Advent - Season of the Immaculata

The time of Advent is absolutely essential for our contemplation, too. If we have truly given our humanity to be changed into Christ, it is essential to us that we do not disturb this time of growth.

It is a time of darkness, of faith. We shall not see Christ’s radiance in our lives yet; it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless, we must believe that He is growing in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything, literally everything to this almost incredible reality.

This attitude it is which makes every moment of every day and night a prayer. In itself it is a purification, but without the tense resolution and anxiety of self-conscious aim.

How could it be possible that anyone who was conscious that Christ desired to see the world with his eyes would look willingly on anything evil? Or knowing that He wished to work with his hands, do any work that was shoddy, any work that was not as near perfection as human hands can achieve?

Who, knowing that his ears must listen for Christ, could listen to blasphemy or to the dreary dirtiness of so much of our conversation, or could fail to listen to the voice of a world like ours with compassion?

Above all, who, knowing that Christ asked for his heart to love with, for his heart to bear the burden of the love of God, could fail to discover that in every pulsation of his own life there is prayer?

This Advent awareness does not lead to a selfish preoccupation with self; it does not exclude outgoing love to others—far from it. It leads to them inevitably, but it prevents such acts and words of love from becoming distractions. It makes the very doing of them reminders of the Presence of Christ in us. It is through doing them that we can preserve the secrecy of Advent without failing to offer the loveliness of Christ in us to others.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – Happy Feast Day! The Immaculate Conception has dawned upon us, and we rejoice in the Immaculata, the one who God chose. Heaven has decided to celebrate the feast this year by making the world just a little bit whiter, as snow is pouring down from the sky in these parts at an alarming rate.

Now, we’re all clear, right (since no one else is, apparently) that the mystery we celebrate today is not the Virginal Conception and birth of Jesus from the womb of Mary. It is Mary’s own conception in the womb of Anne, which occurred by the normal processes of human conception, but in which by a unique grace of God she was preserved from the stain of original sin in light of and in anticipation of the saving merits of Jesus. Just thought I’d slip that bit of catechesis in, as this seems to be one of the most misunderstood doctrines in our Catholic faith.

Back to Houselander’s meditation, which follows up on yesterday’s, we see then that Mary’s immaculate being is not simply a special gift God gave her for herself alone, so that she could be a fit vessel to receive the Son, and so that the unsoiled and integral human nature, as it was created by God in the beginning, could be given by her to Him.

All of that is very true, but we must understand that what Mary achieved in a perfect, immaculate way, we are called to emulate and become, with much struggle and failure no doubt, but nonetheless. Mary is immaculately conceived, and lived her whole life free of the wound of original sin and without committing actual sin (two very different things, as Adam and Eve were free of original sin, too, and still were able to commit actual sin).

We are not free in this way, but the whole action of Christ and the Holy Spirit in us is towards making us so, towards making us immaculate. We are not meant to languish in sin and mediocrity, in compromise and half measures and all sorts of shabby attachments to sin.

God has created us and redeemed us to win those battles and to become pure as Mary is pure, free as Mary is free, radiantly filled with Christ as Mary was and is. And it’s not driven by some terrible Jansenistic fear and shame—God being terribly disgusted with our filthy human sin, yuck, gross—but that God is so deeply in love with us that He wants us to be as beautiful as He knows we in fact are.

And He gives us Mary to truly and deeply help us in all this. Her immaculateness does not draw her away from us or make her remote from us; it fills her with a tender motherly love for us and makes her ‘all for us’ in a way that beggars our imagination. Mary’s got our back, and our front and every other side of us.

So, happy feast day – do something happy today! It’s a great day to be human, really it is the feast of our redeemed humanity, so rejoice and be glad – God did not and is not going to leave us in our sins and brokenness. Humanity has been healed; Mary is the great sign of this, and we are following along in her wake and receiving the grace of Her Son to be healed ourselves. Alleluia.

Advent - Season of the Secret

Advent is the season of the seed: Christ loved this symbol of the seed. The seed, He said, is the Word of God sown in the human heart. “The kingdom of Heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed.” “So is the Kingdom of God as if a man should cast seed into the earth.” Even his own life-blood: “Unless the seed falling into the earth die, how shall the earth be sown?”

The Advent, the seed of the world’s life, was hidden in our Lady. Like the wheat seed in the earth, the Bread of Life was in her. Like the golden harvest in the darkness of the earth, the glory of God was shrined in her darkness.

Advent is the season of the secret, the secret of the growth of Christ, of Divine Love growing in silence. It is the season of humility, silence, and growth.

For nine months Christ grew in his Mother’s body. By His own will she formed Him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life. She had nothing to give Him but herself. He asked for nothing else. She gave Him herself.

