It may be fruitful to venture yet further reflection on the Marian mystery. We have spoken of the scant exposure given to her in the pages of the New Testament and have touched upon the matter of the silence in which she seems shrouded.

We may pursue this further by speaking of this silence under its aspect of hiddenness or obscurity.

In the Magnificat, our Lady pours out her gratitude to the Most High by saying, “For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. . . . He that is mighty hath magnified me. . . . He hath scattered the proud. . . . He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. . . . The rich he hath sent empty away.”

It is a song sung from the most profound depth of human obscurity. And we may recall in this connection that just such obscurity muffles almost every human being ever born into this world. Very few rise above the facelessness of the multitude. Few break through the hedge that hems in the conditions into which they were born. If we consider the aeons of human history and prehistory that elapsed before the internal combustion engine and the jet engine made universal travel available to almost everybody, and before global communications broke through the silence that heretofore had wrapped one’s own province and neighborhood, we may grasp something of the obscurity that constitutes the lot of our humanity. Conquerors, explorers, poets, tsars, notables, and potentates of all sorts add up to a very slender list indeed when we compare that list with the immeasurable roster of us mortals. Who can even so much as conjure a picture of the hordes and hordes and hordes that struggle briefly across the dim rear of the stage only to disappear forever into vacuity? Ozymandias lies lost in the sand of the desert, his haughty bid for fame broken and fallen, like most such monuments. Tutankhamen is haled up from his repose under his pyramid, and his name restored to the lips of a century infinitely remote from his: But what of his ten thousand slaves? Where are their tombs? Who are they? Who will tell us their names? Who will announce the names of old Jewish women bundled out of Polish villages to be shot at the brink of mass graves? Who will find the names of the multitudes who went from their shops in Ukraine to the Gulag and thence to unmarked and frozen graves? Who will rake the floor of the ocean for the men who dropped into that silence with the convoys sunk in the North Atlantic by the U-boats, or indeed of the U-boat crews who lie under the very next reef?

To call to mind the obscurity and anonymity that so effaces the very existence itself of nearly the whole race of men is to find oneself bemused. For in the wake of this obscurity and anonymity comes the specter of pointlessness. Vanity. What can possibly be the meaning of the whole pageant? What shall we put forward to pluck up the spirits of the child born into this world for the sole purpose, it seems, of rowing out the years of his maturity in the foetid hold of a Roman galley? Or of the infant born with twisted limbs, whose destiny is interminable years in a wheelchair? Or of the young virgin carried off at seventeen to the seraglio, there to idle away her womanhood among the twittering odalisques who await the rancid embraces of the caliph?

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher. Thou turnest man to destruction. [He is] like grass. . . . In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. We spend our years as a tale that is told, says the psalmist. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. . . . It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, says Macbeth. What is this quintessence of dust? . . . Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, says Hamlet. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, says Thomas Hobbes. The sheer statistics of the thing—everyone falling into pointless graves—overthrow any efforts we might wish to mount in the interest of solace.

It is possible, to be sure, lacking such solace, for us mortals to devise tactics that, we hope, will enable us to surmount the dreary obscurity that seems appointed to most of us. Mercifully, of course, the prospect scarcely presents itself to the fortunate ones who are not much given to reflection. Many simply avert their eyes from the irony that grins at us all—we, that is, with brave notions about our uniqueness and destiny, doomed, it seems, to a drab and obscure sequence of days until the thread of our life has run itself out. One does not think of some superannuated Greek peasant sitting quietly on the bench under the vine leaves at the door of the taverna as hag-ridden with horror at the irony of human life, or of the valetudinarian Bantu woman, or of most people, for all of that, as paralyzed by the obscurity and apparent pointlessness of their lot. Mankind cannot bear much reality, said T. S. Eliot; the burden of inexplicability does not, thanks be to God, add its weight to the quotidian burdens that most men must carry. We simply get on with things as though there were some point to it all.

On the other hand, not a few of us resist obscurity and the anonymity from which it is so difficult to break out. I shall take measures, says the youth in a Herman Hesse novel, and so he sets out to find—to find what? Experience, perhaps: anything that will spice the otherwise bland pudding of life. But we do not need to go so far afield as Hesse’s driven youths: what, we may ask ourselves, lies at the root of the immense industries in our own epoch of entertainment, fashion, cosmetics, travel, journalism, and almost everything else that hails us, shrilly and hourly? Do not all these enterprises supply us all with strategies by which we may divert ourselves, amuse ourselves, occupy ourselves, and keep from our ears the continuo that grumbles along beneath all that we do: “Your time is running out. You are almost no one. Nothing is happening. No one knows you are there.”

