Luke 2:15 - 20
My mother was a very bright woman.
She had a marvelous sense of humor and on a good day could bring
tears of laughter to the people around her. But she would have mood
swings which were unpredictable, and when they swung low, she could
lash out at everyone, including my poor dad. We learned that if we
waited a bit and stayed below the radar, she would swing back up
again and everything would return to some sense of normal. None of
us, of course, had an idea of what her inner life was all about; to
my sisters and I, she was just Mom.
A cousin in Montana just sent me a
sort of autobiography my mother had written. This was in response to
another cousin’s attempt to collect these from my mother and her
nine siblings. So I was reading through this document, written in
1993, before the Alzheimer’s, after she had buried two husbands and
was living in California with her third. And I was struck by the way
certain life events stood out. How when she was in grade school, her
shoes were damaged, and her mother made her wear an old pair of her
brother’s to school. Until she got a new pair of her own, she made
sure no one could see her feet. She remembered the tears in her
father’s eyes when he told his children about their stillborn
brother. She wrote about when she met my father -- she a
just-graduated nurse and he a young man on the surgical unit after an
appendectomy, and how it was love at first sight.
There were a lot of other events that
stood out in my mother’s mind; and it was obvious that they were
things that must have affected her deeply. I could see a reason for
her mood swings, for her sense of humor, for many things about her
that I had always taken for granted. They were mere moments in her
long life, but they were things that she must have reflected on in
her heart, that had become part of her story.
We are coming to the end of the
Christmas story. Although part of that story is told in the Gospel
of Matthew, that part focuses on Joseph. The telling of the story in
the Gospel of Luke, on the other hand, seems to be made up of things
Mary would have remembered -- in fact, things that only she or she
and Joseph could have remembered. Things like the annunciation, the
visit to Elizabeth, the taking shelter in a stable, the birth of her
baby, the appearance of the angels, the adoration of the shepherds,
the presentation in the temple, ,,, and we imagine that some time
many years from the actual events Mary recalls them for the writer of
the Gospel. Surely there were many more things Mary could have told
Saint Luke about Jesus; maybe she did. Down through the ages many
people, including Mohammed, added things to the story of Jesus’
childhood. But Saint Luke wrote down those things that Mary would
eventually reflect on in her heart, things that would have shaped
this first, this perfect Christian, the one who first bore Jesus
within her body and soul.
There have been many thinkers who came
to the conclusion that the best explanation for why we are here is
that there is a God, one God. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and
indeed many others before and since the lifetime of Jesus’ mother
were convinced of this. But the greatest of these thinkers concluded
that God was without limits, that he had no form; that he was
unchanging because to be capable of change would be to be limited;
that he had always existed, that he was all powerful, that he was all
good -- and it is not easy to love a God like that.
Human beings are designed to love. We
have been loving each other since before history began. Genesis
points to the ideal love between husband and wife, a love that would
forshadow the love of Christ for his Church, and such a natural thing
that most human beings attempt to enter that kind of relationship,
even though the reality is always marred by original sin. But all of
us long for love and long to be loved.
The memories of Mary are recorded by
Saint Luke so that we too can reflect on them, so that those memories
can shape us and make a difference in our own lives. The almighty
God who has an infinite love for all of his creation, and indeed each
of his human children knows that it is almost impossible for us to
love a God without limits, a God we cannot see or hear or touch; so
he became a baby, helpless, limited by time, born and destined to
die, because it is easy for you and I to love a baby.
When we reflect on something with our
hearts, we take it into ourselves, we allow it to change us, we keep
going back to see if there is more there than we thought the first
time we reflected. And on this Christmas morning Mary invites us to
reflect again on the miracle of the incarnation, when God entered
history as her newborn baby, so that we could love him and become one
with him.
