Handmaid of the Lord

By Adrienne von Speyr

In this profound book on the mystery of Mary, Adrienne von Speyr reflects on the life, attitude, and prayer of the Mother of God. She shows how Mary's assent to God's will—her Fiat: "Let it be done to me according to thy word"—is what defines and sanctifies every aspect of her life. She gives new insights into Mary's holiness, suffering, prayer, and role of spiritual motherhood for all mankind.

Handmaid of the Lord is not a biography detailing the daily life of the Mother of Jesus, filled with the sights and the sounds found in the holy imagination of a saintly visionary. Rather, it responds to our desire to know Mary in a penetrating and personal way, opening us to the mystery of her inner life, which can be revealed only by the Word himself and pondered in the heart, just as Our Lady herself did.

Humility, obedience, availability, joy, suffering, and transparency before God are some of the key spiritual attributes of Our Lady found in this timeless work. As with her other books, von Speyr helps us to savor and to appreciate each word of Sacred Scripture as self-revelation from the Father through the heart of the Church, the Bride of the Son, in a loving exchange of the Spirit. In this way, the Word may be absorbed into the very core of our being, as it was for Mary, the Mother of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781681497518

Adrienne von Speyr

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) was a Swiss medical doctor, a convert to Catholicism, a mystic, and an author of more than sixty books on spirituality and theology. She collaborated closely with theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, her confessor for twenty-seven years, and together they founded the Community of Saint John. Among her most important works are Handmaid of the Lord, Man before God, Confession, and her commentaries on the Gospel of Saint John.

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FOREWORD

Handmaid of the Lord offers a doorway into the heart of one of Christianity’s greatest mysteries—the mystery of Mary—and there is no better spiritual guide through that door than its author, Adrienne von Speyr.

A reader of this work should be prepared to be spiritually steeped in the transcendent nature of the girl whom the messenger of God named Grace-filled. The word expansion comes to mind. It is a term Adrienne often uses to describe what happens to the heart when grace is poured out and the willing vessel receives.

This book is not a biography detailing the daily life of the Mother of Jesus, one filled with the sights and sounds, smells and tastes found in the holy imagination of a saintly visionary. Such works may touch the heart in some ways because there is a craving to know the details surrounding the everyday activities of that Woman given to us at the Cross as Mother, who is beloved and daily entrusted with our most tender needs. To be sure, those visionaries bear witness with a pious intention of heart. Their works, however, often fall short of touching the transcendent nature of the soul that Simeon prophesied would be pierced so that the thoughts of many may be laid bare.

Nor can this book be categorized as an anthropological investigation of the woman named Mary of Nazareth. Though such scholarly approaches contain interesting historical facts and sociological insights, such works often, in the end, tend to intellectualize their subject in such a way that they lay out the humanity of our Lady like a cadaver awaiting dissection. That approach alone will never do for those who truly want to know the woman so precious to all of heaven that she would be assumed body and soul to the very heart of love itself, into the very depths of the Holy Trinity. If the reader desires more than the above, if his hope is to know Mary in a deeply penetrating, intimate, and personal way, then it will be necessary for him to be open to mystery, which can be revealed only by the Word himself and pondered in the heart, as exampled by our Lady.

Saint Benedict of Nursia, in the very beginning of the Holy Rule, exhorts us to listen to the Word with the ear of the heart. Saint Hildegard von Bingen and Saint Teresa of Avila have spoken of gazing upon the Word with the eyes of the heart. Such divine acoustics and optics for the baptized Christian are acquired with a posture of receptivity that receives the revelation of divine communication in whatever fashion the self-revealing triune God chooses. Such an attitude of attentiveness to the Word has been called, for almost the entire life of the Church, Lectio Divina. Adrienne von Speyr is a grand spiritual master of the practice and a beneficiary of its fruits. Handmaid of the Lord is Lectio Divina par excellence. It reveals the sheer beauty of Marian contemplation like no masterpiece of temporal art or music ever could; hence its status as a spiritual classic. Originally released in 1948, receiving the imprimatur in Germany, it has revealed God’s greater glory and withstood the honored test of time.

Humility, obedience, availability, suffering, joy, and total transparency before God are just some of the key spiritual attributes of our Lady found within the pages of this timeless book. As I pondered a facet of Mary with Adrienne, I found that I understood more and more about myself and what it is to be a child of God. I experienced encounters with grace that seemed so real to my mind and soul that I felt as though I were actually receiving a showering from the very hands of Our Lady of Grace. I continue to visit this spiritual masterwork as if returning home, as it were, to visit my Mother.

I have often referred to Adrienne as a spiritual guide, for that is what she has become for me. Handmaid of the Lord was my first encounter with her. At the time, I did not know that she was called a mystic, though I know now that she was. During her lifetime, her work was never released with the suggestion that she was someone extraordinary. It did not need to be, for her writings stood soundly on the merits of one educated on her knees in prayer, living fully a Christlike life in the world as wife, mother, doctor, and friend. Her radical form of listening and seeing, of receiving the gift as given, of pondering each morsel of heavenly food is her legacy. As with her other works, in Handmaid of the Lord she helps us to savor and to appreciate each word of Sacred Scripture as self-revelation from the Father through the heart of the Church, the Bride of the Son, in a loving exchange of the Spirit. In this way, the Word may be absorbed into the very core of our being, as it was for Mary, the Mother of God.