Working, eating, sleeping, she was forming His body from hers. His flesh and blood. From her humanity she gave Him His humanity. Walking in the streets of Nazareth to do her shopping, to visit her friends, she set His feet on the path of Jerusalem. Washing, weaving, kneading, sweeping, her hands prepared his hands for the nails. Every beat of her heart gave him his heart to love with, his heart to be broken by love.

All her experience of the world about her was gathered to Christ growing in her. Looking upon the flowers she gave Him human sight. Talking with her neighbours, she gave him a human voice. The voice we still hear in the silence of souls saying, “Consider the lilies of the field.”

Sleeping in her still room she gave him the sleep of the child in the cradle, the sleep of the young man rocked in the storm tossed boat. Breaking and eating the bread, drinking the wine of the country, she gave Him His flesh and blood; she prepared the Host for the Mass.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – Today and tomorrow I will offer reflections from this magnificent book by this great Englishwoman, a contemporary mystic who wrote the above words while bombs dropped on London during the war. Her insights into the power of Christ to transform every aspect of our humanity need to be heard against that backdrop of the Blitz and its terrors and privations.

We read this book almost every year during Advent for our communal spiritual reading after lunch – it has become as much a part of our Advent traditions as the wreath and the Nicholas cookies. Since today is the ‘normal’ date for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and tomorrow is its deferred celebration on our liturgical calendar, I thought I would share some of Houselander’s thoughts here.

Her description of Our Lady’s pregnancy is, on one level, the simple objective fact of pregnancy. Any mother, anywhere, at any time, has entered this mystery, and what a mystery it is. That one human being, a woman, can fashion within her being another human being, that the shaping and nurturing of a human life, made in God’s image and likeness, made to live in immortal and eternal splendour, happens in the hiddenness and darkness of the womb of a woman—already this is holy ground, and yet it is holy ground that billions of ordinary women, and the men who love and cherish them, have traversed since the beginning of the human race.

But of course, this Baby who Mary is shaping and fashioning is not only made in God’s image, but is God, is not only destined for eternal glory, but already is the eternal glory of the Father. And so a mystery is introduced into humanity that is meant to implicate the lives of every person who receives Christ, male or female, makes all of our lives a holy mystery before which we should fall prostrate if we had eyes to see it even slightly.

Every human being who is in a state of grace (and we cannot know for certain with anyone if this is the case or not) is shaping Christ within themselves. Or, rather, the Holy Spirit is shaping Christ within this person. And it is precisely through the concrete events of the day that this shaping is occurring. The joys we delight in, the work we labor at, the love we offer, the pain and anguish we endure: all is meant to shape Christ within us, become His joy, His work, His love, His passion—in us.

The season of the secret—well, Advent and the coming of Christ to you and me is certainly a well-kept secret. A secret kept from us as much as from anyone else. It’s probably for the best – if we could see what Christ was doing with our frail, pale lives, we would probably be so paralyzed with astonishment and awe that we’d be unable to get out of bed in the morning.

But it is so – our whole Catholic faith bears united witness to this. Our Lady, being immaculate, cooperated fully and perfectly with this shaping of Christ from our humanity, and so we have what we have—the perfect Incarnation of God through the fiat of a human creature and the action of the Spirit. 

We know it’s a bit messier with us—our yes and our no mingle together in a way that makes it all much more difficult. But it is so, nonetheless. This is what every ‘yes’ we say effects; this is the whole action of God in us, to make Christ take shape in our lives so that our lives become His, and His becomes ours, and the glory and love of God can shine forth in us and the world be blessed, and our own lives made secure for eternal joy and light.

Everything Else is Froth

The whole thing was to happen secretly. There was to be no announcement. The psalmists had hymned Christ’s coming on harps of gold. The prophets had foretold it with burning tongues. But now the loudest telling of His presence on earth was to be the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a child.

It was to be a secret and God was so jealous of His secret that he even guarded it at the cost of His little bride’s seeming dishonor. He allowed Joseph to misjudge her, at least for a time. This proved that God knew Our Lady’s trust in Him was absolutely without limit. Everything that he did to her in the future emphasized the same thing. His trust in her trust in Him.

The one thing that He did ask of her was the gift of her humanity. She was to give  Him her body and soul unconditionally, and—what in this new light would have seemed absurdly trivial to anyone but the Child Bride of Wisdom—she was to give Him her daily life.

And outwardly it would not differ from the life she would have lived if she had not been chosen to be the Bride of the Spirit and the Mother of God at all! She was not even asked to live it alone with this God who was Her own Being and whose Being was to be hers.

