verily I say unto you, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil”—perhaps to destroy by fulfilling, as an ancient bottle is burst with new-made wine. The veil of the temple is rent in twain at the cry of ‘Consummatum est,’ and in that hour the Law of Moses stands both destroyed and fulfilled.

So the child in Mary’s arms is really a mighty, propitiatory child. The Precious Blood did not fall only on Calvary but at Bethlehem. It was there that the fountain was first opened for sin and uncleanness, in the first dark hours of the year. As the winter sun shall mount at last into the blazing heavens of July, so he too will pass through shattering equinoxes of redemption to his ascended summer calm.

But our New Year’s worship is for him in his winter helplessness, his smallness, his obedience to the frosty fierceness of the law. He is the pattern of our Faith—its helplessness in its first struggle for life—for what are its two thousand years in his sight but as yesterday?—its smallness, as it lies in the stable of humble intellects and impulsive hearts—its half-conscious obedience to laws which are the patterns of heavenly things—its blood-shedding in that obedience.... We are often too confident of our Faith, just as our enemies are too contemptuous of it—we and they forget that it is still only a child, existing chiefly by desire, by feeling, by necessity.

The age of that child made obedient unto the law, and in the shedding of blood first given his human name, is not more disproportionate to the age of the Law than is the age of the Kingdom of Heaven to the age of the earth. Millions and millions of years ago life first appeared—a small helpless thing, scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic mass, in constant danger of being stamped out by the mighty forces around it. Throughout long ages it developed so slowly that its growth would be almost imperceptible to the watchman of a thousand years ... and as it grew, it submitted itself to the Law. Terrific forces bound it, moulded it, complicated it, regulated it, evolved it. We see the domain of the Law stretching back from the circumcised Christ, far beyond the Priestly Code, far beyond the days of Moses on the Mount, back to the prehistoric ages of the world, when in some dim secret place of the sea there was a change, a miraculous birth. In the same way we see the dominion of Grace stretching forward from the child of that winter’s day, beyond his helpless infancy and suffering manhood, beyond his Cross, beyond his empty grave, beyond the Mount of his Ascension, on into the far future of the world, when having grown to manhood and shared his Cross, it is raised at last to share his throne.

On the Feast of the Circumcision the old and the new kingdoms meet—the kingdom of Nature and the kingdom of Supernature, the kingdom of the Law and the kingdom of Grace. We do not understand why the greater submits to the less, why Grace is content to suffer under the Law, why the New King weeps and the Old King carries the sword.

“I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.” ... Not only the Law of Moses, but the whole Old Testament of the world’s history—that which we call, understanding but in part, the Law of Nature. The supernatural life does not come to destroy the natural, but to fulfil it, not to supplant but to complete it. Grace fulfils the Law, and Spirit raises Matter to the right hand of God. On the Feast of the Circumcision the sacramental wonder has begun.

So we watch the New Life lying on the Winter’s lap, submitting itself humbly and sweetly to nature and mankind, surrounded by dangers that threaten it—the shouts of Herod’s soldiers are not far off—suffering the pains and indignities that accompany its surrender to our limitations, baptising itself into our humanity with blood. Mary and Joseph—the loving and the wise among us—know that it will live best in the warm air of simplicity, homeliness and familiarity, of childhood and the hearth. It must be sheltered from the windy blasts of dispute, and wrapped from the frosts of prohibitions; it must not be brought into the cold halls of pomposity, nor starved by cutting off from the six days of common things.... Mary and Joseph must be careful guardians of the New Life if it is to grow through the slow ages of the world’s future—as life grew humble and close to the ground through the ages of her past—till it is old enough to claim its manhood—till it attains at last to the full stature of the Cross.

February _Month of Light in Darkness_

It is still very calm—but the frost is over. The hardness is gone from the air, and the cold, and that chill sense of binding. Instead, there is a feeling of moisture, which is also a feeling of growth—of the first growth. Already that growth has become apparent in the delicate catkins that hang from the hedges, in the frail budding of the trees. As yet there is no green, only a brown stickiness—no unfurling, only a close-packed promise. But life and growth are there, in the hedges, in the woods, and in the moist, rain-drenched earth, whose scents are carried up the lane by the breeze which has the first spring warmth in it. A slow light spreads over the fields at evening—yellow, rainy, reflected in the ponds and in the watery ruts. It is a faint light, a watery light, but it shines where a month ago was darkness.

