(December 24th 2Sm 7:1-5,8b-12,14a-16; Rom 16:25-27; Lk 1:26-28) – READ HERE
At its worst, which happens a lot, religion controls and patronises God. Rather than removing the human blocks and setting the spirit free in human affairs it can easily exclude the divine. Religious leaders often speak for God, telling others what God wants and doesn’t want, without ever exposing themselves to the risk of meeting God directly.
This is what David does in the first reading. He has won his battles and settled into his kingdom and then thinks ‘Oh, I should build a nice big house for God to live in which will be the Temple. What a good idea’. But God – more gently than he deserves – puts him down. ‘Do you think you can put me in a house? I bless you, not you me. But you will find me pervading everywhere in your life. That’s where I am and will always be. In you and in life.’
Paul, the former religious bigot, understood this after his transformative bout of blindness and a nervous breakdown. The truth is wider, deeper, broader and longer than can ever be expressed. The best we can do is try to express our growing wonder. And that is simply what ‘praising God’ means.
Today’s gospel of the Annunciation shows how the homeless presence of God, on earth and in the cosmos, saturates into the particular. There is a plaque in Nazareth, marking the supposed spot where Mary received her angelic visitor. It reads, ‘Et Verbum Caro Factum Est’: Here on this tiny piece of earth the infinite and eternal Word of God became flesh. The messenger explained to her her destiny. She, young and obscure, would be the house in which God dwells. She is frightened and confused. But she was conscious and responsive. She thought about it and then asked a question – how can this happen to me who am still a virgin?
It sounds like a simple fairy-tale and it is seen as such in nativity plays acted by little children around the world. The tale, however, is not only simple but profound and mysterious. How deeply it touches us, depends on whether we can suspend our scepticism and allow ourselves to be swept beyond the reserved mythical-literal dichotomy into a revelation that enters us and dwells in us for ever after.
‘Experience is the best proof’ of this and of everything else. If we can listen, be conscious and then say yes to what is beyond ordinary (dualistic) knowledge, we don’t have an experience. We become the experience.
The full celebration of Christmas depends on this surrender that is not a rejection of intelligence but an opening of the mind to the mystery dwelling in the heart. Mary doesn’t know what it all means and maybe she never did. But she teaches us the contemplative way when she simply assents to what is and knows what she doesn’t know – as we do in meditation. Her fiat, ‘may it be done to me according to your word’ allows the cosmos, materially, to become the temple that God soaks into by becoming, not only God but also human. No thing will ever be the same again.