No, He asked for her ordinary life shared with Joseph. She was not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love for an earthly man, because God was her unborn child. On the contrary, the hands and feet, the heart, the waking, sleeping, and eating that were forming Christ were to form Him in service to Joseph.

Yes, it certainly seemed that God wanted to give the world the impression that it is ordinary for Him to be born of a human creature. Well, that is a fact. God did mean it to be the ordinary thing, for it is His will that Christ shall be born in every human being’s life and not, as a rule, through extraordinary things, but through the ordinary daily life and the human love that people give one another.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – This is such a great book! I can see that my temptation will be to just keep excerpting it until the whole of it has been published on this blog (which probably wouldn’t please whoever holds the copyright to it too well). I will wrest away my fixation with it tomorrow and move on to something else.

If yesterday’s excerpt was a fine corrective of our activism and utilitarianism in favour of passivity, response, and prayerful contemplative surrender to God, today we see a great celebration of hiddenness and ordinariness as opposed to the ethos of publicity and glamour.

We are so sure, so very, very sure, we modern human beings, that we have to make a splash, have to break out the brass bands, the advertising campaign, have to fire up all the social media and launch a full-court press of publicity: press releases, gala premieres, all the fanfare and hoopla the budget will allow.

This is what you gotta do if you’re going to have an impact in the world. This kind of thinking can be just as prevalent in the Church as outside of it, and is just as common among people who are really good at the whole publicity game and those who are no so adept at it. The movers and the shakers are the ones whose names are on everyone’s lips, who have publicists and command the center of attention wherever they go.

So we think, but we are wrong. Utterly, completely, totally wrong. What makes a lasting impact in this world is not buzz and headlines, but opening the door of one’s heart to God. The person in the headlines may well have done just that: Mother Teresa and John Paul II come to mind here. But their effectiveness did not come from their worldly success, such as it was. It came from their fidelity to Mary’s hidden fiat.

 

Politicians come and go; celebrities and activists and pundits of all description come and go. They are famous in their day and forgotten in the next. It is this hidden mysterious reality that Houselander describes so beautifully that makes our lives real, meaningful, powerful. The daily choice to love God and to love the people in our lives, the daily choice to give our humanity, body and soul, to God, to receive His life and bring forth His life in the life of the world. This is what counts, the meat, the core of life. Everything else is just froth.

Being Comes First

Christ’s insistence on the power of children is very striking. Almost more than anything else in the Gospel it proves that in God’s eyes being something comes before doing something.

He sets a little child among his apostles as an example of what he loves. He says that heaven is full of children. Indeed, 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.

How consistent it is with the incredible tenderness of God that His Christ, the Immortal Child, should be conceived by the power of the Spirit in the body of a child. That a child should bear a Child, to redeem the world. Our Lady was at the most fourteen when the angel came to her; perhaps she was younger.

The whole world trembled on the word of a child, on a child’s consent. To what was she asked to consent? First of all, to the descent of the Holy Spirit, to surrender her littleness to the Infinite Love, and as a result to become the Mother of Christ.

It was so tremendous, yet so passive. She was not asked to do anything herself, but to let something be done to her. She was not asked to renounce anything, but to receive an incredible gift. She was not asked to lead a special kind of life, to retire to the temple and live as a nun, to cultivate suitable virtues or claim special privileges.

She was simply to remain in the world, to go forward with her marriage to Joseph, to live the life of an artisan’s wife, just what she had planned to do when she had no idea that anything out of the ordinary would ever happen to her.

It almost seemed as if God’s becoming man and being born of a woman were ordinary.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – I’m spending a few days on the blog honouring yesterday’s solemnity of the Annunciation with these powerful meditations by Caryll Houselander. I mainly do this because I find I cannot do fitting honor to Our Lady in one blog post on her actual feast day—there’s too much to say about her, really. Also, I want to spotlight this author and this book, written in England in the midst of World War II, which is one of the truly great Marian texts of our day, and which deserves a place on every book shelf.

For those reading this who know Catherine Doherty and Madonna House well, we can see here how influential Houselander was on her. ‘Being is more important than doing,’ for example. Also, ‘the door to heaven is so low you must go down on your knees.’

It is this whole business of Our Lady’s passivity that I would like to highlight, though. Mostly because in North America at least, we really, really hate this. OK, maybe hate is a strong word. But we are culturally ill disposed towards passivity of any kind.

No way! We are activists. Tell us what to do! Give us some practical pointers! Give us a program! We’ve got to get up off our duffs and do something if we are going to heal the culture, restore the world to Christ, rebuild a Christian society, renew the Church, etc., etc.

