I look forward to your joining me in the future.
Peace
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 realize that if I understand something and feel that I can explain
it, it’s no mystery. Yet, there’s this undeniable urge to put our ego front and
center and do our best to try to explain things that defy explanation. I was
reminded when I heard Adam say, I was
afraid, because I was naked. To which God answered, who told you that you were naked? (Genesis 3:8-19) Too often modern
believers tend to place their trust in therapy more than they do in mystery, a
fact that’s revealed when our worship resorts to the jargon of ego-satisfying, self-help
and pop psychology: Let’s use this hour
to get our heads straight or revisit our perspective. Really? Sure, let’s
use this hour because we’re too busy later, after all, we’ve got the kids, or I
don’t want anything to get in the way of my Super Bowl Sunday. Let’s use
this hour, and get it over with and you can send me a bill… later I will zip
off a check in the mail. There, that’s done. But the mystery of worship which
is God’s presence and our response to it doesn’t work this way.
Somehow, the mistrust of all that has been handed down
to us, has led to a failure of the imagination, evidenced by language that’s
thoroughly comfortable and unchallenging. Our prayers become a self- indulgent
praise of ourselves as we purport to “confess” our weaknesses. These prayers are
anything but the lifting of our hearts and minds to God. There’s no attempt to
at least meet him half way and listen and stop talking.
And so now in this fourth week of Advent we focus on the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38), a mystery of epic proportions that
defies rational explanation. It stuns us to 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 did not stand up to reason or that we couldn’t explain,
should be characterized as primitive and infantile? Why do we think that an
almighty spiritual being is confined to man’s intellect and his feeble language
to communicate? Do we not see how metaphor and poetry reveal meaning, not
explanation, on a deep personal level?
Last
year we had an opportunity to travel through Eastern Europe, making our way
from the Black Sea to Amsterdam. I was taken aback by the devastation in human lives
caused by the failure of the “great social experiment,” that created societies
whose wealth was shared but only among those at the top. So great buildings
were erected for the personal aggrandizement of the elite while sacrificing the
welfare of the people who were desperate for food and who desired a modicum of personal
enrichment. On the other hand, I was impressed with the number of churches and
cathedrals that were reopened after decades of being forced to close. These
were flourishing, and while they served as much to support tourism as worship, they
were a major presence.
Looking
at the beautiful classical paintings and art in these churches made me wonder
what it was that inspired the artists to create poetic images and visual
metaphors depicting the “mysteries” of Christianity. It occurred to me that
their art was spoken in a language all its own and derived its source from inspiration
and not the intellect, and while the cynic might deride the image of the Angel
Gabriel appearing to Mary, the artist understood it completely. Art and music
are languages of the soul and bypass our rational being to speak to us at a
level we cannot explain or know but do we really need explanation for something
we feel down deep?
When
we allow God’s love to break through into our consciousness as we contemplate the
Mysteries of the Annunciation and Virgin birth, do we 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 fill our being? We cannot ask it to explain what it
cannot.[BR1]
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