The Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 21, 2008

by The Rev. Constance Jones

Luke 1:26-38

Mary, Mary.
This final Sunday in Advent is all about Mary.
The Gospel, the singing of the Magnificat, even the adult forum today is about Mary.
Mary, who said "yes" to God when the angel Gabriel appeared to her,
and who has been pulled this way and that by the Church ever since.
Put on a pedestal, dressed in blue, and pretty much denied her humanity,
or shunned with embarrassed shudders at other times,
even blamed somehow –
statues of her smashed or hidden.
Mary, whose freely-given yes was apparently necessary
for God's plan for the salvation of all the world,
as if all the universe held its breath to hear her wonder-filled answer --
How can this be?
But let it be with me according to the will of God.

I can't even begin to chronicle the volumes that have been written
and the doctrines constructed around the Virgin Birth.
The study of the word "young woman" in Isaiah's Hebrew
and "virgin" in Matthew's Greek.
The doctrinal arguments
that sound more like lessons in gynecology or even anti-gynecology.
The tug-o'-wars over Mary
as if her blue cloak were nearly ripped in two.

Yet there's so escaping it:
it all still somehow depends on the purity of Mary.
The Incarnation of God into this world somehow hinges on the answer of this young girl
and her receptiveness – her empty, waiting womb.
You and I know emptiness, of course, and loss.
But we fill the silence and solitude so quickly –
with words, to-do-lists, music and television you can't get away from.
Maybe even holiday shopping.
Layer upon layer to shield us from the heart of things, deep within us.

But what if we did enter that empty place –
to explore it, and maybe even to hallow it.
Suppose we prepared, like Mary, for God to come in,
the way we ready the spare room for a longed-for guest,
or decorate a nursery for a baby not yet born?

I have been reading about Mansur al-Hallaj,
a 10th-century Sufi mystic and martyr who invited his followers
into the deepest places of the human soul to encounter God.
He called this place the "Virgin Heart." – in French the point vierge.

    "Our hearts," al-Hallaj wrote, "are one single Virgin....
    which only the presence of the Lord penetrates in order to be conceived therein."¹

A thousand years later another mystic, Thomas Merton,
discovered al-Hallaj, and wrote in the same vein --

    "At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to     God... this little point.... is the pure glory of God in us.... It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody."²

A point of nothingness like a diamond.
An empty place where God can enter in.
A point of virginity. And the locus of our immortality.

Now, I know that for some of us,
talking mystical language and imagery, like reading poetry,
can make our head hurt, or make wrinkle our brow.

But imagine that you are being drawn to that place of emptiness,
uncluttered and open.
A stable with a waiting empty manger filled with straw,
an unfilled womb, a heart of receptiveness.
It's like praying without words, pushing the words aside.
It's like persistent questions without answers
and journeys with unclear ends,
or situations the minute after illusions have been shattered.
I think of Christ, emptying himself of his claim to Godhood,
so that he could receive our humanness into himself.

"The Holy Spirit will come upon you," Mary was told,
"and the power of the Most High will overshadow you."

This is never by our own merit, of course.
The purity is what God confers upon us.
And filling the empty place is never ours to do either.
We have to wait.

Thank God, too, for what a friend of mind calls "the gentleness of God."
It's no wonder that the angels have to keep saying "Don't be afraid,"
for the power of the Most High could so easily obliterate us.
But instead it comes with infinite tenderness.

God's gentleness with Mary was not only
that the angel said "Don't be afraid,"
but that God sought her consent
to bearing Christ into the world.
God always surrenders himself to wait for our answer to come in,
just as he humbles himself at that Table to be a bit of bread and a sip of wine.

Is the point vierge, the virgin heart, a matter of single personal experience, then?
A place inside our deepest personal self where we meet God
and have him all to ourselves?
If that point of diamond is what lives on after we die,
do we become alone with God?

Merton says the opposite is the case.
By encountering God in this tiny place in ourselves,
we experience the unity of all that God has made,
and we are enabled truly to love others.
To love purely out of the grace of God
who enters into that point in ourselves,
is to be a participant in all the love, past and present,
here and not here, of all of creation.
We are never isolated again, never alone,
and what was welcoming emptiness
has become full of the presence of God himself.

As one young insignificant girl
said Yes to becoming the bearer of the Most High,
and as Jesus consented to empty himself to take on our humanity,
we are invited by God to make a space so that he might come in.
Not out of the richness of our purity, but out of our poverty and need.

We are invited also to make spaces to take each other in, too –
to open ourselves to each other's hearts and souls, to others' needs,
including those of the stranger.
We stand shoulder to shoulder in the face of the mysteries of this life,
of the passage of time, the confluence of joy and loss.
We are blessed together at the time of death,
to see heaven and new life opening up.

Whole communities or even nations might be open to the coming
of the God who is even sometimes called "the desire of all nations."
We might reject violence or the quick fix or presuming our own righteousness.
We might practice holy hospitality,
practice forgiveness, and depend on God.

Being virginal, I think, has almost nothing to do with sexuality.
It has to do with a heart open to God,
"fearing not" because we trust God for what comes next.
Saying with Mary, let it be with me according to your will,
yes, I consent to the blessing of bearing God into this world.

The "highly favored" one is not just Mary.
It is every one of us, you and me.
The angel is for us, and the responsibility.
God waits for our answer as he waited for Mary's.

It is dark. It is the hush before the great birth.
Will God hear us say "yes"
to the One who will redeem the world?

¹ Quoted by Dorothy C. Buck, "The Heart of the Soul" at www.dcbuck.com. She is quoting from Massignon's 1989 translation.

² Ibid. She is quoting from Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.