Time is on our side
And Mary said to the angel, “How can this be? ”The angel replied simply, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you.” So then Mary said, “May it be done to me according to thy word.”
– From Luke 1
Michael Gerson wrote last week, “Assurance at the heart of Advent is the antidote to fear. No matter how desperate the moment, we are told, time is on the side of hope.”
Roman Catholics celebrate Mary today with a Solemnity. She lived quite a life, at least from the day Gabriel appeared and announced that she was pregnant with the God-baby Jesus. Days of despair soon followed this announcement, followed by the pain of childbirth in a strange town without help or shelter (las pasadas). She and Joseph found themselves in and among the animals, God’s creation, those donkeys and cows and sheep and goats who shared their barn, and then in a birthing magical painful sticky moment comes God’s own child Jesus.
Just like the angel said.
Mary held her own, of course. Mary was quite a woman. She “treasured up all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). All her life hope will color her thoughts, shape her smile, and fill up her days, often in the face of suffering or persecution. And then, testing that hope to its breaking point, she watches her son die standing right there, at the foot of his cross.
Gerson, like many of us, is blown away by Mary’s response to Gabriel’s invitation.
This is perhaps the greatest human moment in the Bible – the calm and trusting response of a young Jewish girl to an absurd and epic request. She said simply, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
Mary immediately saw the revolutionary implications of the inexplicable child: “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
Our seeming indifferent universe might grind us down daily with its inevitable entropies and decays. But it is a reasonable choice, Gerson thinks, to greet that endless crouching, rising crashing wave with  bleak, hopeless dignity or with patient, hopeful longing. We choose as we acknowledge (or not) “hints of a reality beyond nature.”
Choosing hope, however, is far more difficult when we are caught in the trap Gerson describes as the fearful contemporary compulsion “dedicated not to the pursuit of dreams but to the avoidance of nightmares.”
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So then. This seems exactly the right time for the Solemnity celebrating Mary. And exactly the right time for us to rest in the waiting, darkening days of Advent, called to remember the patience God requires as the seed is planted, the seed explodes in the ground, the roots dig down deep and the green plant rises from the earth.
Thank you, Lord for showing me the endless and uncomplicated hope of sparrows and squirrels, vying for the food in our feeders. And thank you for teaching me to lift my eyes higher than the ground, and to always listen for bells ringing every hour, and to taste the food that you feed me.
https://www.davesandel.net/category/advent-and-christmas-devotions-2019/
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archive.php?year=2019
Michael Gerson, from his column in the Washington Post, December 5, 2019
“Time is on My Side.” Not the best Advent song, perhaps, but the Rolling Stones can really sing it out!
