In terms of social unrest today or 2000 years ago what happens to a young Palestinian woman unmarried who turns up pregnant? How can she safely carry the child to term? And then what happens to them?
In Bethlehem a few years ago I listened to a French speaking nun from Lydda tell a group of us North American pilgrims what happens there at the orphanage where she serves. They take in orphans, and raise them through their first school years.
An 18-year-old man came to their door one day with a gift. It was a thank you gift: his first paycheck. Years before he was born and cared for and raised to school-age there at la Crèche de Bethléem. Kids grow up there, up to first grade, then go to foster programs and schools until they are full grown.
Where did these kids come from? Some are children found abandoned, or placed temporarily by social services due to serious social unrest or problems within their families. And others? Their mothers were young unmarried women from villages in Palestine who became pregnant.
A scandal, possibly fatal, would erupt if their pregnancy was discovered or they had a child in their hometown. So on the quiet they are brought to Bethlehem where the child is born and the mother is cared for. Then the mother returns to her village. Crisis averted: the child lives, the mother lives, violence is not done to either one.
How different it was for Mary who knew her husband but not yet intimately. Customarily he would have severed the relationship if she were pregnant by another man, wouldn’t he? But he protects her and raises the child with her and so the holy family begins its journey.
Pregnancy is risky, always risky when the child is unwanted, and if the child is wanted by a jealous king its peril is increased. Mary took on the risk, as did Joseph, and what we see in Mary is more than courage: it is humility and obedience. She sees herself as of lowly estate, as a simple daughter of a village family.
She is not the daughter of the king, not a daughter of Herod and certainly not the child of Caesar Augustus who was called “son of God, King of Kings.” (Read or watch “I Claudius'' and you’ll see just how wildly different two young women can be.)
Mary is a woman of honor and great strength. To say, “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” is to take on a great burden and a great responsibility.
Mary Holmes, art history teacher at Cowell College, said that the virtue our society needs now is obedience – and I think she meant it in the Marian sense of docility: accepting the reign of God and the power of the spirit is not passivity.
“Docility is to have reverence and acceptance of God’s plan for our lives in order to experience fulfillment, true happiness and closeness to God.”
(https://ct.dio.org/item/4903-docility-to-the-holy-spirit.html)
Mary is already empowered by her creator’s love and her sacrificial response. She will now know no ordinary life nor will her son. All that is changed now and forever. She is a woman clothed with the sun: made shining and glorious by her simplicity and her humility, her obedience and her courageous response: “Here I am, Lord.”
And so that was an ordinary extraordinary young woman, two thousand years ago. Obedience, docility, not passivity, but openness to the leading of God and the power of the Spirit at work.
How are we nowadays to accept the gift and the call of God? What extraordinary ordinary thing awaits us this coming Christmas season?
Mary responded to the news from God’s messenger with more than simple acquiescence. She went on to sing: My soul proclaims the greatness of God.
And God comes to humankind to liberate them from what en-toils them.
500 years ago it was the oppression that came with occupation and an imposed cultural hegemony. On top of the good news they carried as if it were pollen on their clothes, the people of Spain arrived in the new world with a desire for gold and conquest.
This included spiritual conquest as if the local people had nothing to add or to offer but simple passive submission to the foreign message. But one day not long after the conquest came a second change, a revolution in spirituality.
Juan Diego encountered a vision of the Mother of God atop a hill that had been sacred for centuries. On it he saw not a nature goddess but the Queen of Heaven.
He told the bishop. The bishop did not believe him. In that cold gray time of year roses should not bloom, but bloom they did, that day. Open your tilma and gather them in, she instructed.
He took the cloak to the bishop and opened it. Flowers fell on the ground. What remained was an image of a dark-skinned Mary, an indigenous Mary, resplendent, on its inner surface.
That became the sign that showed the way. God was not to stop at human borders or inhabit human prejudices. The way was open and all were welcome.
The point was not, she is ours. She is one of us. The point was, we are hers. We are hers. And she and we belong to God. Wherever we travel, God is with us. Emmanuel.
How will we now, 2000 years after Mary, and 500 after the vision of Guadalupe, receive the Christ child and the message of angels? What are we doing, called to do?
Venture forth into the night bearing a small burden to a foreign land? It’s being done, now, across our own desert. Are we to welcome the stranger into the inn, and make room where none was found? It’s being done, here in our own town.
Are we to follow the words of an extraordinary messenger to an unknown land, as so many patriarchs and matriarchs did, in Old Testament days?
And perhaps it is the simple things, the daily things, that we do, to follow God’s pathway in our hearts, as best we may. To show kindness to strangers, sympathy to the distressed, tolerance to the uneasy, support to the weary, joy to the glad, and all this, to the end that God’s purpose on earth be known.
Perhaps it is just to stand still, upon a hill, and hear and join the angelic choir as they sing, “Glory to God!”
But there is work to be done. Mary did not stop with “Here am I.” She went on, as she visited her relative Elizabeth, to sing with joy of justice and redemption, of faith and hope and the lasting challenge, the commission even, of every child of God.
He has redeemed us. He has come to his people. And he has given us a job to do.
To join in the redemption of the world by our actions of justice, mercy, and compassion. The small things, yes, the big things too: the work of the people is to join in the salvation of the world.
No, we are not deities. We are not divine. Neither is she. But we follow the one who is.
“Now, master, let your servant go in peace according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation. You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples. It’s a light for revelation to the nations and a glory for your people Israel.”
Luke 2:29-32 (CEB)
| JESUS MAFA. The Annunciation - Gabriel and Mary, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48278 [retrieved December 8, 2021]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact). |
Oh, by the way, that 18 year old was sent out with a fond farewell by his foster parents but he was back at the door in moments. “Mom, could you give me money for the bus?” He had given them his whole paycheck and it was all he had.
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