Research has shown that
learning begins in utero. There the infant is picking up cues about the world
he will enter. Will it be a place of scarcity or abundance, conflict or peace?
And though the voice he hears is muffled and low, an infant soon begins to recognize
his mother’s voice and her heartbeat. Soon after birth, the baby will prefer
her voice to all others. The mother’s voice, her beating heart, her face become
the child’s first world, his emotional sustenance. She is the one who can
assure him that he is treasured and loved. This among so much else is what Mary
gave the infant Word of God - the
assurance and security he required to begin his life with us. God depended on
Mary to become a person.
Through Mary, the sublime
beauty God reaches down to us to “become a person available to our
senses,”* at last bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And in her
quiet, brave surrender, she has given us the little Child “who is the
beauty of all things beautiful.”* She and her kinsfolk had prayed for
centuries that God would, at last, rend the heavens and come down, flash his
lightnings and route the foe with his mighty arm. But God would intervene in a
far more astonishing way, with a baby’s chubby little arm, a baby’s tears and
gurgling. Why would God have done such a thing? How could he, or put more cynically – why would he bother?
Such is the exquisite
absurdity of the Incarnation, its scandal, its incomprehensibility; and most of
all the wonder of the divine eros, for God has lost himself in love
for his own creation and given Himself away to us. The only-begotten Word
of God, through whom all things in heaven and earth were made, has emptied
himself and taken our flesh from Mary. Becoming a human, he remains what he
always was, God in nature and truth. And these two natures of the one Christ
must never be confused or separated. That is why naming Mary Mother of God was
so crucial for the bishops who gathered at Ephesus in 431. Mary had
to be recognized and revered as truly Theotokos "The Carrier of God," Bearer of Him who is truly
human, truly divine.
Mary has agreed to be
available to God’s desire with an attentive curiosity: “How will this be
for I am a virgin?” she says to Gabriel. Indeed, there were always
questions. Would Joseph set her aside when he learned the truth? Why a
census now, at the worst time possible during the last days of her pregnancy?
And why, if God has so favored her, a poor, undistinguished virgin from a
backwater, why would he allow this fulfillment of his plan to take place in a
cattle stall, where she must place the Son of the Most High to sleep in an
animal’s feeding trough? Why after all their careful preparations, a stable,
the hay, the barnyard smell, and scruffy shepherds with tales of angels singing
instead of family and friends to help her through her first delivery? The
questions will continue until Calvary.
Mary notices, she notices
the incongruities and lets them be, and she wonders at the incomprehensibility
of God’s ways. Why becomes why not. In
today’s Gospel shepherds rush to the manger, they are amazed to discover the
Baby just as the angels reported. They depart, excited to spread the news. But
the mood shifts and Luke tells us that Mary simply, quietly “treasures all
these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” These inexplicable
treasures reflected on and pondered. The word in Greek is sumballousa; it
means literally to throw things together. And I suppose it’s what we spend our
lives doing as persons of faith, with Mary we ponder and notice God’s ways and
try to put it all together, catch a glimpse of transcendent beauty hidden
within the sometime absurdity and confusion.
Perhaps like Mary, very
often we believe, but we don’t really understand. We don’t have to. We only
need to wonder that with God, mess is opportunity. This is our
work as monks - to notice and surrender. And this is where conversion and
contemplation begin, and how they are sustained. Mary is our dear
exemplar. Following her lead, we discover that the emptiness, ambiguity,
and incongruities in our lives may be pregnant with presence and possibility
even divinity. The Mother of God shows us how to throw it all together,
trusting in the God, who never deceives, abandons, or demands but has
come down to be on our side, to be with us and protect us, to redeem us, and
teach us compassion.
Like Mary, we have been
drawn and fascinated by the love and beauty God first offered, touching our
hearts so deeply that we were willing to give everything else away. It is
after all how we got here in the first place. Only such love is worth our
lives; only such love and beauty could have claimed Mary’s heart or our own
heart. We have not come here to figure out things about God but to love
and more importantly let ourselves be loved by him and to experience his beauty, the
God who is love. Love is never ugly, and God’s love is always creating beauty
in place of irregularity and unevenness.* Hopefully we learn a blessed
counter-intuitiveness. And we sense that the incongruities ultimately belong to
the phenomenon of beauty because through fragmentation the beautiful will
reveal the promise it contains.* It is the crucified and risen Jesus
forever full of holes and wounds who reveals the beauty of God.
As the quiet coda to this
morning’s Gospel, we hear that this little Boy has been given the name, Jesus,
the name an angel gave to Joseph months before, a very ordinary name in its
day, like Billy, Dick, or Tom. It is the name Mary spoke when she called him to
supper, the name Joseph used as he showed him how to plane a rough board, the
name his friends yelled at play, “Jesus, it’s your turn. You’re up.” Perhaps
too ordinary in its day, it is for us the name above every other name, a name
of great beauty and peace and sweet refuge. And we know that it is a name for
Bread, the Bread of life and peace and joy given to us first of all by Mary.
Photographs of the Abbey creche by Brother Thomas. Numerous insights from Gerald O’Collins, Saint Augustine, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
