4 Advent C December 20, 2015
Micah 5:2-4 Song of Mary
Heb.10:5-10 Luke 1:39-56
Lectionary Link
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; *
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed: *
the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him *
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, *
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel, *
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
The promise he made to our fathers, *
to Abraham and his children for ever.
Expectant moms, Elizabeth and Mary get together to exchange stories. One can project our modern penchant for documenting accuracy upon this encounter by assuming that Mary just pushed the record button on her iPhone as she waxes eloquent in the spontaneous Song of Mary. Or one can assume that Mary wrote it down herself on the spot or at a later time. Or one could assume that she recounted it to someone in the early church to write down. Or one could assume it was a composition of someone in the Lucan church community who was familiar with the song and poetic tradition of Hannah, the barren mother who conceived and bore the famous judge Samuel. It is always nicer to enjoy the assumptions that things really did happen in exactly the way in which the Gospel of Luke recounts the setting of the composition of the Song of Mary. On the other hand, one does not do damage to the Christian message with an understanding of the Song of Mary being a song which expresses the beatific vision of every Christian who through the process of mystagogy realized the conception and the birth of Christ within one's life. After all, Paul who wrote before the Gospels were written, wrote that Christ lived so much within him that he did not know if his inside "I" was he or Christ. He also stated that Christ in you, is the hope of glory. And so the mystagogy is placed within the Gospel story of Mary conceiving the life of Jesus within her through the action of the Holy Spirit. And when another person recognized the significance of such a conception, there results a song of mystical union, the Song of Mary. It is Mary's song, because of the literal birth of Jesus, but it is also the song of everyone who has had the mystical experience of the life of Christ born within themselves.
Song, poetry and art have their own self authenticating reality. Interpreters make a mistake if they take the words of song and poetry and try to find one to one corresponding empirical events in the external worlds because poetry exudes a hope which has the expression of perfecting bliss unattainable in the physical world. The experience of bliss is actually attaining the unattainable.
The Song of Mary, the famous Magnificat might be seen as something like a Broad Way Musical called the Song of the Visitation of Blessed Mary. Two women sharing women-only secrets of being a person with a person-to-be within them, the blessed estate of being with child. Mary and Elizabeth sharing a special irony on the world as expectant moms with babies of destiny within them. What mom does not dream about the providential destiny of her babe? But Mary and Elizabeth are two women who are revisited and become the pleasing prose and poetic puppets of the preachers of the early church to present the message of the spirituality of the church's practice. Mary and Elizabeth become the teaching foils of the early church.
The event in the face value of the words present a pleasing "as if" charming story onto which the beauty of shared gestational joy can be projected but it ultimately has to give way to appreciating it as the prose and poetry of the early church.
The prose of the Visitation is the appeal of the followers of Jesus to the followers of John the Baptist, in short saying, "Even when John was a fetus in his mother's womb, he jumped with excitement to know that the one who would be born after him would be his successor." And if John, used fetal gymnastics to send a message through his mother Elizabeth to Mary, then surely the followers of John the Baptist could come into the experience of the different kind of baptism of Jesus Christ. John baptized with the waters of the Jordan River; Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit. Jesus would send as the Risen and Ascended Christ, an over-shadowing of the Holy Spirit and conceive the mystical experience of the birth of Christ into any soul willing to accept invitations of such an impending conception of a new divine life coming into one's life.
The mystical experience of having the life of Christ born within oneself and to know like Paul, that, It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives within me; this experience is the kind of experience which inspires the poetry of the Song of Mary.
Mary is the paradigm in story form of the mystical birth experience of Christ into the life of a person. And in this mystical birth experience there is the occasion for ecstatic utterance, the poetry of the divinized inwards of a person pours forth. St. Paul actually believed that he was given suffering to keep him humble in light of the expansive mystical experiences which he had. Mystical experiences authenticate themselves and inspire excessive language. It is a language that makes a person seem like being nakedly exposed unless someone has experience something akin to such a spiritual awaking.
In the spiritual experience of the birth of Christ within oneself, one experiences such smallness because of the overwhelming oceanic engulfing presence of God. Yes, one can easily commit humility and resort to using the courtly term Lord, for the One who is so superior one feels totally comfortable with groveling.
So much of religious discussion turns out to be selfish conversation about being saved or salvation; in the mystical experience one is less concerned by one's selfish sense of salvation. One is overwhelmed by the Savior and the favor that one feels because of being approached to have a relationship with the Savior.
One feels blessed, as in blessed are the poor in spirit, because one feels warmed by a much Greater Spirit. The experience is so indelible that it makes one confess its eternality. All generations will call me blessed, not because we want rosary prayers said to us perpetually, but because we have an experience of the everlasting.
The experience is an event of grace; one does not feel like one has done anything to deserve it. And one feels like one has been given permission to call the king and president by their first name, or the secret hidden names that lovers only use in arousal. Holy is God's name or special in the event of such loving communion.
The mystical event inspires uncontrollable confessions. This God and lover is not just for me; this lover has mercy on everyone who looks on with awestruck heart for Great love.
The mystical event inspires us to say things which we do not really believe have been verified in empirical experience, like, the strength of God's arm in scattering the conceitful proud. The event allows one to experience a parallel reality of heaven not yet realized in my actual earth. Too many of the lowly are still lowly and the powerful ones on their thrones still tyrannize the lowly. But not in the orgasm of mystical experience. In the experience one is assumed into the parallel heavenly realm to confess the will of heaven, not yet done on earth. In this state of heavenly assumptions, tables are turned, justice is realize, the hungry are fed, the rich are given the experience of empathy with the poor.
And one experiences Israel as symbol for heavenly citizenry, because the actual earthly Israel has mostly been the quest of the favored and chosen ones in search of an actual hospitable place to live in perpetual peace, something which has only been sporadic and short-lived in actual earthly experience.
And this promise was given to Abraham but why not just say also to Adam and Eve? The promise is so available that it is co-extensive with human experience as it has come to be stated in human language. The promise of the arising of the divine image upon one's life is always already and whether Abraham or Confucius are figureheads of one's ancient lineage, the point is that the divine image upon humanity has a way of becoming manifest within all peoples and races.
Mary, and her song is the witness and a poem of the ecstatic birth of Christ within oneself as an event of the arising of the image of God upon the human soul.
And so we prepare ourselves for the specific season of Christmas, because the possibility of Christmas as the event of the birth of Christ within us is an always, already reality.
I wish for all the ecstatic reality of the Song of Mary. Amen.
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