God’s embrace

Today’s readings: Numbers 6, 22-27; Galatians 4, 4-7; Luke 2, 16-21.

At the start of a new year, there is always the desire to renew something deep inside us, to sense our capacity for finding the healing light in our darkness, to restore our calling to redeem humanity and the world. In our desperate struggles, and mingled with our hopes, there is also disillusionment and confusion. Lately we have also been seeing deep anger in the hearts of many. But there is hope for humanity.

Too much happens day by day that overwhelms our spirit and easily overshadows the core message which should be the focus of the Christmas festivities. Little do we give notice at times to the big truth that the Jesus message is an event, not just a message. An event that has the force of change.

Where can we find again the force that draws our spirits upwards? In the absence of inspiration and creativity around us, where can we find the sources for spiritual growth and fresh vision? Pope Benedict has proclaimed this coming year as the Year of Faith precisely because he firmly believes the essence of the crisis of the churches is the crisis of faith.

In the face of what we can call the faith-fatigue syndrome, faith needs to be recovered as the living force that keeps us going. The challenge ahead is to find a powerful remedy against this fatigue.

At the start of a new calendar year, we celebrate liturgically Mary’s maternity, and, in the footsteps of Pope Paul VI, we celebrate the World Day of Peace, with the emphasis this year on the right attitudes of the heart to wait for the dawn and the need to educate young people in whom “this expectation is particularly powerful and evident”.

Mary’s being the Mother of God cannot be dissolved into something symbolic. Theologians throughout the ages have often warned against the subtle spiritualism that perceives the fleshly conception and birth of Jesus Christ as a mere ‘parable’ of an eternal and universal birth of God in the soul.

Historicity is something that pertains to the very nature of Christianity and it rejects any dualistic distortion which has always sought to spiritualise the incarnation. In the religion of the incarnation, Christ’s indwelling of the soul is both flesh-ly and spiritual. That is what we technically term ‘sacramental’.

When we speak of change, of rebirth, of new creation, it is a flesh-and-blood affair. One of the most ancient icons of the Byzantine tradition, ‘Our Lady of the Sign’, shows the Theotokos (Mother of God) with her hands extended in prayer and with the Holy Child in her womb.

In his commentary on a late 16th century Russian version of this icon, Leonid Ouspensky, in The Meaning of Icons, suggests that the icon emphasises the “cosmic significance of the Mother of God” and her role in the world’s restitution, for she has “renewed the whole world in her womb”.

Our life, as we often remind ourselves at each start of a new year, is a pilgrimage through time. It is mysterious and cannot be reduced to something mechanic as we very often tend to do.

This is not just a religious issue. It concerns humanity and our humanness. That is why the major alternative worldviews of the modern age affect and challenge society and its norms, our daily living and beliefs, and ultimately our well-being.

We are easily led to believe that the problems of life can be resolved by human ingenuity. God in this climate ends up being an unnecessary hypothesis. Yet we sense the deep desire of values that are shared across the human family and that go beyond race and religion. Like the blessings in the Book of Numbers, they are timeless values rooted in the vision we need to recover.

Paul in the second reading speaks of “the appointed time”. He is not speaking about a time of reckoning, but about God’s grace that can transform any time, any disillusionment, any fear as a time opportune enough for God’s love to embrace us all.