December 20, 2017
Third Week of Advent
Luke 1:26-38
I’ve been rereading this really terrific little book by the Carmelite writer Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus, and I wanted to share three short passages from it this morning as a commentary on the story of the Annunciation. Because I think they are.
Mary is exactly the model of the humility and self-surrender we are called to this Advent and this Christmas.
Here’s the first passage:
There is nothing in the gospels to suggest that prayer is going to be delightful and satisfying. On the contrary, our Lord suggests the opposite. It is going to be hard to persevere and easy to grow faint. It is going to be secret from ourselves.
Everything will depend on our having the correct idea of the nature of prayer, how it is God who works and we who receive. This will make us wise and we shall know how to pray. Prayer is to going to be a very simple thing, so simple in fact that it may well scandalize us and dash our hopes. We wanted it to be an exulting, satisfying experience [but this is not what it is]. Prayer is self-surrender to God at every moment. We go before God as we are. This means we suffer ourselves. We accept feeling our total inadequacy, that we “can’t pray,” that our thoughts wander, that we are earthy and unspiritual, more interested in the breakfast to come than in God.
The reality of our prayer will be the reality of our self-surrender, not how we feel.
“Behold,” Mary says, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”
The second passage:
“We shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind: and your neighbor as yourself.” If we ponder these words we are impressed by the totality of the love demanded, the wholeness of the gift. This, I think, is the significance of consecrated virginity. Physical virginity of itself means nothing, what matters is spiritual virginity, this wholeness and totality. Now every Christian is called to this spiritual virginity. He has to belong to God body and soul. Some are called to reach this in marriage, others in the single life in the world, others in a state of consecrated celibacy. The means are different, the end is the same.
“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”
And the third and final passage:
God is always working to bring us to an awareness and acceptance of our poverty, which is the essential condition of our being able to receive him, and the petty frustrations, the restrictions, humiliations, the occasions when we are made to feel poignantly and distressingly hedged around, not in control of the world, not even in control of that tiny corner of it we are supposed to call our own, are his chosen channel into the soul. It is the one who has learned to bow his head, to accept the yoke, who knows what freedom is. There is so much that we must take whether we like it or not; what I am urging is a wholehearted acceptance, a positive appreciation and choosing of this bitter ingredient of life.
“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”
O Lord, give us the grace to receive your grace.
Give us the humility of Mary, and her willingness to surrender, to empty herself out.
Help us to see all the stresses and pressures of the next few days as opportunities for surrender, as Annunciations.
Whatever our particular vocation, may we through You be spiritual virgins: wholehearted, holding nothing back, giving all to you.
We thank you, Lord, for the Christ child, born into this ordinary world, this ordinary, complicated, sometimes tedious world. May we, too, take this child into our selves, in our own ordinary lives, and give birth to him again and again through our kindness and our honesty and our cheerfulness and our faith.