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Christmas time liturgies continue to pile up one on top of the other. Today we celebrate Mary’s role in the life of Jesus, and of us. A story has it that Father Godfrey Diekmann was having a theological conversation over dinner one day when he became exasperated at the way things were going. He suddenly shouted out “It’s not the Resurrection, dammit! It’s the Incarnation!” He went on to say, “But we don’t believe it. We don’t believe we are invited to become the very life of God.”
Today’s Letter to the Galatians sounds quite a bit like this outcry from The Great Godfrey. We are children, we are heirs, we are adopted into God’s life. We, a tiny pinpoint on a tiny pinpoint of a planet in a tiny pinpoint of a galaxy which is a tiny pinpoint in the universe have been given a share in the personal life of the Creator. Everything else follows from this reality.
Today Mary shows us how to live with that truth. She tells us to ponder it in our hearts. Note: our hearts. This is not a head thing to be figured out. That’s impossible. Instead, we are to mull over what we have learned and what experience has taught us until we come to know how God-Become-Human was the moment of salvation. God’s entry into time and history as one like her—like us—revealed the human destiny of Mary and of all of us. Our future is life with God; our existence is friendship with God. What Jesus had in essence, we have as gift. A loving God invites us to companionship; no, even more, to sharing in his Divinity as he shares in our humanity. God did this through Jesus, and not just for Mary but for all of us. Vatican II drew the focus from Jesus dying for our sins to Jesus offering us himself. From that time on an older emphasis changed. Christmas deepened in meaning to show forth the amazing truth that God is with us out of love. We are called in this liturgy to chew on this until it sinks within the very bones and marrow of our beings. There’s really no other way to cope with being Christian.
Mary’s role celebrated in this mystery present to us today is not, Thomas Merton tells us “a sweet regression to breast-feeding and infancy.” He goes on to say that this is “a serious and sometimes difficult feast. Difficult especially if, for psychological reasons, we fail to grasp the indestructible kernel of hope that is in it. If we are just looking for a little consolation, we may be disappointed.” He echoes the example Mary’s pondering gives us and adds that we are to be grateful for what it is we are contemplating. He says, “Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God.” And so Christmas continues and calls forth our response yet another time today.
This is, of course, also the beginning of a calendar new year. Turning again to Mary we see her humbly accepting her role in God’s plan. Perhaps our New Year’s resolution, if we are inclined to make New Year’s resolutions, might be just that. Perhaps we might just bow before and accept what reality shows to us as our destiny today and throughout 2010. The poet Czeslaw Milosz says that we’re all secretaries. We write in time what we are meant to write. And I quote: “Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth/Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle/Or ending with a comma. And how it looks when completed/Is not up to us to inquire; we won’t read it anyway.” I might add, Well, we won’t read it here and now. Mary surely didn’t read her entry while it was being lived here on earth. But perhaps in eternity. Until then, she is, in my mind, the head of this secretarial pool made up of all of us. And we can learn a lot from her supervision and her expertise.
Happy Feast of Mary. Happy New Year 2010.