Why should I hurry from shop to shop looking for the shoes, the pullover, the fabrics, cosmetics, or appurtenances that will flag everyone down with “Here is someone interesting. Here is someone beautiful. Here is someone au courant. This is not someone routine.” Or why this frisson when I find myself swept into the entourage of someone rich and famous or when the opening that may turn out to be my big chance presents itself or when my name appears in a roster of notables, or near-notables, or at least of those who appear to promise notability. Why preen when I step forward to take up the dignity of some office to which I have been appointed or elected—school committee, say, or manager, or senior editor?

Because (I tell myself) here lies my route of escape from hiddenness. Inasmuch as I can garb myself a la mode, clink glasses with the great, or mantle myself in a little brief authority like Angelo in Measure for Measure, I can lay hold of the thing that alone will rescue my existence from the murk of obscurity, namely, an identity that is known, if not by the millions, at least by the few who form my world.

But to be Catholic is to have heard of a different ordering of things. It is to have glimpsed the state of affairs where our identity is not a thing to be sought in chic avenues or along the corridors of influence. It is to have been in attendance a thousand times at the obscure place where the young woman of no renown at all is hailed with the salutation that rings out, not from the avenues and corridors, but from the Sapphire Throne itself.

It is the salutation next to which the accolades and triumphs so sedulously sought by all the caesars, strivers, schemers, and ambitious men of history appear flat and vain, for it comes, not as the reward for my schemes, shot through as such schemes tend to be with venality, disingenuousness, and duplicity, but rather gratuitously, from the Most Highest, if we may borrow the Elizabethan superlative here. It is a salutation that crowns this woman with praise, honor, and glory never to be dimmed by the passing of aeons.

The Virgin of Nazareth, in all of her obscurity and anonymity, is, for Catholics, not only the chosen Mother of the Lord: she is also the icon in whom we mortals may glimpse the foretaste—the pledge, even—of what the Divine Mercy has in store for every man and woman who will say with her, Fiat mihi: Be it done unto me according to thy word. To be sure, the particular dignity with which that Mercy crowned the Virgin is unique: no other creature in heaven or earth has been so favored. On the other hand, the Divine Mercy calls Hail to every man and woman ever born. There is no poverty, no disfranchisement, no obscurity, nor any misfortune visited upon any man or woman by predators, circumstances, or suffering, that can interpose itself between any soul and that Hail. It is a salutation that comes, not in response to any influence that may be brought to bear upon it by riches, privilege, beauty, renown, power, or intelligence. It is the greeting that calls to every soul in the inmost secret of its being. We may say even that it is a greeting that comes to every soul only in its hiddenness.

To be Catholic is to affirm some such significance in the very obscurity that hides the figure of our Lady. We never see her in her youth and family. We see her only very rarely during the life of her Son. Actually there is only one glimpse of her, as there is of him, during the thirty or so years between the Presentation in the Temple, when he was a newborn infant, and the marriage at Cana of Galilee, when he had begun his ministry, namely, at the event invoked in the Rosary under the title the Finding in the Temple. A Catholic is not scandalized by the immense disparity that seems to stretch between the humility and obscurity of the Virgin, on the one hand, and her exaltation, on the other. The objection that too much is made of her in Catholic piety escapes him: What, exactly, do we suppose the Divine Mercy is all about to begin with, he wonders? Is it not precisely that it hails our mortal obscurity and bids it come into the precincts of great glory? He that is mighty hath magnified me. He hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden: so says every Christian soul. It is not for nothing that the Church has put the Magnificat in our mouths for every evening of our lives.

But what, exactly, might this great salutation mean to all of us who have not been appointed to the particularly glorious office to which the Virgin of Nazareth was appointed? Surely there is no such dignity in store for us, obscure as we all are?

No. Or rather, no such dignity. The dignity to be revealed as crowning each human soul is unique. There are no mere copies or repetitions in the retinue of the King of Kings.

There is no merely faceless horde attending on the Throne. Every man and woman, brought into being to begin with by the Word, which was in the beginning with God, is named with a name that so far is known only to God. It is a name inscribed on the white stone, to be given at the Last Day to those who, says St. John in his Apocalypse, overcome. We may guess that it is a name of such immense dignity that the one for whom it is reserved is not yet ready to bear it: hence our schooling in Charity here on earth and the completion of that schooling in Purgatory. My frame is not yet such that it can stand erect under the weight of that crown or that name. If it were given to me now, a grotesquery would become visible, since the figure thus named (me) is very far from corresponding yet to the dignity of the name. It would be like giving the name Plato to a parrot or Bach to a magpie: there is a hiatus between name and thing. In the City of God, the one named is the name: or, conversely, the name articulates accurately and wholly what (or who) the one named is.

