Behold the Handmaid of the Lord

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."

I like to imagine it might have been early in the morning and dark when our Lady crept outside, following a silent prompting in her heart to come out and pray as she stared up at the beauty of the stars fading with the first light of dawn.  Then, in that darkness just before the dawn, the light of the angel Gabriel burst upon her like the rising of the sun.

"Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women."

Called by name, she could not doubt that it was to her the angel spoke.  The message was for her and none other.

Who would not tremble at such a grace-filled message?  The words must have spoken to the depths of her heart and to her vocation, touching her soul in a way that only the truth of the Lord spoken to our hearts can do.

"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God."

First, the injunction not to fear, a call to trust, to commit all doubts and uncertainty into God's providential love.

Then words of such power:

"Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a Son; and thou shalt call His name Jesus.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the most High; and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of David His father; and He shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever.  And of His kingdom there shall be no end."

For where God works there is ever clarity and strength, slicing through our own expectations with the sword of truth.  And He ever calls us to transform our perspective.

"How shall this be done, because I know not man?"

Tradition holds that Mary had taken a vow of perpetual virginity and that Joseph had done so as well.  Her question makes most sense in light of this view, which certainly precludes any possibility or expectation for a child in the picture.  I wonder whether she questioned in that moment her certainty regarding her vow of virginity.  Did she ask in her heart if God wished her to tread a different path?

"The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.  And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren: Because no word shall be impossible with God."

Although Mary must have known then that God confirmed her in her vow of virginity, nevertheless the message must have transformed how she saw the entire rest of her life.  She could have questioned further, she could have resisted, she could have clung to what she wanted.

Yet she said only: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word." 

She could scarcely have uttered a more beautiful surrender of her expectations for her life.  All that she must have seen as necessary she laid down, accepting instead the power of God at work.

My prayer today is that we will have the courage to do the same, to surrender anything that we think is necessary for ourselves or others, to lay our expectations at the foot of the angel Gabriel, and speak with Mary: Behold the Lord's servant always, ready to fulfill all that He desires.

I wonder too about those moments after Gabriel departed.  Did the world seem dark and dreary?  Did her heart ache within her even with the joy of receiving God's message?  Perhaps the devil too crept in to tempt her not to trust in the Lord's plan and in His messenger, for if he could undermine her trust, he would have a foothold to drag her away from her obedience.

Yet Mary arose with haste, never heeding such tactics, and went to bring Christ to her cousin, to share with her the glory of God's word.

For her it was necessary only to attend to the duty of the moment and not to worry about the future.  She went to be present where she could draw closer in her service to the Lord and did not fret about what must come or what to do about it or how.

Here I am, Lord; I come to do Your will.

Give Me This Water

An image came to me today as I was praying, arising subconsciously perhaps from the Gospel of the Samaritan woman asking Jesus to give her the living water of which He spoke.  It seemed a fitting image to share with you.

The image was of a small child holding out a thimble, asking God to pour all the waters of the sea into it.  It seemed as if the child was oblivious to the fact that such a feat was impossible.  It did not seem to matter to the child how tiny was the thimble to try to hold so great a quantity of water.

Perhaps you have seen the analogy already: the thimble as our souls and the waters of the sea as God's ocean of grace and mercy.

Let us take it a step further then.  How do you hold out your thimble?

Few of us dare hold it out as boldly as that little child.  More often we hold it out tentatively, saying to God: "I know my little tiny thimble can't possibly hold all the waters of the ocean and I don't deserve too much grace anyway and I don't want to ask You for too much or what isn't Your will, so just fill my thimble halfway, or just a little bit, or maybe even just a drop.  That's all I really need.  I'll be content with that."

It doesn't make nearly so lovely an image, does it?

I wonder what might happen if we came to God more like the former image—coming to Him like little children—and asking Him to pour into it all the waters of the sea.  Would He pour until it was overflowing and the waters burst up like a little fountain and ran down the sides of the thimble and over our hands and arms and onto the stones below?  Would we then watch as the trickles ran through the cracks of the stones, running on and on we know not where as we laughed with delight?

Or would we complain that the water was cold when it fell on our arms?  Would we feel guilty that we had spilled it?  Would we cry watching the water run away because our thimble could not hold enough?

Yet what if instead we looked up and saw Christ looking back at us, smiling, His eyes so full of tender love?  Then I think we would have the courage to hold up our thimble and ask Him to pour into it the entire sea.

Wait Here and Watch

Think of Saint Joseph at work with Jesus beside him no more than a boy.  It is easy to imagine him saying to Jesus, "Wait here and watch," as he showed Him how to work some tool or carve a bit of wood.

Today's great solemnity honoring Saint Joseph rises amidst the bustle of daily life and the desert of the Lenten fast like a great shining jewel, reminding us also to take a moment to watch and wait.  Perhaps in that moment's silence we may learn some great secret of the inner life.  Perhaps Saint Joseph will teach us how better to serve our Lord.

As we continue on through Lent, we can think of another time when those same words were used: Wait and watch.

In the garden of Gethsemane, Christ spoke in those words to His disciples.  "Wait here and watch with me," He said to them, and not "Pray with me."  He only asked them to watch and wait, the simplest of actions, even if sometimes the most difficult.

Why?

