During the months of August and September, Drusilla of Heirs in Hope wrote some very interesting and informative posts (and responded to a wide variety of questions and comments) on the subject of there being two vocations in the Catholic Church: marriage and consecration to Christ. It was very timely for me, as I was in the midst of reading about the vocations of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Adrienne von Speyr’s, Handmaid of the Lord:
“Both states were lived by Mary…. The Lord led her into both states, and each time in a precise, definite form of communal life, foreseen and devised by him.”
Mary and Joseph, writes von Speyr, “are betrothed as people who want to serve God and belong to each other. These two intentions are not equivalent for them; the will to serve is the determining factor and forms the basis of their commitment to each other. They consecrate their betrothal and their whole life to this service.” Although their betrothal and marriage was infused with the supernatural from the very beginning, yet, says von Speyr, their years of marriage entailed, “mutual service in housekeeping, breadwinning and everything involved in the toilsome and harsh scraping out of a life.” Joseph attained to God and holiness through Mary, yet it was he who was instrumental in initiating Mary “into the mystery of the natural community.” This marriage, this common calling, writes von Speyr, was “nothing less than making possible the Incarnation of the Son of God and his development.”
Although the Blessed Virgin had always been the model of contemplation, von Speyr tells us that it is at the foot of the Cross that she receives, “her new supernatural fruitfulness [in the form of] a new supernatural association with the apostle John.” Here truly begins the Blessed Virgin’s second vocation, that of life as a religious. Jesus gives Mary to John as his mother, and gives His mother to, “the priest, John, whom the Son already possesses as a saint, and Mary now submits to the priestly mission of the Apostle.” She lives in John’s home as in a cloister, adjusts herself to the rules in place there, and “conforms to John’s office – the office bearing the special form of unity between authority and love.”
“If the religious state thus receives the breath of life at the foot of the Cross, it is like a first-fruit of the Passion, even before the great and universal fruit of redemption and confession is plucked on Easter. This first-fruit consists in this: that Mary and John, at the foot of the Cross, share in the Son’s suffering and are thus initiated into a new form of community.”
