The Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, he goes in on his knees.
—Caryll Houselander
I propose the person of Mary as the key to understanding the “narrow gate” of the Gospel teachings in Matthew 7:13-14 and Luke 13:22-30. Christ’s depiction of salvation’s entry as a narrow gate is one of the most troubling in the Gospel. It seems to portray salvation as restricted, exclusive, and elusive. Yet, while Christ states that “those who find [the narrow gate] are few,” he also promises that those who seek shall find; to those who knock, the door shall be opened (Matt 7:7). Our ever-merciful and loving God does not withhold salvation from us. Rather, he opens “the road that leads to life” for all. He prepares his children to pass over to this new road throughout the course of salvation history and, at last, opens the way with his seed in the womb of Mary. In Mary’s union with the Holy Spirit, humanity is wed to God. The embrace between Mary’s humanity and God’s Spirit is so full that the fruit of their union is Christ, God-and-man, who is the new road to life, our salvation. He is the way of humble love made accessible to humankind.
So fused to the divine life, the mysteries of Mary’s life eternally open to us, making accessible the way that is the life shared with Christ. Her life, then, is not only the key to understanding the narrow gate, but it is the narrow gate itself. Her life is the precise, embodied opening through which humanity meets God. This matters because the life under the mantle of Mary is the very opening, or portal, to the Way who is our Savior and Salvation. It is by entering into the mysteries of her life ourselves—marriage to the Holy Spirit, bodied-forth and shared life with Christ, and ultimate confession of our poverty and reception of the Father’s love at the foot of the Cross—that we may be gathered together from our dissipated ways of self-seeking and fused anew in God’s life and love.
In this light, we see that the narrow gate is not so much a guarded barrier but rather an open invitation. The gate is “narrow” in the sense that it is mystically enfolded in the life of a person. And the nature of this person’s life is one of lowliness, of surrender and reliance on grace. This life is indeed accessible through the unique life of Mary, but the Holy Spirit makes that life universally available to us all. Broadly, our ego-centric world rejects the invitation to the little way of a life wed to God. “Those who find the way are few.” Preferring to seek worldly favor, to become “big,” we brush away the unattractively “little” invitation to divine favor. Yet, just as in the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit finds surprising and intimate ways to meet us in our small moments. He announces Christ to us, making it possible for us to accept this invitation, to become small enough to pass through this narrow door.
Mystical and spiritual works, most prominently, The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander, inspire what follows, while the doctrinal development of Mariology from Vatican II to the present forms its context. St. Paul VI (Lumen Gentium; Marialis Cultus) addresses the need to clarify the legitimacy and proper placement of Mary in the order of Catholic belief. St. John Paul II (Redemptoris Mater) and Benedict XVI further develop Mariology in the realm of spirituality, recognizing her as the Mother of the Church and of the Church’s children. Contemporaneous writings from Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger (Mary: The Church at the Source; Mary for Today; Daughter Zion) align with and deepen the doctrine into more robust theology and spirituality. Though not always explicitly stated by these sources, I offer that the Mariological doctrine and spirituality from this period naturally grows into mystagogy. As we draw close to Mary, Marian spirituality blooms into intimate, enfleshed participation in the unique graces of her blessed life.
Exposition: The Problem of the Narrow Gate
Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” He answered them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough. . . . [You will] stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will say to you in reply . . . ‘I do not know where [you] are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!’ . . . You yourselves [will be] cast out, and people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God. For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
—Luke 13:22-30
“Lord, will only a few people be saved?” This initially sounds like a genuine theological inquiry about salvation. Yet, a deeper read exposes the self-seeking attempt to frame the question, and so glean a response, that measures salvation in quantitative terms. More honestly expressed, he is asking, “How probable is it that I will attain salvation? What are my chances?” Depending on the person, the intonation here could result in one of two extreme attitudes: presumption or paranoia. The presumptuous person expects the answer to affirm his superior righteousness. “I am one of God’s chosen people, set apart and worthy of salvation, yes?” On the other hand, the fearful person worries about not making the cut. He frets, “What must I do to preserve my life?”
Of course, this sort of eschatology results not in eternal life and rest, but in profound insecurity. Doubting God’s mercy, we have staked our faith on the shifting sands of our own selves and our human efforts. We consequently establish our notion of favor or blessedness in self-centered, human terms. We form an inverted conception of the Blessed Life, an “ego-projection . . . that is limited to our own narrowness,” and which sounds something like this: “Blessed are the comfortably well off, the cheerful, the highly respected. Blessed are the flattered” (Houselander). Blessed are the efficient and the prosperous. Blessed are those who enjoy good health, who fit into the centerfold. Blessed are those who ace their exams and get green lights. Blessed are those who smell good, have good teeth, and sane minds. Blessed are they who pray on schedule, who sit in the front pew, and who display piety for the rest.
