Responding to a question about the formation of the Kingdom of Mary and the qualities of soul necessary to become part of it, Dr. Plinio presents some reflections on the complementarity between fatherhood and birthright, his role in the constitution of historical ages, and the relationships between seriousness, charm and grandeur.
Q hen get my turn to read Cornelius 1 , hope to find in his work the review to two entries that are complementary: paternity and primogeniture.
Until the French Revolution were still remains of the patriarchy
What is in paternity so that birthright, which is only the first flower of fatherhood, has such a value that, for example, when God punished the Egyptians with those ten plagues, the last and greatest of them was the death of all the firstborn , even of animals? 2
From the angle I am considering, I am almost more struck by the death of the firstborn of animals than of men.
The ancients had a very well-constructed sense of the family and developed patriarchally, that is, with some traditions and qualities peculiar to the patriarchal period. And the waters of the patriarchy flowed far into the bed of the river of history. Until the French Revolution and the generalization of it in the world, we find rest of the patriarchy in this and in that institution.
It is therefore understood that it is particularly hard for the patriarch to lose the one who is his firstborn. It is something like that which fulminates the rest all that has come, because it breaks the natural link between the patriarch and the rest of his progeny. Because of this the death of the firstborn causes a pain for the patriarch, especially for the head of the patriarchal family.
In our day, the sense of primogeniture seems very erased, almost reduced to zero. But for God, no. For the refinement of punishment was not to kill any one child, but the firstborn. And to understand the connection of the punishment with the birthright, that is to say, what is worth the firstborn not as a person, but as the firstborn, then comes the punishment even over the firstborn of animals.
Paternity Mysteries
I had to see in Cornelius, but this seems to imply the following: that an animal strain, with the death of its firstborn, is degraded and that there is a gift of perpetuation in the firstborn that others do not have; where the first-born of the first-born of the first-born has a representation of the whole race that others do not have. To achieve this, animals have some support in biology itself. It is mysterious, but it seems to me enormously sensible and explicable that this is so.
These considerations introduce us in the knowledge of the mysteries of parenthood, in what it has of biological. It is something so broad that God wanted man and woman to exist, so that this idea of authorship – a being that generates another – expressed itself by the severity and greatness of man and the sweetness of woman, in order to give a complement, as if a human being alone was not sufficient to encompass all the causality of another being, so great is the fatherhood, so great is the causality, so many mysteries therein.
Then one understands the role of fatherhood. I am speaking here of paternity in the literal sense of the word, but also of another form of paternity, which is the constitution of soul families.
Soul families
Generally the kingdoms, the countries, the nations live by having the soul families as their framework. And when the soul families of that kingdom decay, the kingdom decays irremediably.
These soul families, in general, are founded by an individual, according to which the other souls are raised; it is a kind of mold, according to which God models all other vocations.
In general, we see in history that at the root of every great age of Catholic nations there are some great souls who raise or raise a great religious family, and then, as a sort of fragrant exhalation, the great temporal leaders are born to serve the Church.
Then, for example, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius, St. Francis of Borja, St. Francis Xavier, St. John of the Cross, etc. One can imagine a fabric of souls, a set of luminous focuses of whose encounter a Philip II born who, for Spain, was a patriarch smaller than the own myth, but that did a great thing: to leave a myth in which the posterity believed, so that the good he did not realize, the myth did after him.
Then I ask myself: «With Grand Retour 3 for us here on Earth, what will be in the Kingdom of Mary? With what special graces, with what special gleamings will the Divine Holy Spirit make itself felt, when it is time for him to breathe in the decisive grace of the Kingdom of Mary? «That should shape us.
The man who desires seriousness does not make him see or judge something to enjoy. He wants the truth even if it does not delight him, he wants to judge justly, even if it does not please him.
We all know the phenomenon of heliotropism: the tendency of plants to turn to the Sun. The «sun», in this case, is the Divine Holy Spirit. And it is necessary that He finds us avid of Him. In such a way that the Holy Spirit is manifesting, we turn and open immediately.
Notion of seriousness
It would contribute to this, let us now turn to another notion: that of seriousness.
In its first aspect, in its most elementary definition, seriousness is the disposition of soul by which one wants to see reality absolutely as it is, and taking away all the consequences which logically must be taken away.
Seriousness involves two elements: the entirely objective observation of the object seen, and the legitimate extraction of knowledge from within what has been seen.
So seriousness is perfection in objectivity and full fecundity in bringing about consequences, the full abundance of conclusions as far as that soul was given to have. It is serious who sees everything as it should be seen and concludes as far as it can conclude.
The man who desires seriousness does not, therefore, do of seeing or judging something to delight himself. He wants to see the truth even if it does not delight him, but to judge even if he is not pleased to judge in that way. He wants to judge justly.
Therefore, he is in a habitual combat attitude against himself. Because we all have a tendency to lack of seriousness, that is, to see things as they are not and to judge them as it suits us. Just as, for example, no man escapes temptation against purity, no man escapes temptation from seriousness.
Full seriousness constantly targets the
But seriousness has more.
