December 8, 2013

Gospel Commentary from the Irish Dominicans

The voice of prophecy had been silent for four hundred years. John the Baptist spoke with such fire that people believed God had now broken the long silence. Even many of the Pharisees and Sadducees were convinced, or at least willing to consider it. We are more aware of the Pharisees - they get such a bad press in the New Testament. It must have taken an immense force to lift their heads from their study of the Torah, the Law. The Torah was God's definitive word, according to their belief. But here they were, listening for a new word from God.

God's new prophet did not flatter them. “Brood of vipers!” Pit of snakes! Don’t rely on your Scriptures, your past (he told them); God is able to do a new thing.

But in fairness to them, they had put aside their commentaries and come to listen. St Paul had been a Pharisee, and it took the power of God to cast out his old certainties. These seem more amenable. He could have thanked them for coming! But John is a rough diamond, an uncut diamond. He has the hardness, but there is little beauty, and not much light coming through. Take away the rhetoric and his message is conventional: “Tax collectors… asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.’" (Luke 3:12-14).

But there would be another diamond, an Immortal Diamond, and John's greatness was that he pointed to him. "He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire" – he, the Immortal Diamond formed in the crucible of earth's suffering. With him every mortal sufferer can be immortal diamond, can say with Hopkins: "I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am."

-- Today’s Good News, the website of the Dominicans of Ireland

Maria walks amid the thorn, Kyrie eleison,

Maria walks amid the thorn, which sev’n long years no leaf has born, Jesus and Maria.

What ‘neath her heart doth Mary bear, Kyrie eleison?

A little child doth Mary bear, beneath her heart he nestles there, Jesus and Maria.

And as the two were passing there, Kyrie eleison,

Lo, roses on the thorn appear!

Lo, roses on the thorn appear, Jesus and Maria!

- Medieval German Carol

Poem: The Annunciation by Denise Levertov

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,

almost always a lectern, a book; always

the tall lily.

Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,

the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,

whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions

courage.

The engendering Spirit

did not enter her without consent.

God waited.

She was free

to accept or to refuse, choice

integral to humanness.

___________________

Aren’t there annunciations

of one sort or another

in most lives?

Some unwillingly

undertake great destinies,

enact them in sullen pride,

uncomprehending.

More often

those moments

when roads of light and storm

open from darkness in a man or woman,

are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair

and with relief.

Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.

But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

____________________

She had been a child who played, ate, slept

like any other child–but unlike others,

wept only for pity, laughed

in joy not triumph.

Compassion and intelligence

fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous

than any in all of Time,

she did not quail,

only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’

and gravely, courteously,

took to heart the angel’s reply,

the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb

Infinite weight and lightness; to carry

in hidden, finite inwardness,

nine months of Eternity; to contain

in slender vase of being,

the sum of power–

in narrow flesh,

the sum of light.

Then bring to birth,

push out into air, a Man-child

needing, like any other,

milk and love–

but who was God.

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

Spirit,

suspended,

waiting.

____________________

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

“One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God's arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God's grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can't grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul.” --Michelle Blake, The Tentmaker

Another of our Advent companions is John the Baptist. He prepared the way for Jesus. He lived in the wilderness, and people were so fascinated with him that they went there to hear him speak. John said what they didn’t want to hear: He told people what was wrong with them and what was wrong with the nation. Imagine John standing in a shopping mall during December. What might he say to us? Like John’s preaching, the message of Advent can be hard to take. But unless we face it, we are not ready for the coming of Christ.

The season of Advent begins on the fourth the fourth Sunday before Christmas. At Christmas we will welcome the coming of Christ. During Advent we do whatever is necessary to make ready for Christ’s coming. …

Advertisers make the mistake of beginning the Christmas celebration too early. If we imitate them we can get overloaded. That takes the fun (and the point) out of both the preparations and the celebrations. Christmastime begins on December 25 and lasts for several weeks afterward. There will be plenty of time for parties and concerts and caroling and all the other joys of the season.

But for now, it is Advent. Advent has its own joys. … In the quiet of Advent we make ready to hear angel songs. In the darkness we prepare to be dazzled by the star of Bethlehem. – Mary Ellen Hynes, Companion to the Calendar

Take time to be aware that in the very midst of our busy preparations for the celebration of Christ’s birth in ancient Bethlehem, Christ is reborn in the Bethlehems of our homes and daily lives. Take time, slow down, be still, be awake to the Divine Mystery that looks so common and so ordinary yet is wondrously present. An old abbot was fond of saying, ‘The devil is always the most active on the highest feast days.’ The supreme trick of Old Scratch is to have us so busy decorating, preparing food, practicing music and cleaning in preparation for the feast of Christmas that we actually miss the coming of Christ. Hurt feelings, anger, impatience, injured egos—the list of clouds that busyness creates to blind us to the birth can be long, but it is familiar to us all. -- Edward Hays, A Pilgrim’s Almanac