Kris McGregor

Founder, Discerning Hearts

December 14, 2016

THE LIGHT OF ASSENT

As a sheaf of grain is tied together in the middle and spreads out at either end, so Mary’s life is bound together by her assent. From this assent her life receives its meaning and form and unfolds toward past and future. This single, all-encompassing act accompanies her at every moment of her existence, illuminates every turning point of her life, bestows upon every situation its own particular meaning, and in all situations gives Mary herself the grace of renewed understanding. Her assent gives full meaning to every breath, every movement, every prayer of the Mother of God. This is the nature of an assent: it binds the one who gives it, yet it allows him complete freedom in shaping its expression. He fills his assent with his personality, giving it its weight and unique coloring. But he himself is also molded, liberated, and fulfilled by his assent. All freedom develops through surrender and through renunciation of liberty. And from this freedom within commitment there arises every sort of fruitfulness.

Even Mary’s childhood is illumined by the light of her assent. Childhood is always a preparatory gathering up of the self for the decisive engagement that will come later. In Mary’s case, this commitment will be nothing other than an assent that determines everything. In order to understand her childhood, therefore, one must look back on it from her definite self-engagement later on. It has meaning as preparation for that for which she was chosen from all time—chosen so completely that at the moment of her conception she was dissociated from original sin and thus from everything that might have weakened or impaired in her the power and perfection of her later assent. So great is the power and freedom of her consent that she is perfectly free from the slightest inclination to say No. This is so because her assent is prepared and planned from the first moment of her existence. In her being, then, her assent is cause and effect together. It is not one single act in her life; rather, God called her into existence for the sake of that act, and every excellence she was endowed with was granted for its sake. She, who matures in order that the Word may be spoken from her, already lives completely from the outset and on the strength of that Word.

Above all, Mary’s assent is a grace. It is not simply her human answer to God’s offer. It is so great a grace that it is also the divine answer to her entire life. Her assent is the answer of the grace in her spirit to the grace that from the beginning has been the foundation of her life. But the answer Mary gives is just as much the answer expected by grace, in that she does not fail to hear God’s call; and for her, not failing to hear means placing herself at the service of the call in complete surrender: surrender of herself with the whole strength and depth of her being and ability; surrender of herself both in strength and in weakness—in the strength of one who is ready for every disposition of God and in the weakness of one whose life has already been placed at his disposal, who is weak enough to acknowledge the power of him who asks but strong enough to offer him her life without reserve.

As a word of grace, her assent is in a special way an act of the Holy Spirit through whose effect she gives her soul and body to God. The Spirit who will overshadow her is already within her, and it is he who allows her to utter her assent together with him. At the time of her overshadowing, the Spirit flooding through her will meet with the Spirit already dwelling within her, and Mary’s Yes will be as though enclosed within a Yes of the Spirit. But enveloped in the Holy Spirit, it will become a true, free, and independent word of her own spirit. At first it will be a word of her own spirit, without her yet suspecting how firm God’s intention is to become a Word of her body as well. It is the Holy Spirit who will extend the Yes of her spirit to an assent of her body. He can do this because her assent is unbounded, a malleable material out of which God can make whatever he will.

In assenting, she renounces herself, makes herself nothing, in order to let God alone become active in her. She makes all the potentialities that constitute her nature accessible to his action, without her being able or wishing to overlook anything. She resolves to let God alone work; and yet, precisely by virtue of this resolution, she becomes cooperative. For cooperation with the action of grace is always the fruit of a renunciation. Every renunciation in love is fruitful because it makes room for consent to God, and God waits only for a person’s consent to show him what a man is capable of doing with God’s help. No one has ever so completely renounced everything of his own in order to let God rule as did Mary; to no one, therefore, has God granted greater power of cooperation than to her. In renouncing all her potentialities, she obtains their fulfillment beyond all expectation: cooperative in body, she becomes the Mother of the Lord; cooperative in spirit, she becomes his Handmaid and his Bride. And the Handmaid becomes Mother, and the Mother becomes Bride; every perspective, as it closes, opens up a new one ever farther into infinity.

But her fruitfulness is so unlimited only because the renunciation in her assent was also boundless. She sets no conditions, she makes no reservations; she gives herself completely in her answer. Before God she forgets all caution because the boundlessness of the divine plan opens before her eyes. Not only does she will what God wills, but she also hands her assent over to God for him to dispose of it, form it, transform it. In saying Yes, she has no wish, no preference, no demands that must be taken into consideration. She enters into no contract with God; she wishes only to be accepted in grace, as in grace she has been claimed by God. God alone should administer her assent. If indeed God bends down to her, then her answer can only be blindly obedient surrender. She knows no calculation, no guarantee, no hint of reservation. She knows only that her role is that of the handmaid who stands so completely in the position of humility that she always prefers what is offered to her, never tries herself to bring something about, neither prepares nor directs the will and wishes of God. Only after her assent is spoken will she help to give it form; then she will persevere in this assent, not as if she were now locked up in a prison, but, on the contrary, as one contained within the liberating form that from now on stamps her entire being. From the moment in which she pronounces it, she forms it continuously, submitting herself perfectly to God in everything, and thus lets the assent shape her whole existence.

