~ Solemnity of the Mother of God ~ Happy New Year!



Artist Unknown

The story is told that little Alice was captivated with the stories of Jesus – especially the nativity and the eventual death of Jesus on the cross.  And she was overjoyed when she was chosen to be an angel in the school nativity play.  She learned her lines to perfection. 

However, little Alice was known to add her own logic to every situation.
So the nativity play was well under way and when it was Alice’s turn to say her lines to Mary, she said: “Don’t worry, Mary, you will have a lovely baby and you will call him Jesus.” Then she added, “But I wouldn’t’ get too attached to him, ‘cus he’ll be gone by Easter.”

Isn’t it amazing how certain voices keep us grounded in truth and cause us to ponder, reflect, review, or even reframe our lived realities?  Certainly this feast of the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, calls us, like Mary, to ponder all the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of our own lives. And yet, not to get too attached to them because they are only stepping stones that gently move us forward with courage, hope, imagination, new insight and wisdom  into this new year.

In our Gospel we see that Mary and Joseph as transients, equivalent to the homeless of our city streets. In this setting, "Mary, is a young woman in a patriarchal society. She wrapped her child in swaddling clothes, the traditional Palestinian way of securing a newborn, and laid him in a manger.  Mary was very much like the majority of women in the world today; she was a peasant from a village of about 1600 people.  She was poor, exploited by the rich; she had to pay taxes to Caesar, to Herod, and to the temple."  She was persecuted. She was like many people in our world today, especially women in Asia, Africa, in Latin America and all those tiny villages where women work 10 or more hours a day on domestic chores – fetching water, gathering wood for fires, and preparing meals.

The first to hear the message were shepherds who were busy with their flocks.  They were regarded as unclean and of low economic and social rank. They hurried to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph and the child.  The Gospels tell us there was something very significant about Mary.  It’s what Luke tells us in today’s Gospel - “And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.”

What Luke is telling us is that Mary was someone who throughout her entire life pondered, reflected and listened deeply to God in her life trying to discover how God was present to her in the events that were happening.  And in her pondering, she let go of control, trusted so deeply, and was open to all possibilities.  She allowed God’s love to define and direct her life rather than let her fears fling her into illusions, darkness or lostness!

In the biblical sense, “to ponder is patiently holding inside of one’s soul that which one desires to understand, along with all the tension that it brings.  It means to puzzle out the meaning of the events of our lives; to toss things together until they make sense.”  Mary, experiencing things she did not fully understand, turned them over in her mind and heart.  She pondered in order to fathom the meaning of her experiences and kept on her Gospel path walking by faith having enough light for only the next step. 
Often Mary carried a great tension within her in which she was helpless to resolve the realities of her life and had to simply embrace them as mystery, accept them and believe, and then go on with her life living with these tensions.

It is written that “Tension is necessary – inevitable between what is NOW and what will be tomorrow.  To be human is to live in tension constantly exercising, flexing and releasing spiritual and pastoral muscle.  Tension is good and Godly, vital and virtuous.  Good tension is a response to Divine Disturbance and leads to a deeper commitment to God’s mission.”

Today is also World Day of Peace – a day to ponder the new Bethlehems and new Nazareths that are happening in us where the Divine can find a home within us and within our world once again.  Perhaps on this first day of the New Year, we will puzzle over our lives and resolve to commit ourselves to listen as Mary did, and hear God speaking to us through the Scriptures, our prayer,  and through all the events of our everyday lives.

So let us be open to the graces of these Scriptures today:

• That like Mary, we may risk moving to the margins, and let God direct and guide us as we walk this New Year’s path perhaps finding ourselves humming in the darkness through it all.
• That God will truly look us full in the face, smile upon our efforts at peace and justice for all, shine upon our world, bless us and keep us.
• That like Mary, may God grace us in our attempts to hold, keep, treasure, puzzle out , and toss together our ponderings, act on them and give birth to deep peace in our hearts, our homes, our church, our government, and in our world.
• And that we, like Mary, may not get too attached to comfort, certainty and answers.   May we learn that tension is inevitable between the now and the not yet- and that our God is eternally pondering us and seeking new Bethlehems and new Nazareths within us where the divine mission can be birthed again and again.

So let us ponder the words of the mystic, Meister Eckhart, who reminds us that we all are meant to be Mothers of God.
“What good is it to me
if this eternal birth of the divine Son
takes place unceasingly
but does not take place
within myself?
What good is it to me
for the Creator to give birth to his/her Son
if I do not also give birth to him
in my time and my culture?
This, then, is the fullness of time:
When the Son of God is begotten in us.”

For we are all meant to be Mothers of God.

http://usccb.org/bible/readings/010118.cfm