Holy Family – it is making me

the God of Grit

O great mystery,

and wonderful sacrament,

that animals should see the Lord born,

lying in a crib;

The medieval hymn, O Magnum Mysterium, expresses awe at the humility of Christ’s birth. That the birth of the King of Kings should be first witnessed to by beasts of burden, and that the spouse of the Holy Spirit lies on hard ground amidst scratchy hay to labor– this is a magnum mysterium, a great mystery.

During different stages of my life, I have pondered different aspects of Christ’s birth during the Advent and Christmas seasons. As a young adult, the wonder and majesty struck me; as a young mother, the discomfort and peril struck me; at other times, the historical and cultural circumstances have struck me. But this Christmas, it has been poignantly sensory. I am there experiencing the stench of animal urine and dung, the smell and scratch of hay, the frigid night air, the veil of darkness, the base life-sounds of bleating and newborn cries.

This past year I have tried to be honest and receptive in my relationship with God, which has revealed a lot of repressed anger and hurt towards God. I had to work through the shame of feeling angry before I could actually confront the origins of this anger. Interiorly, I wearied, stopped wrestling the darkness, and I’m now just sitting with it. While that’s necessary, it’s dark and cold here at times. But I know this is part of deliverance and healing.

It’s been liberating to stop forcing emotions, like pulling cellophane over a bucket of muck. Right now, Mass is an act of obedience; Communion is a still, quiet moment at the cross. But this is an improvement from running out of Church during the consecration, which is where I was a year ago. Part of that healing has been peeling away the angelic, gilded depictions of Christ and the Church, and discovering the grit. Only then do I see myself and the life God has walked with me through. Only then do I remember that God indeed has been Emmanuel, God with me– not just in consolation and revelation, but He has been faithful in all things, all places, even under the cold veil of night. I don’t know if I believe that yet, but at least I can imagine that I will get there.

What does it mean that God chose to be born in a dank, stench-filled cave, surrounded by dumb animals? If Mary was the beloved of His heart, why would he allow her to give birth in cold, pungent darkness? Magnum Mysterium opens with, “O great mystery”. This, like so much of Christ’s life, is a mystery which theologians debate and mystics contemplate. But what we can know with the same senses that Christ incarnated, is that His birth, while miraculous and mysterious, was also one of stench and grit.

This simple reality makes me feel loved. As John of the Cross wrote, “this delight within your Bride / Would great be increased, / If the flesh she is endowed with / She saw you also shared”. The stench and grit that I am working through is there with baby Jesus and the Holy Family. I will sit with them in the dark, chilly cave, in the great mystery, and trust that salvation is here.

O Blessed Virgin, whose womb

was deemed worthy to bear

the Lord Jesus Christ.

Alleluia!

finding Jesus in the Temple

What St. John of the Cross describes as “the dark night of the soul” is, as far as I understand it from saints’ writings, a true loss of all consolation, or a sustaining sense of having been abandoned by God. The presence of God, however strong or faint, which had sustained such souls in their vocations, no longer calms their spirit or is their source of strength; they feel quite alone. Most recently, the world was shocked—even scandalized among some groups—to learn of the darkness and silence that had pervaded the spiritual life of the great Mother Teresa, who served God faithfully to the end. The response of holy men and women is not to despair, but to have faith in the darkest time.

Yet one can experience God’s stillness or silence without a dark night of the soul, and it can be unsettling. Though there may not be a temptation to despair, there is a temptation to panic, to act impulsively, or to find consolation elsewhere. Just as Jesus’ time in the desert gives us insight into the trial of temptation, and Jesus on the Cross illuminates the forsakenness of the “dark night of the soul”, an earlier event in His life offers some clarity on that more gentle, but aggravating sense of a loss of His presence.

It’s appropriately labeled a mystery- “Finding Jesus in the Temple”—and the Gospel account can be found in Luke, chapter two . Joseph and Mary head to Jerusalem in a caravan for Passover, and Jesus accompanies them as a boy of twelve. After everything is done according to the law—and undoubtedly beautiful, fruitful moments have passed between Jesus and His parents as they speak of Jerusalem, God’s covenants, and the Mosaic Law—the Holy Family departs. But it turns out Jesus is not with them, and Joseph and Mary are, for three days, left with unimaginable imaginings about their son as they scour Jerusalem for him.

