Fr. Daniel Manger, OSB Cam

In this season, we recall our ancient sojourn in faith and in the final coming of the Light of all lights, who will manifest a justice and peace and liberation with joy. Such a Light, although longed for, has often been avoided in our lives as we lack hospitality toward the Light who is justice, peace, reconciliation and hope.

Caverns of our heart-spirits remain darkened, un-enlightened passages. This is confounded by the paradox that we are often uncomfortable with what is exposed in the Light while, at the same, we are longing for it.

Hilda Graef in her book Mary: A History of Doctrine & Devotion comments that in the earliest times of the first Christians a question arose; “Why did the coming of the Messiah remain such an obscure hidden event? 

This question still mystifies Christians today, who with the various tinseled remembrances of the birth of the Savior forget the humble and look for the drama of grandiosity in a wonderland image that resembles more of a Magic Kingdom of Mickey Mouse than that of the rugged impoverished reality of Bethlehem and Nazareth in the time of Jesus. 

The early question of the Christian still goads us. And this is good because it gets under the veneer of our tinsel and holiday lighting. How could God become so humble and obscure and bring such a great message and render a breakthrough into our personal and collective hopeless darkness?

We can look to Mary of Nazareth. We, like Mary, are always in preparation for an annunciation of our own, a visitation and a birth of something God desires to gift us with which is the Light that is peace and joy. The Light dispels darkness with Love’s warmth and possibility.

Yet to be disposed to this gift, is to become dispossessed of many things we have been taught to value. What shape or manifestation does this gift of Light take in my day-to-day life in the season of Christmas?

Do I understand a measure of humility, as a Christian disciple of the Word, in my littleness and meager efforts to give back something that has been missing in hospitality for the poor, for the troublesome, the out-casts and those who have been forgotten by collective indifference?  If this emerges out of one’s dark blindness, then perhaps the annunciation is occurring in my personal journey and calling me to a life of sharing amidst the cold winds of self-absorption that insulate us from the warmth and the true Light that is Christmas.

As Mary’s spiritual revelation reminds us our God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the ages is dwelling in caverns of my heart “amidst the cold of winter when half spent was the night.”

Let us celebrate the return of the Light, joyously.