The same calculative thinking behind the question, “Lord will only a few people be saved?” misleads us to seek salvation in graspable human terms. Holding this as our beatific vision, we confuse God’s favor with the favor of the world, which is truly a limited and elusive resource. Not only is this path insecure, but it is also self-defeating; for “no one can serve two masters” (Matt 6:24). Placing our faith in our own human merit means withdrawing that faith from God; it means infidelity to the One Lord, the God of our Salvation.
Christ’s Response: The New Way
His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him . . . He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise
—Luke 1:50-55
Christ meets us, in our inconstancy, with his unwavering fidelity. As we hear in his reply to the question—“Will only a few people be saved?”—he does not indulge our fearful or prideful urge to quantify. Rather, he entirely upends our understanding of favor and salvation, lifting our gaze to the wholly other way of divine generosity. The end of his response in Luke reads: “people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God. For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” This final line serves as the interpretive key for the whole response. His way defies self-righteous presumption, as it is the last who shall be first; it casts out the fear of exclusivity, as it opens indiscriminately to people from all four corners of the earth.
Christ not only speaks, but also embodies this other way for us: “though he [is] in the form of God, [does] not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he [empties] himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness” (Phil 2:6-8). This self-emptying to the lowly is his very countenance, which is portrayed in the Beatitudes (CCC §1717). To the world, this way is “madness” (Houselander, 21). Indeed, the Beatitudes directly contradict the worldly order, giving preference and favor to the last and least: “Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the reviled, the persecuted, the calumniated; blessed are those who hunger and thirst” (Houselander, 21; Matt 5:3-12). Our poverty is blessed in its potential to become a path, a narrow way, to reconciliation with his love. He desires all of us, and so it is to our lowest extreme that he chooses to descend. The summit of Mount Zion, the chosen meeting place between God and humanity, paradoxically lies in the lowliness of humanity.
The life of mercy and self-giving appears distasteful to a world that values self-preservation and that judges by appearances. Christ’s response disturbs us, not because it is meager in mercy but because it is superabundant, and conforming to this level of mercy costs us. The heart, the longing, of Mercy beckons us to sell everything we own and follow. Thus, when Christ responds that “many . . . will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough,” or similarly states in Matthew 7:14 that “those who find [the narrow gate] are few,” he speaks in the trans-worldly terms of the wholly other God. “Few” here refers to the unpopularity of the salvific life in the fallen world. Christ personally offers salvation to all, but few are willing to accept the way of a God who, rather than elevating them like gods, humbles himself and becomes human.
Blessed Are You Among Women
Throughout salvation history, God has intended his chosen people to be “set apart” in the sense of being reconciled to his order of mercy and generosity. Chosenness, or favor, has meant being distinct in humility and love, but it has not warranted gloating superiority over other nations. It has not meant salvation for Israel at the exclusion of others, but rather that, by becoming humbly dependent on God, they would become the locus of God’s meeting with all of humanity. The chosen people are to be Mount Zion, where divine life shall enter and then flow out to the four corners of the earth and bless all nations.
The Lord endures with his people, preparing them for himself through a long line of patriarchs, kings, and prophets. But it is not until he graces us with someone small enough to pass through the low door that he, at last, finds a heart ready for his humble entry into the world. His favored one is a peasant girl named Mary. By all counts, Mary has heretofore done nothing remarkable or memorable. She is a virgin in the fullest sense. With the simple dependence of a child, she has abstained from worldly ambition and has given herself solely to the waiting, the longing for love. This longing for love is a fertile space within her, a womb. It appears to the world an empty void, but it is in fact the very capacity in her for him; and so, her virginity, her waiting, is a positive prayer, rising to the Lord and drawing him to her. The simple fact of her being is dear to the Lord, before any doing that could impress the world (Houselander, 15). Her lowliness becomes the mountaintop.
Sweetly, the Lord meets her longing with his self-gift. With unwavering faith, she consents, submitting so totally that she receives the fullness of his life into herself. The fruit of the Spirit in her open womb is Christ himself, love incarnate. Houselander describes Mary’s reception of Christ as “tremendous, yet so passive. She [is] not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her. She [is] not asked to renounce anything, but to receive an incredible gift.” And, even following the incarnation, “she [is] not asked to lead a special, [cloistered or rigorous] kind of life . . . She [is] simply to remain in the world,” in a family and among the crowds. She allows her life to remain ordinary and lowly so that he may take it up and make it his own. (Houselander, 16).
