Soulwork Toward Sunday: self-guided retreat
Advent 4 (year c), December 23, 2012
"Prepare Him Room"
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| Visitation,Flemish Miniaturist,1520-5 |
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| In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." -Luke I:39-45
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On This Week’s prompts for personal meditation
The image of an unborn child leaping for joy in the presence of the Holy Spirit calls you and me to that same wild and primal instinct. Emulating the babe in Elizabeth’s womb, bounded by water and taut flesh, nearly deaf and blind and without reference to meaning, time, or fate, quickens in us the possibilities of holy Recognition.
This image of waking in the womb begins this week’s prompts (meditation one). Once awakened, we turn toward allowing ourselves appropriation of those qualities of the One we receive and increasingly give room to (meditation two), further recognizing the One hidden in plain sight after all (meditation three).
May Christ at his coming, find in us a mansion prepared for himself.
-Suzanne
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Meditation One (introit)
waking in the womb
Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother's body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.
Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!
What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered Christ? …
-Thomas Merton 1915-1968
From The Quickening of John the Baptist (1949)
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Mary's Song of Subversion
My soul proclaims the greatness of our God
my spirit rejoices in You O God my savior
for you have looked with favor on your lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
You, the Almighty, have done great things for me,
and holy is your Name.
You have mercy on those who fear you
in every generation.
You have shown the strength of your arm,
and scattered the proud in their conceit.
You have cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich you have sent away empty.
You have come to the help of your servant Israel,
for you have remembered your promise of mercy,
the promise You made to our ancestors,
Abraham, Sarah, and their children for ever.
Magnificat, after Luke 1:46-55
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| Visitation, Piero di Cosimo, 1489-90 |
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| Madonna of the Magnificat, Detail, Sandro Botticelli, 1480 |
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Meditation Two (insight)
room within ourselves
We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.
Meister Eckhart 1260-1328
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Meditation Three (integration)
room for others
It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.
But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that he speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that he gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that he walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that he longs for shelter. And giving shelter for food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ. …
If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head, and the moon under her feet, then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her, nor is it Christ’s way for himself, now when he is disguised under every type of humanity that treads the earth.
Dorothy Day 1897-1980 Selected Writings, ed Robert Ellsberg
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The Last Word
Hark! the glad sound!
The Savior comes,
the Savior promised long;
let every heart
prepare a throne,
and every voice a song.
-Philip Doddridge (1702-51)
Hymnal 1982 # 72
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| Annunciation, Bonfigli, 1455 (detail- St. Luke writes the Gospel near his patient winged ox) |
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Visitation
I was months into the heaviness
Of child-carrying,
swaybacked and swollen, and my husband
Mute as an old stone—
So that I heard it all the louder when Miriam’s shout
Reached me from the dust-choked road outside.
I raced out to see her standing there,
Glowing with sweat, her body just beginning
To take on a mother’s curves beneath her robes.
And then the child that nestled sweet
Beneath my heart
Leapt—not a simple turning, not a kick,
But jumped as if some new and secret joy
Had set him dancing: and it was then I knew—
Knew who it was she bore within herself.
Later some would call it solemn, grand; but truthfully,
We laughed as we embraced: breast to breast,
Cheek to smiling cheek,
And I know that both our sons
were laughing too,
in that way of old friends meeting
after years,
when all time seems as nothing,
and the space
between lives collapses
into grace.
-Anne Giedinghammer
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Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
-The Book of Common Prayer
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