HENRY CONSTABLE:  1562-1613.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXIV

THE HOME OF S. JOHN

And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

S. John XIX, 27.

But now we unite to praise thee, O Pure and Immaculate One, blessed Virgin and sinless Mother of thy great Son and the God of all.  O perfectly spotless and altogether holy, thou art the hope of despairing sinners.  We bless thee as most full of grace, who didst give birth to Christ, God and Man.  And we fall down before thee.  We all invoke thee and implore thy help.  Deliver us, O Virgin, holy and undefiled, from every pressing strait and from all temptations of the Evil One.  Be thou our peacemaker in the hour of death and judgment.  Do thou save us from the future unquenchable fire and from the outer darkness.  Do thou render us worthy of the glory of thy Son, O Virgin and Mother, most sweet and clement.

A PRAYER OF S. EPHREM THE SYRIAN.

There is no scene in the whole range of Scripture narrative which is more full of pathos than this scene of the Cross.  Two agonies meet:  the agony of the nailing, the lifting, the dying; and the agony that looks on in silent helplessness.  But while our Lord’s physical agony was in some sort swallowed up in the intensity of the love which was the motive for enduring it, overpassed in the vision of the need of those for whom He was dying, S. Mary’s agony was the pain of a love concentrated upon the Sufferer Who hangs dying before her eyes.  If there be anything that can lighten the pain of such love it is that it feels itself answered, that its object is conscious of it and is helped by it.  And S. Mary had that consolation:  the love poured to her from the Cross, and revealed itself when the suffering Son turned His eyes upon her agony and, understanding what her desolation would be, committed her to His beloved disciple:  “Behold thy Mother; behold thy son.”  These two great loves which had been our Lord’s human consolation were thus committed to one another.  And when the darkness fell, and death relieved the agony, and the Sacred Body had been cared for, then the mother found refuge with S. John:  “and from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.”

From the day of Pentecost on, S. Mary is no more heard of in the history of the Church.  As so often, the Scriptures are silent and decline to answer our interested questions.  They go on with the essentails of their story, the founding of the Church of God, and leave other things aside.  So we do not know any of the last years of the life of Blessed Mary.  Where did she live?  How long did she live?  The traditions, in any case of quite an untrustworthy nature, are contradictory.  Jerusalem and Ephesus contend for the honour of our Lady’s residence.  Jerusalem must have been the site of that “home”