This formation of the assent means then, in truth, that she renounces once and for all any self-shaping for her own life just as completely as she does for the life of her Son. As soon as she has said Yes, her life has the conscious and explicit form of assent, and everything else proceeds in dependence on that. This means, in turn, that her assent has the form of a vow. For a vow is such a final surrender of human freedom and disposition to God that, through this act of humble, confident entrusting of freedom and life, God now possesses all that is ours and thereby has the chance—whether gradually or all at once—to use and transform what has been entrusted to him however he wishes. Every Christian life of faith, hope, and love has this form of a vow as its goal through which everything of one’s own is entrusted completely and finally to God’s disposition, and God receives permission to draw on the assent once it is given and to appropriate it through use. That God really does draw on man’s assent makes the vow a Christian reality that is nourished by the power of the Crucified. The Mother’s assent was such a vow from the beginning.

It is part of the nature of a vow to be made in freedom. But the Mother’s freedom, like every other freedom, is indivisible, and the indivisibility of freedom becomes most forcibly evident in Mary’s assent. She binds herself to God with one single act, and this act is made out of total freedom into total freedom. With this act, Mary, in conversation with the angel, visibly enters into the Christian life for the first time—and immediately into its most fully realized form, the vow. When she says Yes to all that is to come, and also therefore to Christianity along with everything new, unexpected, and beyond expectation that it will hold, she gives shape to the character of all Christian assent as well as to its most perfect form: the Christian vow. Her assent is a vow of obedience, just as much as of chastity and of poverty. In its single renunciation, it contains a threefold renunciation. For in her one assent, the Mother renounces everything that is hers for the sake of God and mankind. Her assent itself coincides with obedience; when she chooses assent as her form of life, she chooses obedience as her life. By doing so, she will be dispossessed of her very body. She has given it, like everything else, to God, and she can no longer dispose of it herself; neither, therefore, can she any longer give it to another human being. But she could not perfectly serve with her body if she did not at the same time put everything she possessed into this service. Everything that is hers is to be claimed by this task. Since she puts herself at the disposal of the task, she also, at the same time and necessarily, puts everything she has at its disposal. The totality of the assent demands that it be so. One cannot make a complete renunciation interiorly—in obedience—without surrendering the exterior as well; it would be like doing hard interior penance and yet leading a life of comfort exteriorly. There is a unity in the offer on God’s part and a unity in the answer on the part of man: and that is the assent, which is revealed in the three vows without losing its unity.

Assent, in its essence, is grace; a grace that, like every grace, comes from God, takes effect in man and his mission, and has the possibility of being sent back autonomously, as a formed answer incorporated within the all-embracing mission of the Son, who, through the assent of man, then has the possibility of coming into the world as man. This essence of the assent as grace is found in every Christian assent that a man utters, and so the Mother’s assent has become the condition and prototype, indeed the source, of all Christian assent to come. Here then, for the first time, the indissoluble bond, the mystical marriage between the assent of God and the assent of the creature becomes manifest, and the fruit of this union is the Redeemer of the world. And though the Mother does not utter her Yes without the grace of the Son, neither does the Son become man without the Yes of the Mother. Assent and redemption are so interwoven, so inseparably one, that the creature cannot give assent without being redeemed, but neither can he be redeemed without somehow having spoken his assent. This mystery has its source in Mary’s assent, since her single assent sufficed for the Lord, as incarnate, to say Yes to all mankind. Her assent, therefore, like the assent of the Lord, is vicarious, representative of our own.

Mary’s assent is threefold. She says Yes to the angel, to God, and to herself. She says it to the angel as a simple response to his appearance, like the promise a person can make the moment something is asked of him. This Yes, like every real human promise, goes beyond what the person’s vision or knowledge can encompass. The situation of assent is like a bud whose development he cannot foresee. But every serious, binding promise nevertheless allows an insight into a whole spiritual attitude and perhaps actually becomes its living epitome. The attitude of the Mother now becomes evident in her promise through the fact that she stands before the angel and has to give him her answer. The angel and the answer are complementary and together embody a single reality in God. At the moment of their meeting, they form a unity of fulfillment. It is the grace in Mary that enables her to meet the angel, and it is God who, for his part, condescends to send his angel to this expectant grace. As her assent expresses Mary’s attitude, so also does the angel who has been sent. Their meeting becomes an expression and, as it were, a meeting place for the fullness of grace: the grace of God in Mary and the grace sent to her by God through the angel find themselves in an encounter of perfect correspondence. Mary has long lived in expectation of the angel; but now is the moment when she must meet him and he must be sent to her. If she had not been