Here, we might pause and consider how Mary further disrupts our expectations of the favored life. Once again, she witnesses to us an “overthrow of values” (Daughter Zion, 18). As we commonly refer to her as “our life, our sweetness, and our hope,” we often imagine her as a lofty figure, set apart in accord with the “worthiness” eschatology’s notion of favor. We think, if anyone in history has deserved the gift of God’s life, it is Mary, no? The guiltless one, the very flesh and blood of Jesus Christ the Savior, should be guaranteed salvation. For her, it is surely a given. She, at least, deserves to be set apart and exempt from the consequences of sin. But even for Mary, salvation is not a given but a purely unmerited gift. For, again, salvation is not just freedom from sin or exemption from consequence. Its positive content is the self-offering of God to each of us. Yes, Mary’s purity is an opening for God; it is a strength that elevates her to the mountain top (“Blessed are you among women”). However, even the highest point on earth is like an anthill before God’s majesty. Regardless of our virtue, salvation still is primarily and ultimately God’s movement: he stoops to lift us up to his height.
And, so, Mary has no thoughts of setting herself apart. Rather, she magnifies the greatness of the Lord, her Savior, precisely because “He has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness” (Luke 1:48). In this way, Mary is a clear prism through whom we behold the truth of humanity. Fully redeemed from sin and fulfilled by her union with the Holy Spirit, she definitively images the human potential: our openness for Christ. To the world, this openness looks like poverty, but to the Lord, it looks like a positive offering, a sacrifice of love and faith.
Indeed, as Mary progresses in her life of Divine favor and allows his beatific countenance to grow in her, she becomes inversely diminished in the world’s eyes. More and more, she must rely on the sight of faith to recognize the favor of her life. St. John Paul II speaks of this in Redemptoris Mater: Mary “bears within herself the radical ‘newness’ of faith: the beginning of the New Covenant.” But, this faith also experiences the dark night: ‘Through this faith Mary is perfectly united with Christ in his self-emptying,” or kenosis (§§17-18).
Like the living waters of Mount Zion, the kenotic exchange of self-gift between Mary and Christ is an overflowing reality. For, in receiving Christ, Mary also receives his heart for the world. He desires to give himself to us, so Mary follows, giving her continual yes to solidarity in Christ with the poor, the lowly, the mourners, the ashamed, the stigmatized. She perseveres alongside him on this beatific path unto Calvary, the point of self-death, where all distinction between herself and the poor is erased. She is no longer in solidarity with the poor, but she is one of the poor herself. She is no longer one suffering for but discovers, in her most stripped-down moment, that she is ultimately one suffered for. Despite her guiltlessness, the favored Mary draws closest to the Cross, claiming first place only to receive his purgative outpouring of mercy on the world. “At the foot of the Cross Mary shares through faith in the shocking mystery of this self-emptying” (RM §18).
Mary as the Narrow Gate
Mary’s fruitfulness, although she is unique and specially chosen, opens a new way for everyone. As Mary is included in the work of salvation, so she includes all and lets an eternal cycle of love between herself and her divine Son become living for everyone . . . When she allows everything to happen to her, she becomes co-operative in all that happens to her . . . The first fruit of her co-operation is the Son himself; and the second is the Son’s work, the redemption.
—Adrienne von Speyr
In the Church’s development of Marian theology, it has repeatedly affirmed that Mary plays a central and indispensable role in God’s plan of salvation. Yes, she is a handmaid, a helper, to the Lord. But beyond that, she models redemption and opens the way. Her roles as daughter of God the Father, Bride of the Spirit, and Mother of Christ are for all Christians and, in fact, constitute our narrow path to salvation.
In Mary for Today, Hans Urs von Balthasar posits, “Certainly, she is unique, the only one who brought the Savior bodily into the world. But are we not all called to give birth to Christ into our world? In this travail, the whole Church is Marian—men and women alike” (14).
The word “mystery” here points to yet a further, mystagogical, dimension of Mary’s role in salvation. True to the Mount Zion metaphor, God chooses to meet us, not abstractly but in the particularity of who we are, as we are. This he does in the person of Mary. Because her life is totally bound to the divine life on earth and in heaven, her life becomes an eternal, mystical event that is open to us. In other words, Mary not only models but actually makes present the narrow gate. For she herself is the narrow gate, that small aperture through whom God permeates human nature and transubstantiates it into his own Salvific Body. To us, “poor sinners . . . she is the ‘gate of heaven’ . . . who makes it possible for us to reach her son. [. . .] She is the help we need for our birth into heaven to be successful” (Mary for Today 43). It follows, then, that the narrow gate is “narrow,” not in the sense that the invitation to Christ is exclusive, but in that it is particular; it is personal, it is intimate, it is enfleshed, and it is feminine.
Mary is the name of the beautiful, salvific life that invites our participation. The Marian life blooms into mystagogy: her pregnancy with Christ becomes our privilege, her discipleship alongside him our path, her surrender to his lowly image our calling.
