The season of Advent is all about responding to graces that are hidden from the eye. We could say we taste in these days before Christmas the powerful time between the Annunication and the Nativity, where all was set in motion but nothing seen. Just as Mary's womb veiled the divinity of her Son, so in these times, our faith knows a certain veil over the wonders God is accomplishing. God works in the world as an unborn baby, making himself felt even though He is unseen.
When the Word awakened in the womb of Mary, this hidden mystery shook the whole universe. Yes, earthly cares unfolded as if everything remained the same - but nothing would be the same ever again. The fragrance of all that is good, holy and true was stirred. An ancient hope rekindled. Worldly powers and heavenly dominions were swayed. The rancor of hell itself was silenced. A new movement of God, transforming human affairs, awakened under divine shadow and life-giving breath - and it awakens still in our time too.
A Tranforming Heartbeat
Thus, his embryonic movements reconstituted her whole being, his very heartbeat shaking her motherhood to its foundations, and refashioning her own womanhood in deified proportions, wholenesses and harmonies. No other mother has ever known this but her motherhood was raised so high that all motherhood is changed forever. All this because her grace imbued virginal readiness welcomed God. Her pure "fiat" ushered Him into the deepest center of her being. There she surrendered to Him the substance of her soul where the Father wills her into existence - and here the Eternal Word chooses to move even as He is concieved in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Mary's Faith
Mary's obedient yes to God opened the depths of humanity to a new coming of the Word in human experience. Her virginal surrender opened the pathway down which God entered into the deepest depths of human desire, joy, fear, sadness, loneliness, emptiness, and poverty. He allowed Himself to be embraced by this woman's fertility and made the frailty of human life His own. By embracing humanity in this way, He embraced the humanity of every man and woman who has ever been and ever will be conceived. He connected Himself to all of us, each one because her virginal 'yes' to Him was so complete. Through her faith, He brought the inexhaustible horizons of his eternal His sonship into the limited horizons of the unborn and unseen. Thus, the humanity that he united to through His mother's humble consent re-established all humanity before the Love of the Father.
The Theandric and Deifying Mystery
Christ came into the whole of human expereince to redeem it all - body and soul. This means the womb-veiled Word of the Father communicates not only through pious thoughts and feelings, but in real, physical bodily action. This means concrete things said and done, even if no one notices - in everything He does, God communicates everything we need to be saved. This also means when He moves in us, we can choose to move with Him, allowing Him to extend his saving mystery through our humanity too. When a soul assents this this, very humbly He detaches it from what it is afraid to lose only to give what it could not hope to have - not only in its private, hidden experience, but in all its relations and through all its actions.
Every bodily movement of the Word through our own humanity, though hidden from mortal eye, is full of the divine power that prepared for this action, no matter how seemingly insignificant, He has willed to act through our frail acts of love from before the foundation of the world. These actions could be disavowing a moment selfish indulgence or remaining silent in the face insult. Or it could be a hidden kindness or simply a smile when it is hardest to offer. No matter what it is, if it is a choice to love or even a choice to make space for love, these offerings are gifts He offers to us that He longs to work through - if only, as did his Mother, we say yes, let it be done to me according to your word. He yearns to bring these little offerings of love to completion even now in time which is "eternity begun and in progress" the mystics tell us.
Tradition calls this divine human activity of the Son of the Father theandric: everything Christ did as man expresses the divinity of the Son of Mary, and everything the Son of the Father does as God reveals the truth of his humanity. Because of the theandric way He saved us, our humanity is divinized, made to participate in His mystery, whenever we sanction how He awakens in us. Whoever is touched by this mystery is never the same. They have been touched by God Himself. A heart is either raised to the praise of glory or turns away sad, forever diminished for not having responded to the greatness for which it was made.
A New Solidarity between God and Man
In this time before the coming of the Word made flesh, we are in solidarity with the Virgin of Nazareth -- the mother of the Most High who has become our mother too. Our mother in the order of grace, she conceives the faith of the Church until believers share in her obedience to the Trinity. When she was overshadowed, we were all overshadowed with her - for each of us co-inheres in the rest not only by virtue of our common nature, but also by a new bond of grace that her "yes" permitted her Son to establish. What He did in her womb is why every soul can welcome the Word with her same obedient trust.
A Practical Consequence
If there is a relative or loved one who seems far from the Christmas mystery, a relationship that seems impossible to reconcile, a hopeless situation in which there seems no way out, what God did in the womb of Mary gives cause for hope. Ponder what happened in her womb that no one saw but she felt move. Ask God to move in the hiddenness of your circumstance in the same way - in a manner so hidden only the Virgin can feel it, for His work is the more powerful the more hidden. It is not enough to pray for a miracle in the distant future - believe that God is doing something beyond your imaginings now. Hold fast the truth of his presence at work in the situation even if you cannot understand how. Meditate on the beauty of what God is already doing in your midst even if it defies your own power to grasp. When the Word awakens in the hiddenness of our povery, the mysterious shadows of God's blessing are already at work in our faith, a faith that the Virgin Mary wants to share with us.
If you face a seemingly impossible situation, one in which hurt and confusion is so intense that it all seems meaningless, search you own heart for the memory of the first coming of Christ hidden in the womb of Mary. She gave us this memory. Through sharing it with us, she teaches us that the Word unseen always moves with eternal meaning - an eternal movement in which all thing are, and move, and have their existence. His movement frees and heals, sanctifies and transforms - even before it is manifest. His riches hidden in poverty are possessed by faith in the way He moves.
Indeed, His Mother concieved Him in her heart before she conceived Him in her womb. If the purely natural movement of a baby in a womb can cause maternal love to spring from the heart of a woman in the frailty of nature, what happened to the Virgin when God's womb veiled humanity first stirred in her? So his first hidden movements sanctified the Virgin who was full of grace. Those same movements transformed her with a newness that humanity had never known before. So these same movements are at work in the present Advent, preparing us without our knowing - inviting forgiveness, reconciling, and making whole. These movements are always homecomings in which the Father reveals to us a future filled with blessing and new horizons of hope beyond every expectation.
Contemplating a Transforming Mystery
To welcome the Word, to allow our existence to be overshadowed in mystery, to suffer eternal love and meaning to penetrate our deepest center, this is the purpose of Advent, the purpose of the coming of Christ. The Son of the Father comes to recreate our innermost being in His image and likeness so that we might know the blessing that He has known from before the foundation of the world. When the transforming and sanctifying movements unleashed in the Virgin are unleashed in our lives, the mystery of Christ's coming begins the work it has yearned to do from before the foundation of the world.
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