When a Catholic places himself at the scene of the Annunciation in his prayers day by day, he hears the angelic salutation coming to this anonymous virgin, announcing her great destiny. And in her he sees, in a mystery, every soul who will say Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. To the slave in the galley and the child in the wheelchair and the girl in the harem and to all whose destiny leads, it would seem, to frozen and unmarked graves on the tundra, the Divine Mercy calls Hail! The voice of the angel pierces the fabric of anonymity, obscurity, and pointlessness that muffles our mortal existence and summons every soul with a bidding from the Throne itself.

Who knows what this summons will entail? For Noah it meant much carpentering, and thereby everlasting renown in the annals of salvation. For Gideon it meant leaving his little threshing floor, and also everlasting renown in these annals. For John the Baptist, a grisly end at the chopping block. But of course none of these tales opens onto the real destiny of the men who figure in them: we see only the earthly lot that was appointed to each one. How did Noah do as custodian of his eternal soul? Did Gideon persevere in the school of holiness? (In the case of John we may believe that his martyr’s crown was, in some sense, the accolade given to him for having in very truth finished the course.) The Ark, and the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon allow us to glimpse brief events in the itinerary of a Noah or a Gideon. All else is hidden. We know nothing, really, of the longueurs that no doubt marked the life of these men, just as we know little or nothing of the longueurs attending the obscurity of nearly everyone’s life. A brief breakthrough to renown, a few decades at the very most, and then silence. Dust to dust. J. S. Bach is given great gifts that bring him up from his obscurity and crown him with earthly renown (a just renown, as it happens): but then he goes on his way. Praise, honor, and glory come to a Duke of Marlborough, a Wellington, or a Nelson in the course of his earthly itinerary: But then what? Is “Hero of Trafalgar” all that is announced in the divine Hail that comes to the innermost being of a Nelson? We do not suppose so. Well, then: What is his destiny? “A far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory”, laid up for him insofar as he will take his cue from the Virgin of Nazareth and, at some point, reply Fiat mihi to the salutation that comes to him as it comes to every soul.

Every soul? The child in the wheelchair? Indeed. Who knows what glory inhabits that enfeebled frame? What honor is incubating there, quite hidden from worldly eyes? Or what of the Down’s syndrome child? What exquisite fruit is adumbrated in the sweetness and vulnerability that gild this child’s limitations? The answer to such questions lies hidden among the secrets laid up by the Divine Mercy. We only know that words such as “glory” and “joy” and “freedom” are the best that language can do to strain forward and peer through the scrim.

But of one thing we may be sure: J. S. Bach himself, and Lord Nelson, will fall at the feet of such a child when the pall of its weakness has been lifted and its identity disclosed before the eyes of all heaven. What component necessary to the completion of heaven’s glory now lies hidden in this child, waiting to be unveiled for the delectation of us all, we can only guess at. Bach was granted great gifts, and in his great fugues and concerti and chorales we glimpse the hem of the garment of heavenly bliss. In the courage and nobility granted to a Nelson we may dimly make out aspects of the stature to which a man may rise.

But what, then, of the anonymous hordes who seem so meagerly gifted and so little favored by fortune?

We come back to the hiddenness of the Virgin at Nazareth. “He hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden.” We suspect that this lowliness was itself the very quality that fitted her for the dignity appointed her.

So: when Catholics are taxed with their Church’s having made too much of the figure of Mary, they can only appeal to this realm of the Divine Mercy, which seems to function altogether apart from all worldly canons of celebrity, renown, and influence. The number of lines of text in the New Testament is very far from being an index of her dignity, they would urge. The very exiguity of the record is itself the clue. We do not add up the lines and reach a sum that qualifies her for great dignity. We see the unique office to which she was appointed, and we hear her response to the summons, and we meditate upon the mystery of it all, cloaked as that mystery is in silence, and we find ourselves eager to join the angel Gabriel with Hail! Highly favored!, and to echo Elizabeth’s Who am I that the Mother of my Lord should visit me?, and to call out Amen! When we hear the Virgin herself say, He that is mighty has magnified me.

Magnified. It is the word that lies at the root of all the joyous piety that has fructified in the ancient Catholic Church in connection with the figure of the Mother of the Lord.