A prison cell in which one waits, hopes ... and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Reflection for December 8, 2013: The Face of Mary

What does Mary look like? Who can say? She wears an infinite number of forms and faces – not because she is more than one person, but because we are more than one person -- because there are so very many of us, and because we all see her with the eyes of our own hearts. In paintings and statues and stained glass windows, in images created across 20 centuries from a thousand different countries and cultures, she is white and brown and black and red, Chinese and Italian and Navajo and Nigerian and Russian. In the pictures in my childhood missal, Mary’s skin was porcelain-white and her hair a soft light Clairol brown. If not for the robe and the halo, she could have been a pretty young 1950s housewife, setting out milk and cookies after school in your average suburb. But I would see her differently if I’d grown up in Africa, say; in a photograph of a carved block of wood from that continent, she is deeply black and strong and mysteriously charged with energy – daring you to try to harm the son she so protectively cradles. And as Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Patroness of the Americas, North and Central and South, she stands alone on the crescent moon and radiates cosmic glory, her robe sprinkled with stars and the serpent humbled under her feet. She is garbed like a glorious goddess, but her face is the face of a young brown woman of 16^th century rural Mexico, filled with wonder at the miracle she carries inside her.

She is all these images and none of them, this woman we call Mary. We don’t know all that much about her, really – not when or where or how she was born, how tall she was or what her voice sounded like when she sang lullabies to her baby son. She most likely had the dark hair and eyes of her people, and was brown and strong and sturdy – she had to be strong to live the hard life that she did. Not that it really matters what Mary looked like. It’s just that sometimes we get lost in the image of her as pale and remote and unnaturally serene -- utterly untouched by time and trouble and pain. Then, I think, we do her a disservice, because this woman knew more joy and sorrow than we can even imagine.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said to her. I am sure there must have been times, in the years to come, when she wanted to laugh out loud, remembering those words. What do you mean, don’t be afraid? Easy for you to say, Angel Gabriel! Don’t be afraid of the terrible mystery of the baby that’s growing inside you? Don’t be afraid of the cruel rejection and shame of being seen as an “unwed mother”? (They stoned such women to death in those days. Still do, in some cultures.) Don’t be afraid of the wounding doubt you see, at first, in the eyes of Joseph, the man you love. Don’t be afraid of traveling hundreds of miles on a donkey during the last month of your pregnancy. Don’t be afraid of childbirth late at night in a strange dark place, far away from your family and your friends. Don’t be afraid of the helpless love you will have for this child, who will one day break your heart. Don’t be afraid of the cross on Calvary.

Right. Easy for you to say, angel Gabriel.

In Yeats’ poem, “The Mother of God,” he imagines the voice of Mary, describing the Annunciation as The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare …

Wings beating about the room;

The terror of all terrors that I bore

The heavens in my womb.

And later in the poem, she asks herself:

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains

This fallen star my milk sustains

This love that makes my heart’s blood stop?

She said Yes to Gabriel, Mary did. When I try to imagine the Annunciation, I feel as if the whole world – the whole universe -- must have paused and held its breath and waited in wonder, time itself standing still in that long moment before Mary replied. But she answered the angel. And she said YES. And she kept her part of the bargain.

How strong Mary had to be to do everything that she did, especially in that rugged time and place. A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done, Marge Piercy says. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs.

A strong woman is a woman like Mary, who committed herself to the Glorious Impossible and never once backed down or turned aside. We Catholics have a special love for Mary, of course; that’s how we get into heaven, we say, by reminding Jesus that we’re relatives “on his mother’s side.” And most of us have known times when we hit rock-bottom and were lost and stunned and tired and scared and helpless, and how we turned at last to Mary, knowing somehow that she was there, and that she would understand. As she always is, and always does. It’s easy to get sentimental about Mary, but we mustn’t lose sight of the truth of this very strong woman, who even argued with her own strong son – on that wonderful day at Cana, when she practically ragged him into turning water into wine! In that extraordinary prayer, The Magnificat, we do not hear a cooing dove; we hear a woman as fierce as a tiger, whose love can, and will, cast down armies and empires and endure until the other side of death. A woman strong enough to bear the savior of the world. A woman strong enough to shelter us all in the infinite cloak of her compassion.

What does Mary look like? She looks like the face of Love, and Mercy – and of indomitable Courage. May she be with us now, and always, leading us in the path of her son Jesus. In Jesus’ name. – Diane Sylvain (adapted from a previous bulletin on Mary)

“And the lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won't get much sleep...” ~ Woody Allen.