* * * * *

Once, long ages ago, there was only twilight in the world—not a twilight of the sun, though those were days of ice and snow and a strange desolation, but a twilight in the soul and mind of man, dimness and faintness and pale struggle in the spirit and mind and intellect—a world in which the earliest man saw men only as trees walking.

The last great ice age was approaching, and where once the forest had grown thickly, the trees were becoming scant. The forest-belt receded before the advancing world of ice, which came out of those parts which are now Scandinavia, and its place was taken gradually by barren tundras or steppes. In the forest had dwelt a strange race, common stock of ourselves and the apes. These beings had lived in the trees, an arboreal life, far above the ground, more or less secure from the terrible beasts that stalked those parts of the world. When in a slow process of many hundreds of years the tree-belt receded, a large proportion of the tree-dwelling race went with it into the south, maintaining by migration the ease and safety of their old conditions. These migrants were the ancestors of the African monkey, born in the freedom and comparative security of the jungle, faithful to the old conditions and the old environment, to which they became more and more perfectly adapted in succeeding generations.

But what of those who remained behind? From tree-dwellers they had become earth-dwellers. They must painfully adapt themselves to an entirely new environment, and learn new ways of feeding, moving, living, at bitter cost to the individual and to the race. They were no longer safe from marauding beasts, the giant mammoths and buffaloes and elks that preyed over the steppes. It would seem as if they had made an evil choice, and would have been wiser had they done as others of their race and clung to their old conditions, following the tree-belt southward. Nothing but destruction could come of this defiance of their environment, this painful adoption of new ways. Those who remained after the trees were gone must surely perish.

But this first race of men (that yet were not quite men) had not acted entirely without light. Descending from the trees to the ground, their hands and arms, used hitherto for climbing, were now set free for enterprise. At last man stood upright. The ages went by, and his hands, no longer needed for mere balance and locomotion, learned skill. He picked up objects, used them, shaped them, and with using the power and scope of using grew. At the same time, the dangers with which he was beset sharpened his brain into resource and constructive planning. His reason came to have a definite survival value in the scheme of things. At first it had been by strength alone that living things survived. Those were the days when the ichthyosaurus and the giant iguanodon roamed the earth. Then the survival factor changed, and the battle was to the swift—instead of the ichthyosaurus and the iguanodon flourished the reindeer and the hare. But now at last mind became dominant, and mankind triumphed by virtue of his better brain development, both over the swift and over the strong. His brain taught him stratagem to atone for his lack of swiftness, it gave him skill to make weapons so that his weakness was a match for the strength of his enemies.

But it taught him more than this. The light was growing, and one day a man drew a rough picture of a buffalo on the roof of the cave where he lived. He did not draw it in the spirit of imitation but in the spirit of power. By placing the image of the creature there in his cave he felt himself to have won power over it. Mere magic-making, no doubt ... nevertheless by such an act man definitely asserted the power of mind over matter, of the unseen over the seen. The first upward step was taken. The Præparatio Evangelica had begun.

The long process had started which was to end in the “ethical monotheism” of Judea. From mere magic-making man passes on to the idea of propitiation. He adopts a personal relation towards the Unseen. Propitiation leads him to the idea of beneficence—his gifts are accepted, calamities and dangers are averted, therefore the Unseen, though cruel, powerful, and capricious must also know moments of loving-kindness. In time his gods are half good and half bad, but it is remarkable that continual contact with the Unseen through the ages both before and after history, slowly deepens man’s sense of its fundamental goodness. At last even his idea of goodness itself changes and acquires an ethical significance. Isaiah and Jeremiah lift up their voices—Wisdom and the Son of Sirach speak—and the spiritual environment is ready for the coming of the New Life, of the Virgin Mary, as in the ages of the ages ago the physical environment was ready for the birth of life in the virgin sea.

