TIME IN THE TIMELESS

With the dawning of 2013, the events of this past year challenge our cause for jubilation. In our heart of hearts, shocked and broken, we look for godly explanation and beg divine intervention. Perhaps in the season of Christmas and an approaching new year we need celebrate what is holy among us, even if to do so accounts for a supreme effort. We might consider that in the eternal virginity of the Mother of God, we may find such a grace where one need contemplate the depths of a mystery that has given birth even to our revelry and cause for rejoicing.

In the Office of Readings for this day, our antiphon reads: O marvelous exchange! Man’s Creator has become man, born of a virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity. As such, we who are temporal, mortal and suffer great limitation, we who are poor upon the realization of our supreme dependence on God, we who drink the cup of consecration, are verily permeated with the eternal in Christ, sharing in a self-giving Trinity. Yet, the great love of the Giver of this gift does not stop there for we are all caught up and held in the generosity of Wisdom and Word.

 St. John, in the universal overtones of his Gospel, speaks of the Word, Who, though with God from the beginning, has been made flesh. Centuries later, St. Athanatius expounds upon the mystery and speaks of the great acquisition that is ours through our communion and union with the Word. Our mortality is made immortal; though a living body we become a spiritual one; though made from the earth we pass through the gates of heaven.

 Yet we are humble in the face of it all, for mystery such as this demands faith in the incomprehensible loving acts of God. The saint reminds us that even when the Word takes a body from Mary, the Trinity remains a Trinity, with neither increase nor decrease. It is forever perfect.

How blessed are you, Virgin Mary,

for you have carried within you the Lord, Creator of the world.

In God’s goodness and mercy we meet with the holy One ever-present. With all of our struggles, with the effects of our negligence and selfish ways, with the atrocities of evil and its relenting darkness, our world is still a sacred place for God has graced us with the Word become flesh and made his dwelling place among us. John’s words continue to assure us.

Through him was life and this life was the life of the human race;

 the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.