The Gospel Story for the 4th Sunday of Advent (Matthew 1:18-24) is Joseph being asked a dream to take Mary as his wife in spite of the fact that she is pregnant. And so, he chooses to marry her. Mary was asked to be the mother of the Savior, and she said yes. The reason we celebrate Christmas is these two people, a 14 year old girl and a man whose age is unknown, who both said yes when Abba invited them to consent freely to impossible situations that made no sense and exposed both of them to potential ridicule and danger. The majority report sees this as part of a wonderful Story about God becoming one of us.
The minority report can be quite different and personal. As we see with Mary and Joseph, being open to Abba is unpredictable and certainly not easy. It requires a lot of letting go and trusting. Both Mary and Joseph, as they had their encounter with Abba, heard the words “do not be afraid”. Abba says the same words to us in everything that is going on in our life at any given time. Everything in our life, both the good and the bad, is somehow of Abba.
Neither Mary nor Joseph, facing their situations, asked Abba to change anything. They trusted Abba at his word and entered their journey together. They did not have that easy a life. In our life prayer is freely putting ourselves in the middle of what is, in Abba’s hands, and looking for and listening to his voice, and getting some sense, maybe a vague sense, in the depth of our hearts. Along the lines of “be still and know that I am God”. This doesn’t mean that things will change or we will have an easy life either. It does mean that, if we are open to it, we will come to see things differently, as we begin to be aware of Abba happening in unexpected ways, situations, and people. One thing we come to really know more and more is that we are not in any way ever alone. This in itself moves us to an attitude of gratefulness and peace, if we let it. It is a constant ongoing journey of letting go of our need to feel in control. No simple thing, but certainly a worthwhile experience.
It might be difficult for us to get our heads around the reality that Abba is real, and loves us more than we can love ourselves or anybody, and is closer to us than we are to ourselves — “in whom we live and move and have our being”. Many of us were raised to see the Catholic notion of holiness as a checklist of rules that varied according to contradictory religious traditions. Our relationship with God was a matter of doing holy things and avoiding sins in our effort to convince God to like us, or at least not punish us for something. Throughout the Gospels Jesus offers us an experience of the Abba he knows. A key factor is the Story we hear today, is an invitation to each of us, wherever we are on our journey, like Mary and Joseph, to say our “yes” to Abba’s invitation to know him here and now in our everyday living. Above all, as he says so many times, “do not be afraid”.
It is a belief in our tradition that when we even think about Abba it is because Abba is actively reaching out to us, inviting us to take the chance and get to know him better, beyond all our ideas, dogmas, and thoughts. Again, “be still and know . . .”. While not saying how we want to know him, we keep asking Abba for the gift of knowing him, recognizing him already happening in us, a matter of experience. We can’t know Abba by thinking and logic, only by love, being open to however he reaches out to us. Also, we have to be ready to be surprised.
Letting go of our need to feel in control, to know, is not easy. At times it is even painful. But when we realize we have been making steps in this direction we feel it happening in us. We might even see it as exciting. The notion of welcoming everything that comes into our life makes no sense at all until it happens with our consent. Whether we are dealing with failed relationships, health issues, or great tragedies, we may come to the realization that Abba is in it with us. We also come to realize that there are no words to describe how we are experiencing Abba, and so we come to see our beliefs and dogmas in a new way as describing our experience. As Mary and Joseph learned, along with many in our own history and tradition, what seems to happen as we move on our journey towards recognizing Abba in everything, we become aware of Abba as an abiding presence in everything about us, and this presence is strong, gentle, good, and brings a calmness and a peace. We even become aware of a sort of invitation to move “deeper” in our relationship with Abba. We may sense a development, a change, in our relationships with the people in our lives as they become increasingly important parts of our relationship with Abba. All this is good, but difficult to explain, and so we begin to trust and go where this takes us. Abba becomes a constant companion in everything, an unexplainable experience. We sense we are a part of Something much bigger than ourselves that is good, loves us as we are, is with us in everything and every one, always without exception.
None of this is without our consent and cooperation, and above all, our openness. It often happens in the midst of suffering where we have no place to turn. More often than not we come to recognize Abba happening when what is going on in our life is really bad. Teilhard: “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers”. Mother Theresa: “Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts”. Fr Arrupe: More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands”. This continually offers us a profound freedom and peace as we come to see our life and experience(s) in wholly different ways. Again and often, “do not be afraid”, and “be still and know I AM”. In the suffering, abuse, violence, suffering, and anger of today, there might be something here. It is all very real, and “in whom we live and move and have our being”. Just sayin . . .