AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH

     CHRISTMAS .

 THE INCARNATION.

 WHEN GOD TOOK HIS FLESH FROM MARY

     AND NOW HE SEEKS A PLACE TO DWELL.

                       

                     "UNDER THE DOME OF YOUR BEING ...YOUR SACRED WOMB..."

                                                             (ST JOHN OF THE CROSS)

THIS IS THE WOMB OF OUR SOUL, THE DWELLING PLACE OF GOD, WHERE THE ALMIGHTY, THE DIVINE THREE BREATHE. THE BREATH OF FATHER BREATHES INTO SON THROUGH SPIRIT WHO BREATHES INTO OUR SOUL. 

THIS BREATH OF GOD THAT ALLOWS US TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE INDWELLING THREE... AND WE BREATHE OUT A PROCLAMATION OF HIS GLORY...

  "AND WE SHALL CALL HIM, 

WONDER COUNSELLOR, MIGHTY GOD, ETERNAL FATHER,

              PRINCE OF PEACE."    (ISAIAH 9)   

             ST JOHN OF THE CROSS ADDRESSES US ON BEHALF OF MARY, OUR MOTHER, AT THIS HOLY CHRISTMAS TIME. WE HEAR HER AS SHE APPEALS TO US...

                                                                     

                                    If you want, the Virgin will come walking down the road

pregnant with the holy, and say,

"I need shelter for the night,

please take me inside your heart, my time is so close."

Then, under the roof of your soul,

you will witness the sublime intimacy,

the divine, the Christ, taking birth forever,

as she grasps your hand for help,

for each of us is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yes there, under the dome of your being

does creation come into existence eternally,

through your womb, dear pilgrim – the sacred womb of your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help:

for each of us is his beloved servant, never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking down the street

pregnant with Light and sing.

                                       (ST JOHN OF THE CROSS OCD)                                            

Advent Season 2022

 "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND THE WORD WAS WITH GOD, AND THE WORD WAS GOD.” (Jn 1:1)

AND MARY SAID, "BEHOLD! I AM THE DOULY OF THE LORD. LET IT BE DONE UNTO ME ACCORDING TO YOUR WORD." (Luke1:38)

“AND THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US." (Jn 1:14)

We continue to journey through Advent. The greatest love story of all time is being re-told. A mystical door is opening from Heaven to inflame earth in the "burning Furnace of Love" that is God's passionate Love affair with His people. He is madly in love with our soul and His love is revealed in and through "The Word." 

We search and dig and pray to try to hear and understand what this "Word" is saying to us. His language is sometimes beyond us because we are finite. He is Infinite. He is totally Other. We are totally dependent on Him.  

"When God loves us, He is loving Himself in us."

Inherent in these words is a staggering truth... that if God loves Himself in us, then He must be Present within us. 

                                   How to fathom such a profound and eternal meaning?

In Sacred Scripture, The Word speaks, so we go there to "sit at His feet" to hear His Voice. 

                                   

And to hear Our Father's response.

Jesus, The Word, spoke in the darkness of the stable of His Birth. We sit at the mouth of that cave and we look inside. We see His Poverty. In this, we hear Him inviting us to let go of attachments that make our hands stick to things that can do damage to our souls. "Attachments can be dangerous because they prevent us from relying on faith. And they can ultimately make us prey to the devil. Detachment is non-possessiveness and opens a soul-space for God to fill it with poverty of spirit."

Like Mary, the Douly of the Lord, we say our own YES to that gift of poverty.

And the Father sees His Son's Poverty growing within us. God the Father is seeing and loving in us something of what He saw and loved in His Son. As He gazes on us, we hear His delight with our small gift and He proclaims to all the hosts of Heaven: 

                  "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." (Mt 3 :17)

                    

During His life on earth, we see Jesus, Savior, Son, as Humility enfleshed. He is the Doulos, the Bondslave of God. Everything He said and did and had, came from His Father. In Matthew 3:6, John is baptising many in the waters of the Jordan. To be submerged in the waters was an external marker for an interior confession of sin and a desire to repent. Jesus, Son of God, Redeemer before time began, approaches John to ask to be baptised. In that moment, He, the Innocent One, not only aligned Himself with my sins, He was expressing ownership of them. For all of us. In full view of the great number

of sinners waiting to confess and to repent, He, the Christ, waited in line and was submerged in our place. 