It was the suffering and struggle of man which made him first look upwards, and in the whole history of the world it would seem as if no step, either material or spiritual, was ever taken without pain. “Without shedding of blood is no remission of sin.” Perfect adaptation to environment—or, quite plainly, happiness—means the end of progress. If man is to go forward, he must be in a state of warfare and dissatisfaction with his environment—in other words, he must suffer. It would seem as if suffering were an indispensable condition of advance. The corn of wheat that falls into the ground cannot bear fruit except it die, and when that process takes place in consciousness, then it is suffering, no matter what its fruit.

You may speculate whether suffering would or would not have been a condition of progress if there had been no Fall. The first impulse is to answer unhesitatingly that it would not—suffering has a place only in a world whose processes are warped by evil, it can have no place in the scheme of an all-loving and all-powerful God. But, after a little reflection, you realise that, though suffering as we know it could certainly have had no place in a sinless world, nevertheless some process of which our suffering is a perverted image may have been a condition of advance. The free creature gladly doing battle with its environment in order to fulfil with a pure and loving will the intelligible purposes of God is of a different order from the creature bound by sin, who endures ignorantly and unwillingly its conditions of progress, which indeed has the power to abuse them into conditions of failure, so that pain no longer brings its certain redemption. Directly suffering becomes voluntary and intelligent it is no longer suffering at all. The misery lies in the clouded mind and will, and it is for this clouding that sin is responsible. No one of us has ever suffered entirely of clear purpose or free will, so it is impossible for us to know the place of suffering in the Purpose of God.

But to the stumbling pain of our first ancestors we owe the fact that we stand upright upon our feet, to the first glimmerings of logos-light that bade them stay and fight a new environment rather than follow their old one into happiness we owe, humanly speaking, the fact that we are men. The light shined in darkness, and the darkness overpowered it not. The pale February dusk is a-flower with the promise of Spring.

March _Month of the Passion_

The softness has gone from the air, which no longer smells of earth. Indeed some of the sharpness of January is back again; but it is back no more as a binding force—rather as a breath, a movement, a release. The gale sweeps the sky along with it over the fields—the clouds race their shadows over the young grass, and over the last barrenness of the winter ploughings. The spring ploughs are now at work, tearing up the earth’s back, and already the first flowers are a-bloom, while the willow-catkins in the hedge have reached a yellow ripeness. They are like splashes of sunshine in the hedge, beside the white moony patches of the first wild cherry. In spite of the Lenten austerity and cold of the earth and air, there is throughout the country-side a sense of released warmth; the flying, tattered blue of the sky has lost its winter paleness, the sunshine already has a spring heat in it, the shadows have in them a depth of passional violet—they are no longer cold and grey and dead, but living, like the sun.

* * * * *

This is the month of the Spring Equinox, when great things happen in the heavens, when in the ancient world worshippers were conscious of some terrific event in the lives of the gods. It was the month when the sun’s brightness triumphed over the winter, when the curse of the sterile earth was removed, and life and birth and joy and fruitfulness came back into the fields. The old astrologer-astronomers read the doings of more than the material heavens in the slow Procession of the Equinoxes. When Taurus was the dominant sign, then it was the bull-headed God who triumphed over his enemies—Marduk, the bull of heaven, vanquished Tiamtu, the dragon of the great deep, and in Assyria winged bulls were among the gods, with mild human faces. Then, when after five hundred years the sign changed, and Aries was ruler of the Spring Equinox, came the reign of the ram-headed gods, of Jupiter Ammon and the gods of Egypt. The Spring saviour became a ram—a lamb ... “the sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens.”...

But in none of these early conceptions of a triumphant god overthrowing the powers of darkness was the victory won without blood. Tammuz, Adonis, Baldur, Osiris, Orpheus—all were slain—all bowed whether finally or temporarily, to the powers of the underworld and of darkness. Till at last pagan religion reached its height, its final climax in preparation for the Gospel—in the idea of the victim whose death brought life into the world.

