As one tries to reconstruct the situation in Ephesus, one feels that our Lady would have had no prominence in the Church in the way of an actively exercised influence.  One thinks of her as living in retirement, as not even talking very much.  If she lived long she would be an object of increasing interest and even of awe to the new converts, and an object of growing love to all those who were admitted to any sort of fellowship with her.  But one cannot imagine a crowd about her, inquiring into her experiences and her memories of her divine Son.  Once she told of her experience, for it was necessary that the Church should know of the circumstances of the coming of the Son of God into the world, but beyond that necessary communication of her experience we cannot think of her as speaking of her sacred memories.  Silence and meditation, longing and waiting, would have filled the years till the hour of her release.

But in the quiet hours spent with S. John it would be different.  Between the Blessed Virgin and S. John there was perfect understanding and perfect sympathy, and we love to think of the hours that they would have spent together in deep spiritual intercourse.  Those hours would not be hours of reminiscence merely; they would rather be hours in which these two would attempt with the aid of the Spirit Who ruled in them so fully to enter deeper and ever deeper into the meaning of Incarnate God.  Jesus would be the continual object of their thought and their love, and meditation upon His words and acts would lead them to an ever increasing appreciation of their depth and meaning.

We have all felt, in reading the pages of S. John, how vast is the difference both in attitude toward his subject and in his understanding of it from that of the other Evangelists.  The earlier Evangelists seem deliberately to keep all feeling out of their story, to tell the life of our Lord in the most meagre outline, confining themselves to the essential facts.  Anything like interpretation they decline.  In S. John all this is changed.  The Jesus whom he presents is the same Jesus, but seen through what different eyes!  The same life is presented, but with what changes in selection of material!  The Gospel of S. John seems almost a series of mediations upon selected facts of an already familiar life rather than an attempt to tell a life-story.  And so indeed we think of it.  When S. John wrote, the life of our Lord as a series of events was already before the Church.  The Church had the synoptic Gospels, and it had a still living tradition to inform it.  What it needed, and what the Holy Spirit led S. John to give it, was some glimpse of the inner meaning of the Incarnation, some unfolding of the spiritual depths of the teaching of Jesus.