Blest for ever, Three in One.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXI

THE FORTY DAYS

To whom also he showed himself alive after his passion by
many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and
speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

Acts I, 3.

Open unto us the door of thy loving kindness, O blessed
Mother of God; we have set our hope on thee, may we not be
disappointed, but through thee may we be delivered from
adversity, for thou art the saving help of all
Christian people.

O Mother of God, thou who art a deep well of infinite mercy,
bestow upon us thy compassion; look upon thy people who have
sinned, and continue to make manifest thy power. For thee do
we trust, and to thee do we cry, Hail! even as of old did
Gabriel, the chief of the angelic hosts.

RUSSIAN.

These Forty Days that intervened between our Lord's resurrection and
ascension must have been utterly bewildering in the experience of the
Apostles. Our Lord was once more with them; He had come back from the
grave; that would have been the central experience. But in His
intercourse with them He was so changed, the same and yet with a vast
difference. We think of the perplexed group of the disciples gathered in
the familiar place, going over the recent facts and trying to adjust
themselves to them. Just what is the difference that death and
resurrection have made, we hear them discussing. Is it that He appears
and disappears so strangely, not coming any longer to be with them in
the old way, with the old familiar intercourse? There is obviously no
failure in Himself, no decline in love; but there is a decline in
intimacy. They themselves feel a strange awe in His presence such as
they had not been accustomed to feel in the past. They feel too that
this restrained intercourse is but temporary, that at any moment it may
end. The instructions He is giving them are so obviously final
instructions, fitting them for a future in which He will not be
with them.

Amid all this perplexity we try to see Our Lady and to get at her mind.
She was no doubt in the small group eagerly waiting our Lord's coming,
dreading each time He left them that He would return no more. One
thinks of her as less bewildered than the others because her interest
was more concentrated. She had no problems to work out, no perplexities
to absorb her; she had simply to love. Life to her was just lov