Mary was chosen to bear Jesus because she kept her
purity intact. Those who know understand that to be pure means to be completely
adaptable, to flow with each moment, to be like a running stream cascading from
the waters of life itself. The eternal messenger is always within, waiting to
unfold the moment through the Word, and one day when Mary is recognized again,
there will be a reappearance of the Christ, manifested in the outer world.
Remember who Mary is.
Reshad
Field, in the Essential Sufism
I was part of an interfaith pilgrimage to the Holy Land in
2011, mostly Jews and Christians, with one Sufi thrown in the mix. The whole
idea was to visit each other’s sacred spots and to try to learn from each other
about our various traditions. We spent the majority of the trip in the south,
near Jerusalem, and then we went up north, visiting mostly the Christian spots.
Our first stop up north was Nazareth, and on our first morning we all piled
into the Basilica of the Annunciation. For being such a popular pilgrimage
spot, it was a lot less touristy than I thought it would be, and it had very
modern architecture. One of the features of the place is that there are plaques
in honor of Mary all over the walls in the plaza and in the basilica itself
from countries all over the world. When we were inside I happened to be walking
with my friend Rabbi Paula, who was one of the co-leaders of the trip, and at
one point we were standing in front of the plaque from Portugal that carried
the title “Mary Ark of the Covenant.” And Rabbi Paula looked oddly at me and
said, “What does that mean?” Obviously this is something very important to the
Jewish tradition––and especially to a rabbi!––and here I was, having to explain
to her how and why we had co-opted such a revered term for Mary. And so I
launched into it as best I could, and if I recall, rather fast and furiously,
the words just kind of tumbling out of my mouth, how I understood that we
believe that there is an aspect of God that we call the Word, and that Word is
the very principle of intelligence and intentionality in the universe; and as
St. John explains it in his Gospel, that Word is not only with God, but that Word is God, like the Word that God spoke and all things came
into being, as the Psalmist says, or the Wisdom that was at play at God’s side
all the while. It’s what lies before all specific laws or dogmas, even before
the Law as articulated in the Torah and the Ten Commandments––the covenant––,
like the Tao that Lao Tzu says is before all virtues. And that Word is always
being spoken to us, transmitted to us, but we can’t hear it in the sense of
fully receive it. It’s in sighs to deep for words, as St Paul says, perhaps like the OM that hums beneath all created
things. But we believe that Mary was a human being so pure, so receptive, that
she was able to fully receive that Word, so much so that it became something in
her; it took root like a seed in the garden of her womb; it took flesh in her,
it became a baby, and she named that baby Jesus, in whom we believe the
fullness of divinity dwelt bodily because he was that very Word made flesh. And
so we believe that this is the new covenant,
or better, the fulfillment of the covenant: this is what God had intended all
along, for there to be no separation between heaven and earth, that we would
share in divinity through, with and in the Word. And so Mary, pregnant with
Jesus, is the ark of this new covenant, because she is carrying the
Word-made-flesh inside her.
There was a guy on the trip who was a wonderful older man, a
little less sophisticated than the rabbi, the minister, the monk, the Sufi and
rest of the crowd, but totally fearless, and he was always saying things that
were filled with a kind of childlike wonder. I didn’t know it but he was
standing at my shoulder listening to my whole discourse, and when I had
finished, and Paula and I were standing there nearly in tears over this moving
moment, suddenly this guy busts out and says right into my ear, “You know I
never thought of it like that. So this is kinda where the whole thing got
started, huh?” And suddenly I thought to myself, You know, I actually had never
thought of it that way before either. And I said, “Ya, you’re right. This is where it all got started, with Mary receiving the
Word so deeply into her heart that it became something in her; actually it
became someone in her body.”
In the Jewish tradition there is a type of literature called
midrash, which is exegesis and commentary
on scripture. Often its moral principles and theological concepts, but midrashim are also trying to explain the full meaning of the
biblical law, and find the hidden or new meanings in scripture. Sometimes it
almost seems as if some of the Christian scriptures started out as simply midrash on the Jewish scriptures. And we are one step
removed: we’re trying to understand the Christian scriptures that are trying to
understand the Jewish ones. And such is especially the case today. It’s as if
Luke is doing midrash on 2
Samuel.
Our naming of Mary the new Ark of the Covenant is no
accident. It’s not that very well hidden at all in Luke’s gospel. This Sunday
we read the story of what we call the Visitation, when Mary, pregnant with
Jesus, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John, who will
be the Baptizer. And Elizabeth says that At the moment the sound of you
greeting met my ear, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Not only does Luke use the same Greek word––skirtan––“dance,” for what John the Baptist is doing in his
mother’s womb as the Septuagint uses for what David does before the Ark, but
the whole layout of the story is strikingly similar. It’s almost as if Luke is
purposely using the story of David bringing the Ark of the Covenant into
Jerusalem as a literary framing device. So it is actually Luke who is telling
us that this is the new law, the new covenant, and, as he does throughout the
infancy narratives, telling us that this is the fulfillment, as Elizabeth says,
of the promises of the Lord; and John is dancing before the ark that/who Mary
is. So this could be seen as Luke’s midrash on 2 Samuel.
