Monday, December 30, 2024
Sixth Day of Christmas
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Anchorites
Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Yet the world and its enticement are passing away.
Like every anchorite, Anna must have had her doubts. Bad days and good days. Which world did she live in, or were both worlds one? Heaven and earth. Where was the line between them? Was there a line at all, after all?
Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice! Whoever does the will of God remains forever.
Incarnation, the word Paul used to describe Jesus’ becoming man, starts with the root word carnal. I think of butchers, and meat, and blood, as well as unhealthy physical desire But especially blood. Drink my blood, Jesus said, and you will be whole, healed, and enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Doesn’t this incorporate earth into heaven? The corporal with the spiritual, the temporal with the eternal? Those Greek divisions don’t exist in the Hebrew, I’ve been told. We are one.
Anna was advanced in years. She lived with her husband seven years and then as a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple.
Perhaps you have heard some of fourteenth century Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, “showings,” revealed to her after she became deathly ill in her 30’s and then recovered. She spent the rest of her life voluntarily confined in a room anchored to the church at Norwich, built onto the church’s wall with only a window for her to receive food and visits from penitents who coveted her prayers.
He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: “It is all that is made.”
She asked God why the onset of sin was not prevented.
Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that is needed by me, answered with these words and said: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’
“These words were said most tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any who shall be saved.”
Now we are honoring Anna, who took the baby Jesus into her arms and blessed him. She knew him without being told anything by Mary or Joseph. Never leaving her own synagogue, an anchorite herself, she conversed often with the Holy Spirit in fasting and prayer.
Coming forward at that very time, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. And as they returned to Nazareth, the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
In her body, in her words, in her life on earth, Anna inhabited the Kingdom of heaven, brought to her by Jesus, brought to her in her own chronos time, in a Kairos moment of supreme unity and joy. All will be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Today a great light has come upon the earth.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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