We try to get before us what would have been the mind of S. Mary through all these happenings which attended the birth of her Child.  What is written of her here is no doubt characteristic:  “Mary kept all these and pondered them in her heart.”  Wonder at the ways of God had been hers for so many months now—­wonder, with devout meditation upon their meaning.  Where there is no resistance to God’s will but only the desire to know it more fully there is always the gradual assimilation of the truth.  S. Mary moves in a realm of mystery from the moment of the Annunciation to the very end of her life.  It is so difficult to understand what is the meaning of God in this unspeakable gift of a Son conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and in the constant accompaniment of pain and disaster and disappointment which is the unfolding experience of her life in relation to Him.  But we feel in her no speculation, no rebellion, no insistence on knowing more; but we feel that there must have been a growing appreciation of the work of God, unhesitating acceptance of His will.  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.