But there is also something interesting going on in the
section we hear from the letter to the Hebrews today. The author to the letter
to Hebrews quotes Ps 40, but actually misquotes it, or else purposely changes
it. Psalm 40 says, Sacrifice and offerings you did not desire, but an open
ear. But here Hebrews says, Sacrifice and offerings you
did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me. So the ear has become a whole body, or the whole body has become like
an open ear. I used to think that ‘body’ referred to Jesus’ body, and maybe it
does, but it strikes me now that it could just as well refer to Mary’s body. Mary,
whose whole body was a listening, a receptivity, an open ear––the ear of her
body, the ear of her soul, as well as the ear of her heart, as St Benedict
calls it, her spirit. This is why she could say, My whole being
rejoices in God my savior. Her whole body
was a vessel, not just her mind or her soul, nor some kind of disembodied
spirit. This body of Mary is a living breathing blood-filled pulsing grounded
vessel. Her sacrifice was her whole being, including her body. Maybe this is
why Paul tells us, in imitation of Mary, to offer [our] bodies as
living sacrifices, holy and acceptable, to God, your spiritual worship. The psalmist tells us, and the author to the letter
to the Hebrews interprets for us: as fine as they are, ultimately God does not
really want our ritual sacrifices and liturgical offerings, holocausts offered
on the altar. What God really requires of us is what those sacrifices and
offerings are supposed to symbolize. What Jesus’ ultimate prayer was, in the
midst of the Our Father as well as in the garden of Gethsemane, is what God
requires: Behold I have come to do your will. An open ear, a body offered up as a
spiritual sacrifice, our whole being––body,
soul and spirit available to be a vehicle, a vessel, an instrument. One of our
monks the other day in our scripture study, what we call collatio, said this is what the yogis are trying to
accomplish. I was quite pleased to hear someone else say that. Yes, that’s
right: that’s what I think the yogis are trying to accomplish, that the whole
person becomes a vessel of divinity.
This is the great turnaround, the extra step that most
spiritual traditions are hesitant to take, all the way from classical Yoga
through Christianity: that the body is not just a vehicle––though even that
much has taken us a long time to accept, that the body is a vehicle. We tend to
think in the spiritual life that we peel it off like a banana peel and throw if
away (that phrase of Fr Tom Ryan that I like so much) so we can be ‘spiritual.’
But somehow this whole great story all the way from the Annunciation straight
through to the Ascension is trying to convey something more to us yet: that not
only is the body a worthy vehicle, an instrument, a hinge, as Tertullian would
say––it is the field, it is that which gets transformed. My whole being.
And somehow this is
the fulfillment of the promise that started out with the promise to Abraham. As
Paul says in 1 Corinthians, a little phrase that haunted Teilhard de Chardin, God
will be all in all. Jesus will say in reference to his own
mother, Blessed are all those
who hear the word of God and keep it.
They/we each of us become arks of the covenant if we but stake our claim on
this promise, that God will be all in all, if we offer even our bodies as spiritual sacrifices, though not something to be burned up and destroyed,
but something to be transformed into a vessel and then transfigured, sharing in
the promise of the resurrection, if we but offer ourselves up for that Word to
take root in the ground of our very being. Isaac of Stella wrote that “every
Christian is also believed to be bride of God’s Word, a mother of Christ, … at
once virginal and fruitful.”
Saint Benedict says that the monk’s whole life should be a
little Lent, but I always thought you could just as easily say that a monk’s
whole life was a little Advent, watching and waiting, the vigil, the longing. I
remember in a discussion I had once with a Buddhist monk, he said that for them
the monk’s main practice was meditation––zazen in his tradition, emptying the mind and sitting. Actually they don’t
even want to call it meditation in the Zen tradition; it’s shikantaza––“just sitting.” This is from the Shobogenzo of Dogen zen-ji (5–10):
One day Ejo asked, “What should we
diligently practice in the monastery?”
Dogen instructed,
“Shikantaza (Just sitting)! Whether you are upstairs or under a
lofty building, sit in samadhi!”
Whereas, this monk said, the main practice of you Christian
monks seems to be chanting the psalms. And I said, “No, I think our main
practice is actually listening.” We even
only chant the psalms so that we can hear them; we’re singing them to each other so that we can listen to them.
Now, I am quite devoted to silent meditation as well, but I think that even
that practice is about something more. As our master Romuald says, “Empty
yourself completely and sit waiting.” So the listening presupposes a certain
silence, but when we empty ourselves, we wait; while we meditate we listen, but
‘listening’ in the absolute broadest sense of the word, listening as a symbol
of receptivity, like the receptivity of a fruitful virginal womb. Hence, the first word of the Prologue
to St Benedict’s Rule for monks is, Listen! But it’s a special kind of listening: he goes on, Incline
the ears of your heart. It’s that same
heart that Benedict tells us at the end of the Prologue to the Rule that we
have to prepare along with our bodies for the battle of holy
obedience to his instructions (in other
words, the Word); and then as we
run on the path of God’s commandments (again,
the Word), when they really take
root in us those same hearts will overflow with the inexpressible
delight of love. And I think it’s that
inexpressible delight of love that is exactly the Word made flesh, the
exuberance that is the dynamic behind creation, now happening in us.
I was happy to serendipitously run into the exact same
sentiment in the writings of John Main the other day, specifically referring to
the Christmas season.
For Benedict, the first quality we
all require if we would respond to Christ and be open to his life in our hearts
is the capacity to listen. The first word of the Rule is ‘Listen!’ And as you
all know, this capacity is one of the great fruits of meditation, which teaches
us that the condition of true listening is silence. We can only listen to the word spoken to us by
another if we ourselves are silent of all words. (Silence and
Stillness, Dec. 22)
So, silence ought to be the fundamental condition of our
heart. We empty ourselves, and sit, waiting.
