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Reflection for December 10, 2006

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We're not speaking of Arnold Drive

In this the sixth year of the presidency of George W. Bush, while Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California and Tony Blair prime minister of Great Britain, during the opening days of the presidency of Felipe Calderon of Mexico and the closing terms of Alan Selig and Paul Tagliabue as commissioners of Major League Baseball and the National Football League respectively, the word of the Lord is heard among us once more as it has been during every and whatever regime over the past two thousand years.

And its message remains the same: Allow God (for once in your life) direct access to your mind and heart. Make straight his path; fill in every pothole to make his access smooth. Eliminate all speed bumps designed to slow down his approach. Eliminate all twists and turns, the detours you set up to divert his influence, the diversions you yourself undertake to divert his influence. Rather pave his way for him, bulldoze all the clutter, devote more time to thinking about him, about all that he stands for, about all that you long for from deep within yourself. Ponder the meaning of your life, the things that are of primary concern to you.

It's Advent time, Advent meaning the arrival, the return of Christ amid the darkness that dominates our world, the worries that becloud our lives - the rebirth of Christ in our midst to establish our lives upon a firmer foundation. Listen to more of what the word of the Lord has to say: All mankind is grass, that lasts no longer than a flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades but the word of God endures forever. So now is the time to embrace that Word both in its biblical expression and in Christ who is that Word made flesh, made Eucharist to dwell among us as the one foundation that can keep us from fading away, from being swept away - unlike the foundation of sand, of contesting ideologies and passing fancy and fashion upon which we seem to build our lives.

It's time to get real, to put first things first, to make of our hearts new Nazareths where Christ can be conceived again; to make of our minds new Bethlehems where Christ and all that he stands for can be born again - where he may grow to a maturity within us that will chase out all those money changers who have taken over the sanctuary of our soul.

Which reminds me of a poem by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, which he called "The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe". In it he imagined the Mother of Christ as the atmosphere, the air that surrounds us and keeps us alive: I say that we are wound / With mercy round and round / As if with air; the same / Is Mary . . . / She, wild web, wondrous robe, / Mantles the guilty globe, . . ./ And men are meant to share / Her life as life does air.

And here's the part that echoes what I said about our becoming new Nazareths: She holds high motherhood / Towards all our ghostly good / And plays in grace her part / About man's beating heart . . . / And makes, O marvelous! / New Nazareths in us, / Where she shall yet conceive / Him, morning, noon, and eve; / New Bethlehems, and he born / There, evening, noon, and morn.

In this modern era of so many potentates like the ones named in Jesus' time (remote, preoccupied with so many things "superior" to Nazareth and Bethlehem) - since even the public display of Christ's birthday is "incorrect", don't we have all the more reason to cradle him in our hearts and become ourselves living, walking, talking displays of his arrival in our world?

-- Geoff Wood