It was not only in Judea that the conception of the Suffering Servant prepared men’s minds for the coming of Christ. Long before the time of Christ men had begun to rationalise the processes of suffering. They no longer fought the cruelties of their environment—the evil and pain of life—as beasts or as children. Both will and understanding were striving to take their share in the conflict. Philosophers built up systems on the idea of pain; and the popular religions dealt with it symbolically in their sacrificial rites; the mystery religions made it the centre of their arcana.

All looked forward, however dimly, to a deliverance from suffering. The stoics sought to overcome it through enduring it, the epicureans through ignoring it; the popular religions fell back on the idea of propitiation—on the conciliation of an anthropomorphic god who might be appeased into sparing; the mystery religions saw as in a glass darkly the God himself becoming the deliverer from the evils of the human process in which he too had a share.

Then the New Birth took place, and suffering was redeemed together with all other human processes. The Incarnation means the taking up into the god-head of the complete manhood, a manhood of which suffering is an inevitable condition. By taking our flesh, Christ redeemed the entire process of the world, which sin had made blind and futile. He gave the world’s sorrows a place in the kingdom of heaven—grief, pain, struggle and death were given their place in the eternal mind of God. The fumbling processes of nature became supernatural—they were born again.

Natural suffering, whether in man or beast, may be compared to the sacrifices of the old dispensation—“which could never make the comers thereunto perfect.” The Law stands for nature unredeemed as Grace stands for nature redeemed and becomes the Kingdom of God. Instead of the old sacrifices in which the unwilling and unknowing victim was offered by forces outside itself, to which at best it could only submit in the spirit of fear and meekness, came the new sacrifice of the Victim who is also the Priest, who of free will, full knowledge and true love offers up himself, a Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

The only deliverance from suffering is through sacrifice—through offering. Once a man accepts pain no longer in the spirit of rebellion or of blind endurance, or even of mere negative resignation, but in the spirit of co-operation, he is free. He becomes as it were the collaborator of God in the processes of the world—his will and understanding are restored to their pre-Adamic integrity.

One of the graces of Calvary is this grace of offering. As perfect man, Christ offered all human suffering to God, with a perfect will and a perfect understanding, so that now by virtue of the Cross, mankind too becomes priest as well as victim. He too can offer what he endures—whether the endurance be sought, as in the case of the saints and ascetics, or merely suffered in the inevitable common way of life. On Calvary, suffering was redeemed from the bondage of the law, of nature and the old Covenant, and was made a part of the supernatural order, a thing of grace. It is the old symbolical antithesis between the Esau and Jacob, Sinai and Jerusalem, Adam and Christ—the Evangelical message of the changed heart—the mystical doctrine of the New Birth. Suffering has its place in the New Covenant in the Kingdom of God, and as it was before a law of natural development, becomes now a law of spiritual growth. The unwilling victim of blind and cruel processes is now the priest of an all-wise, all-loving God, offering pain and grief in union with Calvary in one tremendous sacrifice—till at last sorrow becomes the world’s eucharist, its sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

April _Month of the Resurrection_

The flowers are closed in the moonlight of the April garden, but their perfumes fill the night—hyacinths, tulips, and ghostly white and yellow lilies scent the air with a dim, delicious fragrance. They sleep in the fullness of Spring, and the April moon, round and white, displays the masses of their colours in her dazzling beam.

Faint scents of earth come from the field, of the earth harrowed and her hidden secrets revealed. The scent of moss and soil mingles with the scent of the flowers in the garden. The moon rides high, then dips towards the west—she founders in the west like a great ship; the moon founders, and as she sinks, the sun arises on the opposite shore of the sky, and a long golden beam slants into the garden. The flowers wake and open their petals to the sun—the scents of the harrowed earth are lost in the sweetness of the opening flowers.

“The night is come—O night verily blessed!”

The blessed night is an April night, the night of a full moon. Already the scents of Spring are stirring in the fields—fair scents, fugitive scents, scents of budding and growth. Yet to the watcher of the Passion, Spring has not yet fully come. The earth is like a stage set, but with the curtains down. All is in readiness, but the drama has not yet begun. The watcher of the Passion feels that Spring will not have begun till he sings among the perfumes of incense and lilies:—

“Lo, the fair beauty of earth, from the death of winter arising, Every good gift of the year now with its Master returns.”