Are We Looking or Just Waiting

The Mystery of Christmas embraces both the feasts of the Nativity and the Epiphany. In the Nativity we commemorate God’s humble entrance into human life, incarnated in Jesus. In the Epiphany we celebrate Jesus as God’s gift to the world and embodies the expression for our longing for intimacy with God. (Matthew 2: 1-12)

Like the Magi, we need only the light of strong, unwavering faith to see Him, to find Him, to serve Him in the people around us and in the circumstances of our everyday living. Like the Magi, we need only to trust in and know God's love for us…only then we will recognize His presence and His power in sunrise and sunset, in storm and calm, in the faces of children and wisdom of the elderly, in moments of elation and heart-break. We will see His radiance and warmth behind every cloud of sorrow or failure that darkens our days.

The Magi went to extraordinary lengths to look for the Christ Child. They serve to remind us that there are those who wait for the coming of the Jesus with those who make the effort to find Him. Like the magi, our search goes on - but so does Epiphany…Are we actively looking or merely waiting… and what gifts do we bring?

 

Don't Ask It's A Mystery

We celebrate those events in the life of Christ in the Gospel as stories that are meant to be lived as we are inspired to live them. I’ve come to the realization that it’s not a mystery when I know I really understand a scripture concept and yet feel that I can't explain it. Yet, there is an undeniable urge to let our egos run rampant and we do our best to explain that which defies explanation

Somehow, the mistrust of all that has been handed down to us has led to the failure of the imagination, evidenced by language we choose that is comfortable and unchallenging to our senses. Sometimes we quickly turn the page or change the subject because something we encounter in scripture challenges our ability to fully comprehend its meaning...instead of just letting it rest long enough in our imagination for it to speak to us without words?

As we approach the fourth week in Advent we focus on the Annunciation according to Matthew (Matthew 1:18-24), a mystery of epic proportions that defies rational explanation. It bothers me when I hear some attempt to reduce the virgin birth to a mere story of an "unwed pregnant teenager." Have we come to a time when anything that does not stand up to conventional wisdom or that defies explanation should be characterized as primitive and infantile? Why do we think that an God would be confined to the confines of  man’s intellect and language to communicate His message to us? Metaphor and poetry reveal meaning, not explanation on a deeper personal level that is unique to each of us IF we are willing to open our hearts and suspend our ego and just listen?

Richard Rohr recalls visiting the Church of his youth at Christmas and found and drawn to the Crèche. Staring at the statue of the Baby he was moved by the scene. Of course he knew that this charming bucolic setting was not the way it really was; yet, it inspired his knowing that the Incarnation of God in man could not be denied.

When we allow God’s love to break though our consciousness and contemplate the mystery of the Annunciation and Virgin birth, we do we not run from it? Do we ask it to explain what it cannot? Or are we “virgin” enough to surrender to our deepest self and allow it to penetrate our very being?

"For many of us mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming ‘little children’ again in which we first make friends with mystery and finally fall in love with it again. And in that love we find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are…Confusion happens when mystery is an enemy and we feel we must solve it to master our destinies. And Ignorance is not knowing that we do not know. In the liberation of the dark night, we are freed from having to figure things out and we find delight in knowing that we do not know." (Gerald May, Mystery and Freedom,the Dark Night of the Soul p.133)