Beloved,
I hope this day finds you safe and healthy. I did not get any snow but the rain was fierce and the wind ferocious. I actually saw the wind take a kayak from the top spot of the kayak holder and slam it to the ground. The lake yesterday was frozen from one side to the other. Today all the ice is gone and the wind is having fun playing with the water. I am wishing you a wonderful Christmas season. My newsletter today is different from what I usually send but this touched me to the core of my soul. Maybe it is because I am a woman but I never really thought of the celebration of Jesus’ birth quite in this way.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Mary’s Wholehearted Call
Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) found inspiration in Mary’s courageous “yes” to God:
Perhaps it is because I am neck-deep in a season of motherhood and caretaking that I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment . . . yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.
I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God’s story. Yet I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation.
Evans honors the unique role that Mary, and women everywhere, play in humanity’s physical incarnation:
It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccupping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap. . . .
God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”. . .
To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.
Love and Light
Mary Grace
https://www.thewoundedchalice.com