This is so built into our very cultural and spiritual DNA in North America (the Protestant work ethic!), and there is enough of a grain of truth in it, that it is very hard to show what is off about it all. After all, we do in fact have to do something. Our Lady did, too: she had to do the duty of the moment like everyone else.

But receiving comes first. Listening comes first. Passivity comes first. Being comes first. If it doesn’t, then all our dashing about and doing, doing, doing does nothing of any permanent value. And indeed, our modern world is very busy, very active, very rushing about. We live our lives timed down to the second, on the clock every waking minute, our hours and days packed full of action and stimuli. And what good is any of it?

We are not listening. We are not receiving from God, and so our lives do not bear great fruit. Prayer, silence, daily coming into God’s presence to receive his word and his life—all of this is so deeply neglected in North America, even among good Christian people. And so we get embroiled in the controversy of the day, swept up in the shallow currents of pop culture and political life, frenetic in our ceaseless, and so often pointless, activity. Our Lady stands as the great sign against all this. She is the great contemplative, the great receiver, the great listener, the pray-er, the one whose whole being and hence whose whole activity comes from God and so is directed towards God and his perfect will.

If we fail to emulate her, our lives will be very busy, very stressful, very action-packed, and wholly fruitless. It is God who makes our lives fruitful, not our own action, and that is the great lesson we need to learn in North America in the year 2013.

Always a Love Story

The Church keeps the feast of the Annunciation on the 25^th of March. There is still a touch of austerity upon the earth, there is still a silver emptiness in the skies, but expectation of spring is already stirring in the human heart, the bud is beginning to break on the tree, the promise of blossom has quickened the spirit of man.

This is the season when we celebrate the wedding of the Holy Spirit with humanity, the wedding of Spirit of Wisdom and Love with the dust of the earth . I think the most moving fact in the whole history of mankind is that wherever the Holy Spirit has desired to renew the face of the earth he has chosen to do so through communion with some humble little human creature.

In the  instances we know of, it has not been to great or powerful people that the Spirit has come but to the little or the frightened, and we have seen them made new, and known that the subsequent flowering of their lives was nothing else but Christ given to them by that sweet impact.

It is always a love story, a culmination of love between the Spirit of Light and the Bride of the Spirit. This is something which can happen to everyone now, but it could not have happened to anyone but for the fiat of the peasant girl in Nazareth whom the whole world calls Our Lady.

It is in Our Lady that God fell in love with Humanity… in the virginal emptiness of the girl, Mary of Nazareth, Christ was conceived; it was the wedding of God to a human child, and the wonder of it filled the earth for all time.

Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

Reflection – Happy feast day to you all! It is moved this year from March 25 to April 8, the first day after the Octave of Easter, but Solemnity of the Annunciation it is, nonetheless. A joyous day to you all. We have just finished celebrating Christ saving us in the Paschal Mystery of his death and resurrection. This saving work could not have been accomplished as we know it has unless this little girl had consented to bear Him in her womb, to give her flesh to become His Body.

This chapter from Houselander’s masterwork—a book to be owned, read, cherished if you have not already done so—is such a profound exploration of this mystery that I think I may excerpt bits and pieces of it for the next few days on the blog. It is incredibly relevant in this Easter season that we contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation and how God chose to do it.

The reason it is relevant in Easter in particular is that this is the very way in which all the power and glory and might and workings of Christ’s death and resurrection become operative in our lives. Mary said fiat—let it be done to me according to your will. The Word was made flesh, was born, lived, suffered, died, and rose again. But now this same angel, this same God stands before you and me and says ‘will you?’ And it is our fiat that opens our own hearts and lives to this same Word and this same God, who now (because of Mary) has a human face and a human heart and a human name, Jesus of Nazareth.

And has human wounds and bears the mark of human suffering. God did all this for us, but He did it through and with the co-operation of a human creature named Mary. And His ongoing work, His work here and now in the world to extend the kingdom of love and joy, of beauty and truth, rests on the co-operation of a human creature named (insert your name here).

Christ is risen from the dead, and now he walks the earth looking for souls who will give their living bodies to Him to imbue with his Spirit, so that His love can flow freely in all the rivers and streams of the human world, can be that seed planted deep in the human field, can bear fruit as rich ripe grain to feed the human table.

So the mystery of Mary and the Incarnation is deeply related, vitally related to the mystery of Easter and the saving work of God in Christ’s death and resurrection. You and I need to say ‘yes’ to God, and this yes to God makes the love of the Cross and the joy of the empty tomb visible in the world, so that the world can come to believe, so that other people too can come to say yes to God and so make him visible in their turn. Isn’t God wonderful to involve us so intimately in his saving work?

Say yes to Him, today, alleluia.