Filed under: Mary, Quotes from Great Christians, The Incarnation, Unborn Jesus
“Humanly speaking, the time of Advent must have been the happiest time of Our Lady’s life. The world about her must have been informed with more than its habitual loveliness, for she was gathering it all for the making of Her Son…
It must have been a season of joy, and she must have longed for His birth, but at the same time she knew that every step that she took, took her little Son nearer to the grave.
Each work of her hands prepared His hands a little more for the nails; each breath that she drew counted one more to His last.
In giving life to Him, she was giving Him death.
All other children born must inevitably die; death belongs to fallen nature; the mother’s gift to the child is life.
But Christ IS life; death did not belong to Him.
In fact, unless Mary would give Him death, He could not die.
Unless she would give Him the capacity for suffering, He could not suffer.
He could only feel cold and hunger and thirst if she gave Him HER vulnerability to cold and hunger and thirst.
He could not know the indifference of friends or treachery or bitterness of being betrayed unless she gave Him a human mind and a human heart.
That is what it meant to Mary to give human nature to God.
He was invulnerable; He asked her for a body to be wounded.
He was joy itself; He asked her to make Him a man.
He asked for hands and feet to be nailed.
He asked for flesh to be scourged.
He asked for blood to be shed.
He asked for a heart to be broken.
The stable at Bethlehem was the first Calvary.
The wooden manger was the first cross.
The swaddling bands were the first burial bands.
The passion had begun.
Christ was man.
This, too, was the first separation.
This was her Son, but now He was outside of her: He had a separate heart: He looked at the world with the blind blue eyes of a baby, but they were His own eyes.
The description of His birth in the Gospel does not say that she held Him in her arms but that she “wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger”.
As if her first act was to lay Him on the cross.
She knew that this little Son of hers was God’s Son and that God had not given Him to her for herself alone, but for the whole world.”
A meditation by Caryll Houselander from “The Reed of God”.
One of the subscribers to the e-newsletter sent this beautiful meditation to us. Thanks Diana.