They must have thought they saw him several times, only for their hearts to drop when they realized it wasn’t him. Of course, we know they found him, and in the Temple no less, amazing the scribes with His wisdom. (Some of those scholars must have remembered Jesus when he returned twenty years later.) Both a peace and anxiety must have come over those holy parents—a peace to see Jesus already understanding and fulfilling His mission, and an anxiety that it has begun. What Mary and Joseph felt, thought, and did after that is speculation, or contemplation; we only know what is written in the Gospel account.

Twentieth-century Catholic writers Caryll Houselander and Adrienne von Speyr do just that—they speculate and contemplate what this event meant to the Holy Family. Both writers discuss the trial of trust that Mary and Joseph underwent in those three agonizing days. Von Speyr calls it “the school of noncomprehension”, the act of learning how to surrender one’s intellect in God’s intimate workings. She writes:

No Christian is spared the collision with God’s ever-greater reality or the blind obedience from man that is included in it and required by it. Christ’s parents, too, must already come to know in their Son the hidden presence of fathomless divine mysteries.

And when His parents confront Him in the temple, Christ still offers no explanation. He only asks, almost rhetorically, “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” This is not a rude retort, but Him pointing the way, the way of not needing to comprehend, but to follow. This is not the first time Mary and Joseph have been asked to obey without comprehension. And they will be asked to do this again, particularly Mary during Christ’s ministry and death, and so preparing all Christians to do the same: obey without comprehension. Through Mary and Joseph’s example, we see it’s not an occasion to grow angry or despair, but is cause for a “greater opening-up of [the] soul to God and, therefore, a new fruitfulness.”

Houselander writes that this story from the Gospel is revealed to us because Mary and Joseph “experienced the loss of the Child because it is an experience which we all have to go through, that our love may be sifted and purified.” Houselander calls this sense of loss “the most universal and most purifying.” She goes on to describe the different ways and circumstances we might experience this sense of loss. She even writes of people who may suffer daily emotional ups and downs, who feel keenly what they perceive to be the loss of Christ’s presence through scruples and irrational guilt—this disposition can walk with Mary and Joseph through Jerusalem.

If it is true that, as Von Speyr writes, “one does not approach the Cross with the understanding but only with the renouncing surrender of comprehension”, then periods of thirsting and seeking—whether from spiritual dryness, doubt, emotional instability, silence in prayer—promise to prepare us for the Cross that unites us to Jesus.

Handmaid of the Lord, Adrienne von Speyr
Reed of God, Caryl Houselander

flight into Egypt

I never gave much thought to the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. It was like an interlude in the greater story. The horror of Herod ordering the mass murder of baby boys drew all my attention. But in Maria von Trapp’s memoir Yesterday, Today, and Forever, she writes about when the Flight into Egypt began to resonate with her: as she and her family were fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria, one of her daughters needed comforting, so Maria had one of those parenting moments that I think we’ve all had—she opened her mouth to speak, and wasn’t sure what was about to come out of it. She proceeded to tell her daughter the story of another Family who had to flee for the safety and preservation of their lives. This Family, like the Von Trapps, only knew where they were going, but did not how they would survive or what dangers and surprises might be waiting for them along the way. For Maria von Trapp, it led her down years of research and pondering about details of the Holy Family’s life.

Since reading that book, I have caught glimpses of this mystery in scattered readings, prayers, and sermons; the most memorable are from the Seven Sorrows and Joys of St. Joseph and Caryll Houselander’s Reed of God.

