"My soul magnifies the Lord"

As part of the ordinary for Evening Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours (LoH), the "Magnificat" (aka "the Canticle of Mary") is said daily all over the world by millions1 of Catholic priests, religious, and laypeople. I myself have been saying the Liturgy of the Hours regularly-ish for a bit over a year, and have thus become well acquainted with the prayer -- which is actually lifted straight out of the bible (Luke 1:46-55).

The prayer is Mary's response to Elizabeth's greeting. After experiencing her baby leap within her at hearing the sound of Mary's voice, it says that Elizabeth became "filled with the Holy Spirit" and she praised Mary, saying:

“Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”2

Although Mary's words are the ones recited every day as a part of the LoH, Elizabeth's are the ones which will be familiar to most Catholics because they are the prime source for the Hail Mary. So if Elizabeth is praying the first-ever Hail Mary, the Magnificat can be rightly seen as Mary's response to that prayer. The key to interpreting her response lies right in the first line; however I didn't realize this right away because most translations -- in my opinion -- do not do justice to the poetry of Mary's expression. 3 

Here is how the standard translation in the LoH reads:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Saviorfor he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. 

From this day all generations will call me blessed:the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear himin every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,and the rich he has sent away empty. 

He has come to the help of his servant Israelfor he has remembered his promise of mercy,the promise he made to our fathers,to Abraham and his children forever.

I always considered "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord" to mean that Mary was simply rather passionate about lauding God. This changed when a priest called my attention to this alternate translation:

My soul magnifies the Lord...

We see words constantly but we rarely give any thought whatsoever to their etymology. We take their origin for granted.  Despite the number of times I had seen the title of the prayer, it had not occurred to me that Magnificat looks remarkably like magnifies. As "Magnificat" is a latin word it takes no great genius to see why they are so alike.

"My dear Saint Jerome!" you say, ever so indignant, "Whatever do you mean by putting such a strange word into the vulgate? Mary cannot magnify God! To magnify something is to make something greater, and if God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, how could he possible be made any more magnificent? You, sir, despite your sainthood, are in mortal heresy!"

Or, alternatively,

"At last! Here we find proof that Mary is, in fact, greater than God, giving us due license to worship her as much as we please without Protestant criticism!"4

My dear, misguided fool, let us rewind a bit and make some important distinctions, and you will find this ancient Catholic, biblical prayer is unprecedentedly profound, and not at all heretical.

What does a magnifying glass do?

1.) A magnifying glass makes things appear larger.

Magnification does not, as you suggested, increase the size of something. It merely increases our perception of the magnitude of something. Just as the David magnifies Michelangelo, Mary's soul magnifies the Lord.

2.) A magnifying glass helps us to discover truths indiscernible with our fallen vision.

God is everything brought to its perfection, but sometimes perfection incarnate and stretched throughout eternity is difficult to emulate in our own lives. We see Christ, but, despite his full humanity, we sometimes our blinded by his divinity. "Of course he resisted temptation, of course he never sinned, he's God!" In Mary, God isolates the perfect human soul from divinity so that we can see it more clearly.

3.) A magnifying glass can focus light to start a fire.

God in his super-abundant love and mercy is showering light upon us all the time, but sometimes we're stubborn, clumsy little boogers.  We hide under leaves or trip into puddles and it becomes awfully difficult to set us on fire. We may know that he is God, and that he is big and large and magnificent, but our love is often diffused everywhere and difficult to focus anywhere, let alone on an infinite, invisible God. Mary shows us to love Christ as she loved him, and puts us in his hands.

So, in this light, in what light does this put her response to Elizabeth's greeting?

“Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”2

Elizabeth's greeting is Mary centric. It is all about her greeting, her voice, her womb, and her response to God. Mary does not condemn this, but she redirects it. She changes all of the you to He. It is not about what she has done for God, it is about what God has done for her, and for everyone else.

"...the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name."

What I like about the image of magnification rather than proclamation is that, while proclamation is more active, magnification is a passive thing. When a magnifying glass is placed in front of something else, it cannot help but to magnify it.

Oh, and did you catch the second line of the Magnificat?

"my spirit rejoices in God my Savior."

Mary magnifying God for us through her free cooperation with his Divine Will. Now that's what I call radical joy. If done properly, any life lived with radical joy will magnify the Lord.

