Acts I, 3.

Open unto us the door of thy loving kindness, O blessed Mother of God; we have set our hope on thee, may we not be disappointed, but through thee may we be delivered from adversity, for thou art the saving help of all Christian people.

O Mother of God, thou who art a deep well of infinite mercy, bestow upon us thy compassion; look upon thy people who have sinned, and continue to make manifest thy power.  For thee do we trust, and to thee do we cry, Hail! even as of old did Gabriel, the chief of the angelic hosts.

RUSSIAN.

These Forty Days that intervened between our Lord’s resurrection and ascension must have been utterly bewildering in the experience of the Apostles.  Our Lord was once more with them; He had come back from the grave; that would have been the central experience.  But in His intercourse with them He was so changed, the same and yet with a vast difference.  We think of the perplexed group of the disciples gathered in the familiar place, going over the recent facts and trying to adjust themselves to them.  Just what is the difference that death and resurrection have made, we hear them discussing.  Is it that He appears and disappears so strangely, not coming any longer to be with them in the old way, with the old familiar intercourse?  There is obviously no failure in Himself, no decline in love; but there is a decline in intimacy.  They themselves feel a strange awe in His presence such as they had not been accustomed to feel in the past.  They feel too that this restrained intercourse is but temporary, that at any moment it may end.  The instructions He is giving them are so obviously final instructions, fitting them for a future in which He will not be with them.

Amid all this perplexity we try to see Our Lady and to get at her mind.  She was no doubt in the small group eagerly waiting our Lord’s coming, dreading each time He left them that He would return no more.  One thinks of her as less bewildered than the others because her interest was more concentrated.  She had no problems to work out, no perplexities to absorb her; she had simply to love.  Life to her was just love—­love of the Son Whom she had brought forth and Whom she had followed so far.  She lived in His appearings; and between them she lived in remembrance of them.  One does not think of her as dwelling very much on what He says, but as dwelling upon Him.  The thought of Him absorbs her.  She has passed into that relation to our Lord that in the years to come many souls will strive to acquire—­the state of absorbed contemplation, the state in which all things else for the time recede and one is alone with God.  God so fills the soul that there is room there for nothing else.