Magazine letter for January 2023
After the thrill of candles and cribs, presents and turkeys, the scramble of the sales takes over – the shops rip down the decorations and bargain hunting rules the day. Christmas is well and truly over, and Epiphany is ignored.
Not surprisingly this is not what church tradition would teach or hope for. The period after the spectacular is for reflection, a time to contemplate what it all might mean. At the end of St Luke’s account of the shepherds at the crib there were a couple of sentences appropriate to this post-festival mood:
“But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.”
The appropriate response to most great and momentous events is to sit in thought and wonder – often with no great conclusion. Somehow just the act of contemplation alone is enough for us to deepen our awareness of what has taken place. For thousands of years countless men and women have devoted their lives to contemplation of one kind or another, in every religious tradition known, because the truths that religion teaches go beyond the head and speak to the heart. That is after all what makes them spiritual truths. It is often only with our feelings and emotions, things that lie beneath thought and intellect, that we can appreciate, and learn to wonder at, the remarkable and the extraordinary.
If there is one thing that can be said with some confidence concerning the Virgin Mary it is that she was there at the beginning and at the end. The fact that the Acts of the Apostles also mentions her at the beginning of the new beginning – the birth of the church – leads one to believe that her pondering helped to prepare her for what was to come. Not by giving her foreknowledge, but by readying her for the very unpredictability of the ways of God – and the inadequacy of the assumptions we make about him.
The song Luke gives her in his account was that of a revolutionary reversal in the values of her society, the lifting up of the poor and the casting down of the rich. She has heard similar from her son, and has watched him die the death of a worthless criminal. Songs of salvation and redemption – his very name Jesus, Joshua, Saviour – must have seemed extraordinarily hollow. And yet she may well have been prepared for surprising beginnings from unpromising endings.
As the year turns and the days lengthen, may we find surprising new beginnings from unpromising endings.
William