Healing and new life

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) offers us once more the scene of the annunciation which we reflected on a week last Monday. Really, COLW is spoiled on the approach to Christmas as the liturgy revels in the central mystery which happens to define our charism. But, in truth the mystery of the annunciation never runs out, just as Mary’s yes to the Lord is never exhausted. Its inner depths go deeper than we can possibly fathom. But why this repetition of the same gospel again and again? Mary, now assumed and living in the eternal now of God, lived once in this world in its constant chain of passing moments when no doubt she said yes to Him in every instant, just as we ask her to help us to do. The recitation of this gospel again and again, therefore, is like an echo to Mary’s song, a theme and its variations, which are the same and yet different.

But for herself it is also possible that Mary said yes in every moment of her life without any need for variation whatsoever. While lesser and more complicated souls, like us, may find repetition harassing, children like Mary – for Mary is the little child of God Jesus asks us to be, more completely than any other human can be – children like Mary, I say, find repetition exhilarating. The case is much as G. K. Chesterton described it in his essay Orthodoxy:

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.  A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.  But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

So, what if Mary says yes to the Lord in every moment of her life, not because she needs to cling on grimly for dear life like us, but because she cannot stop her joy from pouring out of her, a yes, a thank you, again, and again for the sheer happiness of the thing!

There is one variation, one difference, in this gospel scene which we can point to which is both wonderful and illustrative, and it is found in the difference between Mary’s lot and that of Elizabeth. Mary on the one hand is full of grace already, and the Holy Spirit will overshadow her to make her Mother of the Son of God; indeed Mother of God, for a mother gives birth to a person, not a nature, and the person she will bring forth and feed, clean, cuddle and educate, is – marvel of marvels - the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. In contrast, we know little of Elizabeth other than that her conception of John overturned the living shame of being infertile in an age when fertility was not understood. Yet in the contrast between the work of God in Mary’s life and in Elizabeth’s, we see a glimpse of the wonderful work of grace in its dynamic diversity.

First, grace heals and restores. It heals Elizabeth’s soul no doubt at the same time as her body, just as Jesus’ later physical cures came with an invitation to spiritual transformation; the angel ascribes her conception of John to God’s power for nothing is impossible with God, although this blessing is nothing like that of Mary’s. John was no doubt conceived naturally but the process was aided by divine intervention. At the same time, Elizabeth’s spiritual transformation is like our own, coming also from His merciful intervention now to heal our souls with a grace which makes us, like Elizabeth, able to recognise and welcome the Mother of our Saviour. We live constantly in the shame of our spiritual infertility; we long to bear the fruit of grace in our lives but find ourselves too often sterile, our souls neglected and choked with weeds from other fields, or else overworked and exploited by our own cleverly-disguised self-interest, like land exhausted and made sour by industrial farming; no matter the causes, they render us barren until we surrender to the health-restoring downpour of God’s grace. This is why we say then:

O Mary, teach us always to say yes to the Lord every moment of our life.

O Mary, teach us always to give thanks to the Lord every moment of our life.

These are the paths to our restoration.

But grace also elevates us too, as it did with Mary the health of whose soul was never in doubt since she was born immaculate and remained so. Grace restores nature, as we noted with Elizabeth, but it also elevates it as we see most tangibly in Mary in the scene of the annunciation, promising to draw us into the intimacy of life in the Blessed Trinity in whose embrace we are made a child, a sibling, and a spouse of our Creator. The Holy Spirit comes upon us and the power of the Most High overshadows us, now in the interests of bringing forth into the world siblings of the Word who was made flesh in Mary, new incarnations made alive in the likeness of Jesus.

If yes and thank you mark our gradual restoration to health, joy and love are the qualities of a life recreated and raised up into the bosom of God. On this journey, we follow a Saviour whose path leads us from the valley of our death to the mountain of His welcoming embrace, the eternal dwelling of the house of Jacob and its unending festivities over the prodigal children who are home at last with their Father. And this is why we cannot help ourselves saying also:

O Mary, teach us always to rejoice in the Lord every moment of our life.

O Mary, teach us always to love the Lord every moment of our life.

Amen.