examination of the heart 512 The brief compendium of His entire teaching is: “Learn from [M]e, because I am meek, and humble of heart” (cf. Mt 11:29). Indeed, His birth in a stable, the flight to Egypt, the temptation in the desert, the persecutions by the Jews, the washing of feet in the Cenacle, the sadness in the garden, the fetters, the slaps in the face, the imprisonment, the scourging, the derision by Herod, the crowning with thorns in the hall of Pilate, the most shameful carrying of the Cross, the most disreputable and ignominious death on the Cross, and the countless other events in His life, was all of this not a very manifest and clear, inasmuch as practical, teaching of the utmost humility? His most modest and humble Mother acknowledges herself unworthy of the heavenly maternity and declares it. She serves Elizabeth, whom she visits. As if impure, she submits herself to purification; indeed, she asks for it. She follows her most beloved Son until His death. As the patient one, she bears such great sorrows; as the humble one, she bears abusive language and unheard of insults. She is glad to be committed into the disciple’s care and, always a virgin, to be called a woman (although this detracts nothing from her unblemished virginity). These things reveal her very great, and even quite divine, humility; without which not even her virginity, as the mellifluous Bernard dares to affirm, would please God.252 Moreover, who could express in words and embrace with one’s mind the humility of the countless number of saints? Very many of them, having thrown away royal dignities, the noble crests of their ancestors, their friends and relatives, famous for their wealth and reputation and having despised the whole world at last, entered the difficult way of the cross and the ignominious (as 252 Cf. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, First Sermon on the Glories of the VirginMother, in: St. Bernard’s Sermons for the Seasons and Principal Festivals of the Year, vol. I, The Carroll Press, Westminster 1950, p. 62: “I dare to affirm it — the virginity even of Mary would have no value in His [God’s] eyes apart from her humility … And hence it may be said that her humility was the true reason why the Lord took complacence in her virginity.” Cf. Bernardus, Sermones de Tempore: De Laudibus Virginis Matris — Homilia I, in: PL, vol. 183, Ateliers catholiques du Petit- Montrouge, Paris 1862, p. 59 (n. 735).
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