And when the Savior came out from the waters, the Voice of God was heard:

                       "BEHOLD! THIS IS MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED."

When we wait in line to confess our sins and our spiritual pride tempts us with a hundred reasons to abandon such a place of humiliations, we may be given the grace to attend to another whisper: God can use even my sins for the salvation of my soul. But more, much more, we can offer our humiliation to God for the soul of another, one who never prays and who will not do penance, to be brought back to God through my offering. 

 And at the words of absolution, the Father sees more of His Son in us and we hear His delight:

                                 

                       "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." 

It was a shocking and terrifying and electric moment when Jesus, Lord raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. The scorching sun must have blazed on that scene among the caves of tombs. And into that stunned silence, Christ Jesus walked to the entrance of the tomb. Suddenly, He raised His hands and arms high into the air. His head was thrown back and His eyes stared up toward Heaven. And then He gave a great shout that must have rocked the silent crowd. 

"Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I know that you always hear me but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me." (Jn 11:38-44)

Jesus was addressing His Father and His Voice was filled with holy joy.

In deeply challenging circumstances, when even friends don't fully stand by us, when all that should be just isn't, do we ever throw our hands and arms high in the air and shout a great shout of utter holy joy in the midst of our storm: Father, Thank you. I know that you always hear me?

And the Father's Gaze sees the faith and holy joy of His Son alive in our soul, and He replies:

                                        

                          "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." 

Our fallen human nature is being pursued by Love in every passage and event in Sacred Scripture. The Word is speaking Himself into life in, through and with us. Christ is the Father's "entire Locution and Response, given to us as Master, Brother, Companion, Ransom, Reward." (St John of the Cross)

This is never more miraculous and powerful and uncontained than at that moment when we leave our seats to walk forward to the Altar where the Unbloodied Sacrifice has been offered to the Father at the hands of the priest. On our way up the aisle, we offer ourselves: all that we were, all that we are, all that we have, all that we will be.  

                                

We receive the Word made Flesh, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

To give Himself to us, the Son had to be totally annihilated so that we can be totally filled with God. The Breath of the Father, through the Spirit, breathes in the Son, now actually and Physically Present on our tongue or in our hand. We are breathing the Breath that empowers us to communicate with God and the Hearts of the Trinity are now beating in our own. 

           

AS HE GAZES ON AND IN US, THE FATHER CAN NOW PROCLAIM IN FULLNESS TO ALL OF HEAVEN:

                              "BEHOLD! MY BELOVED... IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED." 

                                                      And the Word speaks into our depths...

                                                   "DON'T CLING TO ME.....GO AND TELL" (John 20:17)

“WHEN GOD LOVES US HE IS LOVING HIMSELF IN US. HE THUS MAKES US HIS EQUAL."

ON THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (December 8)

                                       SHE IS THE WORLD OF GOD.

                                      WHEN WE SAY "MARY", SHE SAYS "GOD".  

                

We meet her in St Luke's Gospel when the Angel Gabriel addresses her as, "Full of grace", "κεχαριτωµευη": not a name but a title, the title given to her by God from all eternity. To be "full of grace" means that in such a soul there is no space for anything else... no sin, no tendency toward sin, totally and completely empty of self.

                         SHE IS MARY, THE IMMACULATA, WITHOUT STAIN OR WRINKLE.

                        SHE IS FREE FROM PERSONAL SIN AND MORAL IMPERFECTION.

When she responded to the Angel Gabriel who is the Watchguard of the House of Israel, she described herself as "douly", handmaid. She was proclaiming to all generations and for all eternity that she was the bondslave "of the Lord", not a servant of the Lord, but His bondslave. She made no decisions of her own, had no desires of her own and so no attachments, no property but what her Lord chose to give to her. She was owned by her Lord, her entire identity was in Him to choose whatever He wished to do with her, even to take her life. 