The flight into Egypt is the 5^th Sorrow and Joy of St. Joseph. Meditations on this obviously differ from person to person, but Joseph’s primary sorrow would be having to leave Judea, and with that all his hopes and expectations of family life with Mary and Jesus. As a carpenter, he would have probably fashioned a cradle back in Nazareth, or maybe little toys, for the anticipated baby. And if you’ve ever traveled somewhere foreign that is especially hostile to your faith, there would of course be sorrow in the concern for safety. But what about Joseph’s joy? I imagine incredible things must have happened when God Himself strode into a land where pagan gods reigned. I imagine they would have scattered, though we don’t know for sure what happened. But, like all saints, Joseph must have marveled and rejoiced at the way God led them through the wilderness and miraculously provided. (Coptic Christians have a lot of wonderful traditions surrounding the Flight into Egypt, if you are interested in learning more.)

The irony—or rather, providence—could not have escaped Joseph, a man of God who knew Scripture, that he was leading his dear ones to safety into pagan Egypt, just as another Joseph, who God also spoke to through dreams, had done hundreds of years before.

In Reed of God, English mystic Houselander speculates that perhaps the Gifts of the Magi were used by Joseph to sell and purchase tools in order to earn a living while in Egypt (though according to some, Mary kept the myrrh for Jesus’ burial). Houselander, in her brilliant way of relating the Gospel to the everyday, also writes:

Everywhere the flight into Egypt goes on: the little home is forsaken, the child in peril, the innocents slain; everywhere the refugees—Jesus, Mary, Joseph—come to us: strangers, foreigners in a strange land from every country… For them all, Our Lady has answered, long ago: “Be it done unto me.”

From the Flight to Egypt, this call to mercy for refugees and the stranger is unmistakable, and one of those things that haunts me. It’s something I don’t pray enough about, and don’t do much about. It makes me uncomfortable in the best sense– something I know I need to listen to and act on.

Yet there is one aspect of the Flight that I can relate to: being told to “go” and “do” without a lot of details. Anyone who has ever been told, led in prayer, or forced to set out on a journey has faced the unknown. My husband often says that following God is like walking through a fog— backwards. We all have the opportunity to make our Flight into Egypt: to listen, pick up our mats, and walk. And without asking a lot of why’s and how’s. To carry only the unanticipated gifts God has given us, and to trust that He has given us just what we need.

the January blues

It was a relief to leave the hospital after having a baby (except the first time, I was mostly shocked that those professionals were sending me home with a new human). I was anxious to get through the transition of having a new baby, which I could only really start in our own home. But there was also a sense of dread as I anticipated the sleepless nights, aching body and breasts. And there’s the actual, clinical sense of dread that accompanies anxiety and depression, the onset of which I always felt as I crossed the threshold from the sliding doors of the hospital into the parking lot. I didn’t want to go back, but I didn’t really want to go forward.

The same kind of feeling, though not as strong and over-powering, comes over me in January. Christ has been born, the shepherds and wise men have dispersed, now the gifts are safely in the care of a little family fleeing for their lives into Egypt. It’s as though my heart is with the Holy Family as they transition from the stable, only they have something real to dread (which they probably didn’t, because they were, you know, holy, and totally trusted in God’s providence). My sense of dread isn’t for something real, like a madman hunting me down (like, Herod); it can probably be explained away with chemical mis-firings in the brain, hormones, or whatever. A piece of it is probably the shorter days, less light and a lot less sun. Maybe it’s the let-down of an exciting Christmas season—joy and stress jumbled together in my mom-brain.

And so the new year looms before me, a stranger: another adventure to live, joys to experience, sorrows to bear, laughter to hear, tears to shed, piles of laundry, loads of dishes, meals to cook, new shoes and coats to buy as those humans keep growing. There are people who are blessed with optimism and are able to look ahead at a strange new world with energy and excitement; I’m just one of those other kinds of people who looks ahead and thinks to herself, Steady the buffs, old girl. I think it’s something like, Hey, didn’t we just wrap up 2018? as though there should be an interim period of nothing-year where time stands still and no one has to do laundry.

In the meantime, regular exercise (or, irregular also has to work) getting a few precious quiet moments to think, the Sacraments, some great reads, old and new tunes, as well as a healthy diet (plus chocolate) all help with the chemical mis-firings and anxiety levels. And putting the year in perspective. (Also, it doesn’t hurt to chase a capsule of Vitamin D with a shot of whiskey.)