In giving her humanity to God, Mary gave all humanity to him, to be used for his own will. In wedding her littleness to the Spirit of Love, she wed all lowliness to the Spirit of Love. In surrendering to the Spirit and becoming the Bride of Life, she wed God to the human race and made the whole world pregnant with the life of Christ (Houselander, 66-67).
Under her Mantle: Portraits of the Marian Life
I would like to conclude this proposal of Mary as the narrow gate by contemplating the initial and final mysteries of Mary’s life with Christ. Mary is a clear prism through whom we behold the truth of humanity. She images both poles of human redemption: our lowliness and God’s glorious mercy for us. The saints have called her the “Gate of Heaven.” She is also the “Narrow Gate.” The mysteries within her life narrative illustrate this contradiction of the favored life appearing starkly unfavorable. This contradiction challenges Mary’s faith and ours. Yet even when the events of her life surpass her understanding, Mary remains anchored in God’s favor for her, abides in her identity as his. Thus, despite the world’s view of her, she is free to continue uttering yes. By her free, resounding yes, she bears the full bloom of human faith and magnifies the Lord, the one who is surpassingly worthy of her fidelity. Mary’s attitude of firm faith forms our own response. Persevering in unison with her yes, we discover the blessed privilege of union with Christ’s love, precisely in the lowliness that he takes upon himself.
The Light in the Darkness: Annunciation, Advent, and Nativity
The Gospel accounts of the Annunciation, Advent, and Nativity have become so familiar that we often fail to note the strange paucity characterizing them. But these events in Mary’s life appear, at best, ordinary and hidden, and at worst, unorthodox and scandalous. The Annunciation occurs within the modesty of Mary’s bedroom; and just as swiftly as the messenger proclaims new light into her life, he departs. Mary remains in the dimness of her room, pondering. The Word is growing secretly within her, but she is left, embarrassingly, without words to vindicate her inexplicable pregnancy. Mary persists in quiet trust.
The Nativity, too, hardly seems “favorable.” Mary’s labor and delivery in a stable flies in the face of the vain expectation for the favored life to be painless and easy. And, after the pangs of birthing Christ, she and he—innocence and purity—are rendered ritually unclean from her blood for the first weeks of his earthly life. Again, though guiltless, Mary does not seek exemption from the consequences of sin, but again, she “stands in solidarity with the mother of the race [Eve] precisely because she is free of sin, and she stands even more closely in solidarity with [God’s chosen people], which as a whole is continually experiencing the birth pangs of the Messiah” (Mary for Today, 35).
In a world of darkness, bearing the light of the world is a necessarily painful and humbling process. It defies the “shoulds” of expected ease and prosperity, and it instead looks like undertaking those consequences in a way that reorients them into sacrifice for the Christ Child—a sweet act of worship. Mary accepts humanity’s stigma. This, too, will flower into blessedness, will give way to the stigmata of Christ Crucified, who bears the confusion of our guilt and so loosens us from its bondage (Love Alone is Credible, 104).With Mary in the specific graces of the Annunciation, Advent, and Nativity, God dignifies us with the purpose of ones who suffer for. We may offer the hardship of bearing light into the world for Christ and for the world to whom he gives his life.
At Christ’s Side and Christ’s Feet: Discipleship and the Cross
At the foot of the Cross, Mary’s life becomes a sacrificial offering to the Lord, in union with the sacrifice of Christ. In her, we behold the humbling reality that even humanity in its perfected form cannot merit salvation. Ultimately, even Mary comes to the end of herself, is brought to kneel, open handed under heaven like a lily. She is asked to bear the greatest suffering: the loss of Christ. She believes the Word that the Lord has spoken to her, and she says “Be it done unto me” (Luke 1:38). Yes. The favored one surrenders her life in him.
None of us can envy Mary in this result of her favor. She is asked to let go of her precious Son, love himself. Each of our losses is a partaking in this ultimate loss. But this is not the end of the narrow pass; on the other side, the sacrifice of her Son abounds in cosmic fruitfulness. This ultimate loss becomes the ultimate outpouring of mercy onto the world. By her loss, Christ, Mary is broken open to become the mother of us all: “Behold your mother” (John 26:27). She receives us with her open hands and, in her maternal care, she bears Christ in each of us. To accept the sacrifice of her loss and her yes to mothering us to heaven is the most humbling gift, one we could never merit. We can only respond with a thankful "Yes."
Throughout her life with Christ, Mary’s heart is pierced seven times (Luke 2:35). Christ’s death on the Cross is the final piercing. It is the definitive opening, the full longing for God. Incredibly, Mary’s heart is not crushed by this experience. Instead, she continues surrendering herself to the seeking. She continues seeking and finding him in us, in the lowly. Each of her piercings becomes an opening to love, wounds which bleed the content of heaven—sacrificial love—onto the wounded world. The pierced heart of Mary is the “Gate of Heaven.”