AND JUST AS THE SPIRIT OF GOD 'HOVERED OVER THE WATERS' AND GAVE LIFE IN GENESIS 1, SO TOO DID THE POWER OF THE MOST HIGH HOVER OVER THE WOMAN , OVERSHADOWED HER, THEN IN THE SPIRIT'S SUPREME ACT OF CREATION, HE GAVE LIFE TO THE HOLY ONE, THE SON OF GOD, TO BE FORMED IN HER WOMB (LUKE 1:35), THE ONE WHO WAS THE BONDSLAVE OF THE LORD AND WHO WAS FILLED WITH GRACE.

God poured Himself into her, shared His Being with her, took His Flesh from her, His facial Features resembled hers, His hair color and the color of His eyes. She was His bondslave. Yet He would will to become totally dependent on her for everything in His Infancy. She would read Isaiah to Him and He would hear His mother describe His suffering and death; He would become "obedient" to her (Luke 2:51).

God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit ordained that Mary would be without sin from before time began. Creation, Incarnation, Redemption were one Action of God. Christ's death on the Cross was not a rescue plan. From before time began, God ordained that Christ would come to us to redeem all humanity from the stain of sin. Creation met in the Incarnation as did the Redemption of our souls. 

Yet a question has to be asked... if Mary was free from sin, immaculate in soul and body, she should not have needed to be liberated from sin that her Immaculate Heart did not commit. Being born with original sin, that is our path.

Through the decades, Spirit Lord guided the minds of those who would gradually reveal to our finite understanding the awesome plan of Almighty God. He inspired the mind of the theologian, Blessed Duns Scotus who would passionately explain that God had PRESERVED Mary from sin. We, subject to the sin of our original parents, looked to Christ Jesus to LIBERATE our souls from original sin.

                               Preservation(Mary)/liberation(us). 

After a millennium of seeking Truth, Pope Pius IX formally defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, INEFFABILIS DEUS, on December 8, 1854.

As if to confirm this beauty revealing God's Glorious Action within her, Our Lady herself appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous, at Lourdes. On March 25th, 1858, when Bernadette asked the Virgin Mary to tell her who she was, our Mother replied:

                                    "I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION."

"Mary is God's garden of Paradise, his own unspeakable world, into which his Son entered to do wonderful things, to tend to it and to take delight in it. He created a world for the wayfarer, that is, the one we are living in. He created a second world - Paradise - for the Blessed. He created a third world for himself, which he named Mary. She is a world unknown to most mortals here on earth. Even the angels and saints in heaven find her incomprehensible, and are lost in admiration of a God who is so exalted and so far above them, so distant from them, and so enclosed in Mary, his chosen world, that they exclaim: 'Holy, holy, holy' unceasingly” (Secret of Mary - St. Louis de Montfort).

And yet, this is our Mother who knows in advance when we are running out of spiritual wine (John 2:3) and whose request  encouraged Jesus on to the road to Calvary so that her children of all generations would be won for God; the Woman who "stood" at the foot of the Cross and was given over to one of her adopted children, St John. This same beloved disciple immediately removed her from Jerusalem where the Roman authorities would have arrested her as a great prize after the death of the Nazarean. 

She is the Immaculata of Maximillian Kolbe.

"God the Father made an assemblage of all the waters, and He named it the sea (mar). He has made an assemblage of all His graces and He has named it Mary (Maria). Mary is the safest, easiest, shortest and most perfect way of approaching Jesus” (St Louis de Montfort).

"If Jesus is Life, Mary is the Mother of Life.

If Jesus is Hope, Mary is the Mother of Hope.
If Jesus is Peace, Mary is the Mother of Peace, Mother of the Prince of Peace.

May you guide your children on their pilgrimage of faith, making them ever more obedient and faithful to the Word of God." (St John Paul II)