Author Topic: The Acathist Hymn: Office of Praise of the Mother of God (Read 825 times)

Hobbledehoy · « **on:** October 23, 2011, 07:47:15 PM »

As the Month of the Holy Rosary nears its end, I would like to offer some reflections upon the Joyous Mysteries of the same Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which can essentially be reduced to a great truth and mystery, upon which Saints such as Sts. Alphonsus and Louis-Marie expounded: that the faithful soul is to arrive at the possession of Jesus only through Mary.

1) First Joyous Mystery – The Annunciation of Blessed Mary the Virgin, and the Incarnation of the Son of the Eternal Father – In this Mystery, the soul contemplates the Blessed Virgin as the mirror of all virtues, especially purity and humility, which are requisite to cultivate an interior life worthy of the Holy Ghost. He Himself, for Whom the Patriarchs and Prophets yearned and foretold by divine inspiration, greets the little Maiden fore-chosen from all eternity as His Mother by the Archangel St. Gabriel with the sacred Ave, reversing Eva’s name and heralding the Redemption of fallen man. In an act of a peerlessly heroic faith, hope, charity, humility and adoration, the Virgin pronounces her precious Fiat, which accomplishes a wonder far exceeding the creation of the world at the ancient Fiat recorded in Genesis.

2) Second Joyous Mystery – The Visitation of Blessed Mary the Virgin unto her kinswoman St. Elizabeth, and the Sanctification of the Precursor St. John the Baptist – In this Mystery, the soul is lead to contemplate the patronage and tutelage of Mary Most Holy as the means whereby to attain to Jesus, after having striven to cultivate an interior life worthy of such a great Patroness and Mother. Even here, the young, hidden little Maiden of Nazareth begins to exercise her divinely-ordained office to which she had been predestined from all eternity as supreme and universal Arbitress and Mediatress of the infinite graces and merits of her Divine Son: at her salutation the Lord replenishes the Blessed Virgin’s aged kinswoman with the Holy Ghost and a greater faith vivified by charity, whilst the unborn St. John is sanctified in the womb and consecrated as His precursor. The Magnificat uttered by Our Lady is a wondrous sacrifice of praise unto the inexhaustible clemency and wisdom of God for the great Mysteries He has deigned to work on behalf of His elect.

3) Third Joyous Mystery – The Nativity of the Infant Jesus at Bethlehem, adored by the Angelic choirs and humble Shepherds – In this Mystery, the soul is lost in wonder at the ineffable thaumaturgy of the virginal Maternity of Mary Most Holy and the self-abasement of the Lord God as a little Child confined in time and space. The faithful behold an admirable example that ought to be imitated in the simplicity and innocency of heart that enabled the Shepherds to first receive the Angelic announcement of the Nativity before all the other children of Israel and be first to adore the new-born Lord. The soul is at the same led to aspire to a magnanimity and generosity of praise and self-oblation as exemplified in the Sages and their mystical gifts

4) Fourth Joyous Mystery – The Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem and the Purification of Blessed Mary the Virgin – The soul, whilst contemplating this Mystery, beholds how indispensable is docility to the Holy Ghost and the patronage of the Blessed Virgin in order to attain to Jesus, for it was thus that Simeon at last gazed upon the Son of the Eternal Father, the fulfillment of all the types and oracles of the Old Testament. A boundless and generous love, filial self-abandonment to Divine Providence and a spirit of continual prayer as exemplified in Simeon’s Canticle Nunc dimittis, is the response that such great graces demand.

5) Fifth Joyous Mystery – The Invention of the Infant Jesus by the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph amidst the Doctors of the Law in the Temple at Jerusalem – This holy Mystery is an epitome of unfathomable profundity of the interior life of the Christian soul in this world: to seek Jesus in the obscurity of faith by prayer, penance and mortification, under the magisterial tutelage of Holy Mother Church and by the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. The three days of anxious and perplexing obfuscation that Mary and Joseph suffered and offered up to the Heavenly Father as a sacrifice of praise and propitiation is for the soul a startling example of the purifications necessary for the progress of the interior life, even unto the apices of mystical prayer, wherein even in this earthly exile the faithful soul attains to Jesus by contemplation illumined by the gift of wisdom, which is the plenitude of infused faith, and guided more by the Holy Ghost than by the soul’s own finite efforts, which diminish as the soul ascends higher and higher unto the apices of the interior life. The hidden and humble life of Nazareth is the ultimate result of this interior growth, whether fully in the contemplative life of holy Religion, or in a still more hidden manner in the apostolic life, and it is a prelude to the everlasting beatific vision and possession of Jesus in Heaven.

Thus the Joyous Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary show us a wondrous compendium of the interior life and the necessity of the patronage and tutelage of the Blessed Virgin Mary in order to attain to Jesus.

The Byzantines, guided by a wondrously acute sensus Catholicus, also intuited these truths before the Holy Rosary was given unto St. Dominic in their beautiful Acathist Hymn, which I hereby offer you, taken from the Byzantine Missal for Sundays and Feast Days with Rites of Sacraments, and Various Offices and Prayers published at Birmingham, Alabama, by St. George's R. C. Byzantine Church in 1958, (having been printed at Tournai, Belgium, by Société Saint Jean l' Evangéliste, Desclée & Cie). Hitherto I had offered a different translation of the the Akathistos Hymn by the great Rev. Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P.: Ode in Honour of the Holy Immaculate Most Blessed Glorious Lady Mother of God and Ever Virgin Mary, Written on the Occasion of the Deliverance of Constantinople from the Barbarians, A.D. 626(Oxford: Blackfriars Publications, 1947).

Devotion to Mary and the knowledge of her many excellencies are completely gratuitous gifts of which we are all unworthy. It is only because of God's boundless clemency, and the maternal generosity of Mary Most Holy, that these Mysteries have been given to us, that we may better attain to a greater union with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We ought ever to be grateful that He did not keep this most cherished secret hidden from us as He did whilst He walked upon the earth. Whilst dying upon the Cross, when He was about to give us His very life, He gave us the Immaculate Virgin that gave Him that selfsame life. Such was the love of our Savior: that He wished to give us everything, even His beloved Mother. And she in turn gave us His Son, and gave us herself to cherish as our own dear Mother and Advocate. How can we not cry forth in rapt adoration with St. Paul before such a merciful and elegant design of Divine Providence, "O depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God: how incomprehensible are His judgments, and His ways unsearchable!" (Rom. ch. xi., 33).

What great grace! What great mystery! How bitter and difficult would life be without Mary to guide and love us...

Let us never weary of crying forth unto Mary in all our necessities, and may the innumerable graces, excellencies and glories wherewith she has been so ineffably exalted be to us so many reasons to render selfless adoration and thanksgiving unto God almighty, whose infinite and eternal charity fashioned for Himself and for us such a great Mother.

Author Topic: The Acathist Hymn: Office of Praise of the Mother of God (Read 825 times)

Hobbledehoy

The Acathist Hymn: Office of Praise of the Mother of God