. Just to keep things in one's heart is so often
the best way of arriving at an understanding of them; is the best way,
at least, of arriving at the conviction that what we in fact need to
understand is not so much what God does as that it is God Who does it.
Our true aim in life is to understand God, and through that
understanding we shall sufficiently understand life. Failure in human
life is commonly due to an attempt to understand life without any
attempt to understand it in relation to God. It is like an attempt to
understand a work of art without an attempt to understand the artist, to
estimate in terms of mechanical effort, rather than in terms of mind. A
work of art means what the artist means when he creates it: life means
what God means in His creation and government of it, and it is hopeless
to expect to understand it without reference to the mind of God.

Therefore Mary's way is the right way--the way of acceptance and
meditation. So she sought to follow the mind of God. We are told little
of her, but we are told quite enough to understand this. We know well
her method, that she kept things in her heart. And we have one splendid
example of the result of the method in the Magnificat. There the results
of her communion with God break forth in that Canticle which ever since
has been one of the priceless treasures of the Church. The Gospels never
tell us very much; but if we will follow Mary's method they tell us
enough to let us see the very hand of God in the working out of our
salvation; they give us sample events from which we easily infer God's
meaning otherwhere.

And we may be sure that the months that followed the Annunciation would
have been months of ever-deepening spiritual communion, resulting in a
rapidly advancing spiritual maturity. One necessary result would have
been to prepare the blessed Mother to receive new manifestations of
God's Providence, and to fit them into the whole body of her experience.
She would not at any time be lost in helpless surprise before a new
development of the purpose of God. Surprised as she must have been when
the Eastern Sages came to kneel before the Child she carried at her
breast, and hail Him as born King of the Jews, she would have set to
work to fit this new experience into what her acquired knowledge of the
divine meaning had become. And one can have no doubt that these visitors
from afar would have told her enough of the grounds of their action to
illumine f