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1 Rough estimate. Actual numbers unknown.
2 Source: New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE)  Luke 1: 42-45.
3 Or, at the least, they make it less obvious to dullards like myself. I'm not sure if the translation I like is actually a more accurate one or if it's emphasis is just better for my favorite exegesis of the passage. Fun fact though: a new translation of the liturgy of the hours is currently in the works.
4 Disclaimer: Neither of the above statements represents sound Catholic teaching.

This is not a Blog about Happiness.

As my intro to this blog I would like to explain the motivation behind my choice of joy as a theme.

If someone had asked me a year ago what joy was, I would probably have merely considered it a synonym for happiness -- one which rises approximately 400% in usage at Christmas time. The actual delineation between the two, however, is far subtler (and cooler). In fact, joy itself is far subtler (and cooler) than happiness.

Radical Joy

Why?

1) The Roman Catholic Church (esp. the CCC [Catechism of the Catholic Church])


If you take a look at the fruits of the Holy Spirit in CCC 1832, joy is listed. Happiness is not. I would say happiness has been owned but that sounds pessimistic. So, why the word choice? Why joy and not happiness? Allow me to explain further.

2) The Dictionary 1

joy |joi| noun a feeling of great pleasure and happiness : tears of joy | the joy of being alive. • a thing that causes joy : the joys of Manhattan. verb [ intrans. ] poetic/literary rejoice : I felt shame that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture or pain. ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French joie, based on Latin gaudium, from gaudere ‘rejoice.’

happy |ˈhapē| adjective ( -pier , -piest ) 1 feeling or showing pleasure or contentment : Melissa came in looking happy and excited |  • [ predic. ] ( happy about) having a sense of confidence in or satisfaction with (a person, arrangement, or situation) : I was never very happy about the explanation | I can't say they looked too happy about it, but a deal's a deal. • [ predic. ] ( happy with) satisfied with the quality or standard of : I'm happy with his performance. • [ attrib. ] fortunate and convenient : he had the happy knack of making people like him. ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense [lucky] ): from the noun hap + -y 1 .

There's a general observable trend in the two of these definitions; but, it is most observable in the origins. Now, to truly make an educated dissection of the distinction here I'd have to know some Latin, but I unfortunately do not. 2 I am incapable of giving an eloquent treatise on the significance of the word "gaudere." What I do know is that the word happiness places an emphasis on fortune, luck, and happenstance. So, really, when we say "Are you happy?" we are really asking "Have you been lucky lately?" or when we say "Sam went about his chores happily" we are literally saying "He went about his chores unaffected by any blight of misfortune."

A call to live with joy, however, is a call to rise beyond the ups and downs of fortune in our lives. There is a famous mosaic in Pompeii which shows Fortune's Wheel. On the left are a rich garments, and on the right the cloak of a beggar. Although Fortune's Wheel will give some riches and some poverty, ultimately death is the equalizing force. 

Images like this were meant to serve as "memento mori," reminders of death. While it seems morbid to be fixated on death, I would venture to say there is a large amount of crossover between "memento mori" and joy. To live with true joy is to live as unshackled from Fortune's Wheel as death will ever make you. When you have joy you do not need happenstances to give you happiness because your joy wells forth from a source within -- or above -- yourself. Joy is inherently tied to peace: they flow from each other. 

He who is happy cannot keep themselves happy forever, because happiness is something inherently out of our hands; but joy cannot be taken from you because it is a decision. If it becomes a decision to make yourself joyful, it will fail. It must be a decision to allow yourself to be used as an instrument of joy today. To be open to being radically, self-sacrificingly joyful regardless of whether you feel happy. In fact, true joy is beyond our ordinary human abilities to achieve -- it requires God. This, then, is the significance of joy being one of the fruits of the spirit. 

I'm going to end my philosophizing about joy here because the worst sort of ignorance is to not know when you've gone out of your depth. I simply  want to close with three conclusions from this view of joy.

1) Christ on the cross is the ultimate example of joy.

2) Resigning your will to God may mean the loss of some happiness, but it is the surest route to enduring joy.

3) To live your faith well is to live it with radical joy.

Fra Angelico. St. Dominic Adoring the Crucifixion. 
San Marco Monastery, Florence, Italy. Fresco.

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1 Although I am not an English major, one of my two majors is a language, which gives me the right to be obsessed with words and their meanings, usages, and origins.
2 I do know a small amount of Latin (mainly from an ecclesial context), but my major is Spanish, not Latin. Spanish is a language with lower practicality when doing obscure etymology on blog posts or desiring to feel intellectually astute, but far higher practicality in real life. That being said if I had endless credit hours, intelligence, and time, I would learn Latin as well.