What a serious man sees, it is not enough for him to see on a flat surface. For example, an individual who would fly very high and photograph a mountainous system from above. Those mountains would look a little squished in the picture, and anyone who saw it would not have the impression of the whole height of the mountains, because the point of view from where they were photographed was very high.
Man can not have a flat view of reality, because reality is not boring. The reality is hierarchical, all made, therefore, of ascensions, of mountains. Reality is an immense mountain range, and it is necessary to see it in this way, to know how to situate ourselves in the place that competes within it, and not where our fantasy would place us.
It is so easy to sin against this duty! Man has an almost continuous tendency to be absent from this obligation, almost like the tendency to breathe.
And the full seriousness, because it is highly hierarchical, constantly aims at the peaks, that which constitutes a pinnacle of everything.
For example, if a serious man considers a stone, like aquamarine, he gives himself up with her luminary, making a comparison, more or less subconsciously, with stones he has seen. There is, therefore, a comparison with the other things already considered by him. And in the depths of his head, perhaps without his realizing it, there is a kind of desire for the ideal stone that does not exist on Earth, the stone of Earthly Paradise, of the Empyrean Heaven, which can fully give human beings their intelligence, in your will, in your senses.
Continuous desire for perfection
The serious man turns continually to these first matrices, trying to make them explicit. And when we analyze his life, we note that it was a long pilgrimage in search of the perfection of all things.
But he soon realizes that nothing is perfect except the One who is Perfection, and his desire for perfection ultimately turns to God. And that without God our Lord everything is pulverized, loses meaning, only He is absolute. Without the Absolute, everything sinks into relative, into nothingness.
The serious person understands that his continuous desire for perfection, which is to say the heart-pounding of his seriousness, the soul of his intransigence, the impulse of his combativeness, the inspiring source of his affection, his affection, is the love of God, for God alone is perfect. That should continually cheer the serious man.
Stunning charm
From what we have seen so far, we see how the concept of charm and grandeur settles naturally in this panorama.
According to a current concept of charm , this is opposed to seriousness, as it is applied to beings that, in general, make us smile. They are more kids, funny and have a small form of perfection that arouses a little compassion, tenderness, the will to protect and, on the other hand, soaks up.
Taking the word charm in that sense, God is charmant 4 ?
The charm is a quality. Therefore, in God there must be charm , but not with this connotation that suggests limitation.
How can we imagine the Creator making us smile? God even wants the man to smile. When he created, for example, the hummingbird, the forget-me-not, He wanted the man to smile. He wished thus to show something that is a form of charmary perfection , that in Him exists in a grandiose, majestic way, producing in a dazzling way that effect. What we could call, without violating the word, of dazzling charm , that leaves the category of the small and flies to a high category.
A dazzling charm would be the quintessential charm , of which these little charms of the Earth are only reflections.
God is infinite. Therefore, something in the way of what we call charm in creatures , in Him infinitely exists.
Boy Jesus: charm and greatness
The Most High is eternal, never changing. But as we are limited beings, we like certain changes, God is making us see aspects successively different from Him that change for us, not Him. Because He is infinite, we can spend millions and millions of years without ever exhausting these various aspects. And in the succession of these various «frames,» several «panels» of God-all language becomes hesitant to speak of such a high thing-there may be changes that explain to man what he feels when he sees, for example, A butterfly’s color, the agility or the color of a hummingbird’s wings.
And what in nature is iridescent, opalescent, pearly, is it not something that concerns the succession with which in God are manifested the great charms and greatness that are somehow charming ? Is not this vault between charm and grandeur that will be a charm in Heaven? You might think so.
If this is so, it has to be most striking in Our Lady, more than in all the Creation assembled. We can understand, then, what our contemplation of the Mother of God in Heaven will be like.
Did Holy Mary have anything like this on Earth? Had. She gathered in an earthly way the charm and the greatness when she contemplated the Child Jesus. Because there really is the little one, with all the charm of the fragility, but with the majesty of God.
What did the baby Jesus really look like? Who can excogitate this? Child Jesus, before whom the wise men approached reverently, bringing what they had best, and which, however, was a little child suckling on the pure milk of Our Lady, who depended on her even to frighten a mosquito …
We can imagine Mary Most Holy looking at the Child Jesus and, for example, seeing that His human nature wanted to be spoiled, pampering the Baby Jesus and thinking: «God wants to be spoiled by Me!»
You do not know what to say!
These are themes in which I would like to go deeper before I die, to present myself before God with that studied, and with my spirit formed for it and for that.
(Excerpted from conference of 8/8/1983)
1) Jesuit and Flemish exegete (* 1567 – † 1637).
2) Ex 11.
3) From French: Great return. In the early 1940s, there was an extraordinary increase in the religious spirit in France during the pilgrimages of four images of Our Lady of Boulogne. Such a spiritual movement was termed » grand retour, » to indicate the immense return of that country to its ancient and authentic fervor, then faded. Upon learning of these facts, Dr. Pliny began to use the expression «grand retour» in the sense not only of «great return,» but of an overwhelming torrent of graces which, through the Blessed Virgin, God will grant to the world for the Kingdom of Mary.
4) French: charming.
