Lenten Meditation #4: The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
This is the fourth in a series of four Lenten meditations. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.
The Penitential Psalms in the Pilgrimage of Lent
Christ Church, Lent 2021
Lenten Meditation # 4: “But there is forgiveness with thee; /
therefore shalt thou be feared” (Psalm 130. 4)
Our Lenten evening meditations upon the Penitential Psalms bring us to Passiontide and end upon the beginning of the course of human redemption with the Annunciation of The Blessed Virgin Mary which falls this year in the week of Passion Sunday. Christ comes and goes, we might say with John Donne who noted the coincidence of the Passion, meaning Good Friday, falling upon the Annunciation in 1608. It prompted a profound reflection upon “th’ Abridgement of Christs story, which makes one … Of the’ Angels Ave, ‘and Consummatum est” of Christ crucified (The Annuntiation [sic] and Passion, 1608/9).
The Annunciation marks the beginning in time of Christ’s Incarnation. It celebrates his conception in the womb of Mary. In an elaborate and intense poem entitled the Annunciation in La Corona, a circle of seven sonnets, Donne explores all the paradoxes of relationship that belong to the event of the Annunciation through the role of Mary in the economy of human salvation. It is a literary and theological tour-de-force that focuses on the interplay of the human and the divine through Mary; incarnation and redemption are inescapably united. “Ere by the spheares time was created,” Donne says of Mary, “thou wast in his minde,”… “whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d”… “thou art now thy Makers maker.” Language is stretched to the uttermost to conceive of the inconceivable; “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb”, the sonnet concludes, as the expression beyond expression of the wonder of the salvation that is near “to all that will.” “Salvation to all that will is nigh.” It is just that interplay of the human and the divine which speaks to our Lenten programme on the Penitential Psalms in the interplay of voices belonging to the mysteries of human redemption.
Christ’s coming on the way of his going belongs to the inner movement of God’s love and that love as turned outwards to us. Such is the deeper meaning of the way of the Cross. Passiontide sets the Cross before us as veiled, at once seen and unseen, as “in a glass darkly.” Such is the problematic of human sin and ignorance about the very purpose of the Incarnation – to reveal God to man and to redeem man to God. We glimpse but in an enigma. Yet central to what we glimpse is Mary, the chosen vessel of our Lord’s appearing which is nothing less than the reality that is the love of God. Mary is the pure source of the pure humanity of Jesus. She is, to speak in the tones of orthodox devotion and doctrine, the Mother of God because she hears and bears the Word and Son of God into the world. Through her, God becomes man; through her all the graces of God flow forth upon the world. Mary, the Mother of God, is the Mother of grace but only because she is the Mother of humility. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” she says, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
Humility is at the heart of these songs of penitential adoration. It is at the heart of all prayer and praise. Humility alone counters our demonic pride and opens out to us the will of God and thereby all the graces of God. Humility yields freely and fully to the Word of God and magnifies not herself but the God of all grace and glory. In Mary we see what that yielding and openness mean: the active willing of the will of God. Such are the essential notes of prayer and praise, the notes that belong to the Penitential Psalms. In this sense, we may say that the Penitential Psalms are the voice of our true humanity, at once the voice of Mary and the voice of Christ.
