Awaiting Pentecost: Our Lady and the Apostles in the Cenacle – Fr H.J. Coleridge SJ
"She could understand, more than any other, the gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost as they are drawn out for us by Isaias and by St. Paul."
Editors’ Notes
We were delighted recently to find finally an online edition of Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ’s Mother of the Church – Mary During the First Apostolic Age. Finding this text was itself an answer to prayer, because there also seem to be absolutely no physical copies around, except for in the British Library, the Bodleian and a few others.
Nonetheless, now we have it – and we look forward to sharing parts of it going forward.
This section is particularly appropriate for the Sunday after the Ascension – as well as for meditation on the second glorious mystery of the Holy Rosary.
Later in the week, we will publish a second part.
MARY IN THE CENACLE
The first “retreat”
It is natural for the children of the Church to follow in heart Mary and the Apostles, with the rest of that holy company assembled in the Cenacle, during the ten days which intervened between the Ascension of our Lord and the Day of Pentecost.
Our Lord’s command to them had been simply that they should remain in the city of Jerusalem, until they had been endowed with power from on high. But those loving hearts, to whom He addressed this command, would instinctively understand that He meant them to occupy themselves in prayer and communion with God until the time came for the fulfilment of the promise, especially as He told them that that fulfilment would take place “not many days hence.”
This, then, thus became, as we may say, the first Christian retreat made in community by the Church, and it is probably on this account that so many religious bodies and persons in all ages of the Church have delighted in spending in this manner the ten days before Pentecost, on which feast it is often their rule to make elections, and other decisions to which great importance is attached.
The Promise of the Holy Ghost
It may be supposed that the faithful band collected for prayer, and which consisted, as St. Luke tells us, of the eleven Apostles, our Lady, the holy women, and our Lord’s brethren, may have understood that the great Gift which was promised to them consisted in the presence, in a new and ineffable manner, of the Holy Ghost.
It is called by our Lord the promise of the Father, power from on high, the power of the Holy Ghost.
It is generally understood that the doctrine of the Three Persons in the One Godhead was not so clearly revealed under the Old Testament as in the New, and thus, in a number, even of our Lord’s disciples, there may have been inadequate ideas about the Person and Office of the Holy Ghost. Many truths concerning Him had been brought forward by our Lord in the later stages of His teaching, especially in the discourse after the Last Supper, which is recorded by St. John.
But it must be also certain that a great many more such truths remained as yet undeveloped, and that there must have been many differences in the degrees of knowledge on this Divine subject possessed by different persons.
Mary’s knowledge and prayer
As we have understood the Blessed Mother of our Lord to have been filled with the Holy Ghost from the very beginning, and we cannot doubt but that she possessed an immense gift of enlightenment concerning His Person, the effects of His presence in the soul, and the various. measures of His communications.
This must have raised her intelligent expectations and ardent desires, with regard to the promised Gift, to a height unattained by others, and her prayers must have been poured forth with proportionate energy and intensity. The prayers of our Blessed Lady and of the Church had an efficacy of their own in drawing down the Divine Gift, in the same way as the prayers of the ancient Patriarchs and saints brought on the accomplishment of the promise of the Incarnation, although in each case the boon was the free gift of God, unattainable by created merit.
We are thus led to contemplate the prayer of our Lady, especially, as dwelling on the various truths concerning the Holy Ghost which had been revealed to her, and particularly those chief characteristics of His office, which had been selected by our Lord in His discourse concerning Him before the accomplishment of the Passion. Under these heads, as they are contained in the last discourse after the Last Supper, we may group the subjects on which our Blessed Mother’s prayer was now occupied.
We may remember also that our Lady was fresh from the wonderful revelations of human malice and depravity, the manifestation of what St. Paul calls the works of the flesh, which had been made in the Passion.
No one ever understood so perfectly as Mary the depths and misery of sin, in all its innumerable phases, though she by the special graces vouchsafed to her had no experience of these miseries in her own person. She read them in their effects on the most Pure and Holy Victim Whose office it was to expiate them by His sufferings. Nor did any one understand so perfectly that other deep source of humility in the intelligence of which she so faithfully followed her Son, the contemplation of the utter nothingness of all creatures in the presence of God.
From both these considerations Mary could draw a most marvellous intelligence of the need which man had of the creating and renovating Spirit, and of the magnificent degree to which He was to repair and restore, and strengthen and enlighten and fertilize the poor soil of our human nature in this great outpouring which was the fruit of the Passion of our Lord.
We must measure the considerations of our Blessed Lady on the great Gift of the Holy Ghost by her knowledge of the weakness and helplessness of human nature without Him, of the degradation of that nature by sin, original and actual, as well as by her perfect knowledge of the Divine Person Who was now to impart Himself and make Himself present in a new way and degree, both in the Church as a body and in the souls and hearts of her children.
Gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost
The full doctrine of the Church concerning the Holy Ghost as the Gift of God, and the measure and manner of His presence as it began to be after the Day of Pentecost, as compared with the same presence before the glorification of our Lord, belongs rather to the history of our Lord Himself, as it is drawn out elsewhere.
But it belongs to our attempt faithfully to follow out our Blessed Lady’s part in the Sacred Mysteries, of which it was the will of God that she should be a witness and a partaker, to consider how very deep must have been her knowledge on these matters, how ardent her prayer, founded upon that knowledge, how intense the joy with which she looked forward to this most wonderful boon.
She could understand, more than any other, the gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost as they are drawn out for us by Isaias and by St. Paul — the beauty which they would confer on the souls of men, the strength and light and supernatural instincts which they would bring with them. She had been able to trace most accurately the workings of the Holy Ghost in the character, the actions, the words, and whole demeanour, of her Divine Son.
That beautiful study of this most wonderful history was her continual occupation, and had been carried on by her during the whole of His life with an intelligence surpassing that with which the heavenly citizens themselves had looked down, with their most eager gaze, on that marvellous revelation of God.
The catalogue of the fruits of the Holy Ghost as it is given us by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians,[1] reads like a simple description of the character of our Lord, as it was manifested to men, and most clearly of all to His Blessed Mother.
And now she knew that that character was to be reproduced by the Holy Ghost Himself in the souls of thousands and thousands of the children of God, indeed, that it was to be the norm and type of the whole multitude of the faithful, the working of the Holy Ghost in whom was fitly to be described by the Apostle as the formation of Christ in them.
She had already rejoiced over the high sanctity which had been reached by the Apostles, St. Peter, St. John, and the rest, the holy women, Magdalene and her companions, and she knew that this was but the beginning of a process which was to attain far larger and higher developments than any that had as yet been seen.
Intelligence of Our Lord’s Promises
Moreover, our Blessed Lady could regard the Gift of God as it came from Heaven in His own intention, fraught with powers and graces and glories far greater than any that might actually result from its presence, on account of the poor cooperation of men, even of the most saintly, to the boundless beneficence of God.
She understood the power of the Gift, and the infinite merits of the Sacrifice by which it had been purchased. She could take the promises of our Lord, as they are recorded for us by St. John, at their full meaning, though she might know that there might be failures in the absolute and perfect accomplishment, in all the extent, of those promises, on account of the unfaithfulness of many among those to whom they were made.
Thus she could look forward to the whole boon contained in the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, as our Lord had meant when He said that He should abide with them for ever, abide with them and be in them.
She knew all that was intended when our Lord had said that the Paraclete would teach them all things, and bring all things to their minds, whatsoever He Himself had said to them. Here was a limitless promise of illuminations to the truth, and it would sound sweeter than ever when it was connected with the bringing to their remembrance everything that our Lord had Himself taught, and which they might not have been able at the time to understand.
Then again there was the great promise as to the effect of the manifestation of the Holy Ghost to the world, that convincing of sin, of justice, and of judgment, in which our Lord summed up the action of the Paraclete in bringing home to the world the sin of infidelity, in the great display of evangelical justice and the most grand and heroic virtues, which His action in the saints and in the Church was to produce, and in the confusion and condemnation and destruction of the usurped kingdom of Satan, which was to fall to pieces before the light and preaching of the Gospel Kingdom.[2]
Various offices of the Paraclete
There was also another great promise, conveyed, like so many other of the promises of our Lord, in the fewest possible words, according to which the Holy Ghost was to teach the Apostles and the Church the things which were to come.
Under this simple statement might be conveyed immense blessings which our Blessed Lady could understand, not only in the permanence of the gift of prophecy in the Church, but in that revelation of the future glories of Heaven which is laid open by His action in the souls in whom He delights to dwell.
Thus the office of the Paraclete, as sketched in a few words by our Lord, might lie open to the intelligence of His Mother as a perfect and complete renovation, and the establishment of a new Kingdom, penetrating the hearts and souls of the children of the Church, making them in a most true sense His temples and dwellings, flooding them with heavenly light, bringing out in lines of heavenly beauty the whole meaning of our Lord’s various teachings and instructions and prophecies, showing the perfect harmony and interdependence of the whole system of doctrine and practice, sacraments and ordinances, which He left behind Him, opening Heaven, as well as the earthly portion of His institutions, and at the same time confronting the world and putting it to shame and silence before the presence of the truth, and of that glorious reproduction of the Life of our Lord which was to be displayed in the saints and in the Church, and scattering the infernal enemies of God and man by the brightness and might of the powers of the world to come.
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Further Reading
The WM Review Coleridge Archive
The Mother of the Church: Mary During the First Apostolic Age – Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ
[1] Galat. V. 22, 23.
[2] St. John xiv. 16-26; xvi. 8-11.
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How wonderful that you found a copy of his book. Thank you so much for sharing!