Did He know it would be too much for them to attempt to pray?  Did He know that they scarcely understood yet how to pray?  Or did He merely want them to watch how He prayed in the face of temptation and His coming death that they might learn how to act in the face of trials too?

A disciple is one who sits at the Master's feet and learns from Him, as Saint Joseph must have done in his silent way.  We too can sit and watch there, listening to His voice, soft and full of love for us.  Watch and wait.

Be Thou My Vision

Also, in honor of Saint Patrick upon this day and the Creator of all:

Break our Pagan Hearts

Perhaps on this feast day of Saint Patrick who converted the pagans in Ireland it is fitting to talk about the paganism in our own hearts.  We tend to think of paganism as a thing of the past, but often we incorporate it subtly into our spiritual lives without realizing it.

To speak in general terms, the pagans saw the gods as beings to appease.  They spoke of submitting to the will of the gods when circumstances turned against them.  They gave the gods what was demanded of them and begged for only what they absolutely needed, making sacrifices to obtain it.  They tried not to make the gods angry at them.  They had their favorite gods and their favorite rituals.  Yet even when they kept statues of household gods and burned incense to them, they never really wanted the gods to be part of their daily lives.

Don't we often act the same way with God?  We try to appease Him.  We speak of accepting His will when things don't go our way.  We try to fulfill His demands and not to ask Him for too much and try to bribe Him to say yes.  We try not to make Him angry at us.  We have our favorite prayers and devotions.  Yet we don't really want Him to be part of our daily lives and ask us to change our lives and convert our hearts.

We don't speak to God heart to heart as to our dearest friend.  We scarcely even know how to talk to Him at all.

One of the great examples of prayer is Abraham.  Think of him beseeching the Lord not to destroy Sodom.  He started by asking Him to spare the city from destruction if there were only fifty righteous men.  When the Lord agreed, Abraham talked Him down to forty-five and then forty and then thirty and then twenty.  Finally, he asked for the city to be spared even if there were only ten righteous men within its walls.

Yet in the end his prayer was in vain.  There were not even ten righteous men and Sodom was destroyed.

So what do we learn?

God's will was done as it would have been if Abraham had said nothing.  So do we just say: "Stupid Abraham, you should have just accepted God's will in the beginning because He always knows what He is doing?"

No.  Of course not.

We respect Abraham's dialogue with God if for no other reason than that God Himself respected it.  He could have told Abraham it was futile to bargain for He knew already that there were not enough righteous men to warrant saving the city.  Yet instead He allowed Abraham to continue asking.  By doing so, He confirmed Abraham in his prayer—a prayer that came from a heart moved with love for others and a heart that loved his Lord and would accept His will however it came.

Do we have that same courage?  Don't we rather shy away from asking God too intensely for what we want lest it not be His will?

Let us not be afraid to enter into that dialogue with Him, to ask Him for whatever we need, trusting that He will provide according to His far-seeing wisdom.  For if we avoid that conversation with our Beloved Lord, on whom do we rely?  Merely upon our own strength?  And is not that precisely what the pagans did?

As we journey through the desert of Lent, let us dare ask Him to break our pagan hearts and to give us hearts soft and docile to His voice and leading.

Another One Bites the Dust

Perhaps mainly because I have rather a morbid sense of humor, I found it amusing when I heard that performing CPR on someone ideally should be done at about 100 beats per minute and that in order to count those beats it helps to use a song that keeps that tempo, such as "Another One Bites the Dust."

Who would ever think of using such a song to save a dying person?

I mean do you want those in danger of death to think they might be about to bite the dust?

And yet it can achieve precisely the opposite result: instead of biting the dust and dying, the person can live to face another day.

In the spiritual life, it is much the same.

Die to self.

We are told again and again that we are to die to ourselves.  Yet we hear it as if we were that person lying on the ground receiving CPR and hearing a song about biting the dust.  It makes us think that we are going to die.

Is that true?  Or is that a lie sown by the enemy?

Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me.

Those are the words of Christ.  And why would our loving Savior demand anything of us unless it was for our good?

I recently had another project of mine bite the dust.  It followed on a succession of other various happenings that I could describe as things biting the dust—my hopes and expectations mainly.  When this most recent project bit the dust, its death at first seemed to mean the death of much more.

However, I was not left in that place of despair.  Instead, I began to be led along a path that meant a new way of thinking that follows in the same vein as Christ's call to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Him.

This perspective also places the words of the aforementioned song in an entirely new light.

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust.
Another one bites the dust.

Each time these words ring in the happenings around us, we too can receive spiritual CPR.  Each time something we hold too dear bites the dust, the Holy Spirit can compress grace into our spiritual lungs, restoring us to new life.

The Tenth of February

The Web of Life

For Grandma

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat ei.
Requiescat in pace.
Amen.

How swiftly death strikes silent

The certitude of tomorrow

For her, for you, for us all

Who strive with grasping hands to hold

What life gives freely, to store

Treasured gains that never last.

Swiftly death uproots the heart

From soil of expectation, melts

Blinding judgment's bonds.  The seeds

We sow we may never reap; flawed

Words may seem to do more ill

Than good. Yet Love shines through the mask.

Swiftly death shadows our days,

Divorcing heart from hope that claims

Neat-tied perfect denouement.

The unfinished must go beyond

The grave, her untied strands weave

Into the web that you and I still spin.