4th Sunday Advent B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

It’s not Christmas yet. It is still Advent. It is so hard for us to live in the present moment, to experience it, to be present to the here and now. Just try praying, and you find that out very quickly. In no time, I have either slipped back into the past, or begun to anticipate the future. Our analytical minds cannot process the present moment. As soon as I look at it thoughtfully, I stop .. while it continues on; I step away from it. It is our senses that put us in touch with the present moment, and our contemplative mind – but we have to train, to discipline, that contemplative mind. We need practice. And even with practice, the present remains always slippery.

As children we learn the stories of the tribe. But children grow up, and some sophisticate soon tells them they are only stories. And that is where a lot of people get stuck – it’s all stories! They are not true!! They are half right, of course, but they have only the unimportant half. They have only the paper wrapping the Christmas present. The stories are not literally true. But if we turn off our analytical minds, if we turn off one half of our scientific minds, we see that the stories can open us to a whole other truth. We begin to grow up; we begin to mature. There is a lot more to the Christmas gift than the wrapping paper. There is a lot more to life than what the scientific mind can deal with. There is love; there is joy; there is sadness; there is beauty; there is poetry. And there are stories that can lead us into mystery and open us to ever deeper truth.

Tonight we heard the story of the Annunciation made by Gabriel to Mary. Alright. It is Luke’s story. Did it happen that way? Who cares? Luke did not expect his readers to take it as history, but as gateway into further truth, worthwhile truth, wonderful truth. Can you understand the mystery it leads us to? I can’t. But I can contemplate it. I can stay with it. I can be present to it [sometimes]. Give me half a chance, and I could keep talking about it for a long time. But that is not the important thing. What matters is: Can I be present to the truth that God, whoever God is, became human? Can I let “the Holy Spirit come upon [me] and the power of the Most High cover [me] with its shadow”? Can I be present to the love behind that reality? Can I engage with that God now? Can I engage with divine love, here and now, and let God enter into me and saturate me?

Can I engage with Mary? Can I let her love me, here? now? Not thinking about it, not understanding it, but being open to experience it, without even knowing what it might be like, and certainly not trying to, just being there, nowhere – beyond words, beyond ideas, mysteriously. Stories can lead me there, not by being literally true, but by opening me to where to look, what to half-expect.

We don’t know much about Mary. She was no theologian, no doctor of the Law. But what I am tremendously grateful to St Luke for is his observation, “As for Mary, she treasured these things, and pondered them in her heart.” It seems that she was really good at that.