To Walk with Saints and Scholars

Today is the day tradition tells us Jesus was born. It is, therefore, the day that Mary gave birth to the child Jesus. So it follows that today is the day Mary learned to pray.

Mothers have always spoken medicine over their babes. Prayers and incantations come unbidden from the mouths of those who know that something sacred has joined us here and yet also know that “here” is often a hard place to be. Mary is lauded for her “yes” to giving life to Jesus, but how often do we remember she was also saying “yes” to a lifetime of trying to keep him alive, saying “yes,” in fact, to the reality that one day he would die. The child she gave birth to could, at any moment, be taken from her, and she didn’t need to know the end of his story to know that. Every woman giving birth in her time and place knew that the lives of her children would be fraught with illness and danger. Most would not make it to full maturity. So Mary’s “yes” was also her “yes” to a lifetime of prayer. She prayed for protection, she prayed for peace, she prayed for wisdom and she prayed for strength for the life born in her on Christmas Day. And this Christmas day, it is with her that we should pray.

Because today (and every day we allow it to be so) Christ is also born in us. We are Christ’s hands and feet doing God’s work in the world. We are the face of God for those we meet and the eyes with which God looks with compassion on the world. And that incarnation, that being a body living in the world, is a sacred thing. But it is also a hard place to be. Two thousand years of repeating Christ’s teachings have not settled the conflicts, solved the troubles, or subjugated those who misuse their authority and power. Yet we are not off the hook from doing the loving and the speaking up and the standing firm just because it is hard… or because it is still not done. The work is mine and ours to do even in all its difficulty precisely because giving birth to Christ’s love in the world is sacred, and we will need protection, peace, wisdom and strength to do it.

So this Christmas, it is with Mary, Holy, we should pray. As we give birth again to the love of God in the world, we must pray for protection for the charge we have been given. When our spirits and energies flag under the weight of the world’s needs, we must pray. We must pray for the peace that allows us to hear what God’s work is for us now and next. When our minds reel with all there is to be done, we must pray. We must pray for wisdom to use our oh-so-human limitations to bring about beauty nonetheless. When we feel insufficient to the tasks and overwhelmed at the ask, we must pray. And we must pray for the strength to receive the love God has for us and the faith God has in us. Because God believes in us and in our abilities to make the world as God would have it – a world of hope, peace, joy and love….no matter how complicated. With Mary, Holy, we should pray so that we can continue, even in complicated ways and in a complicated place, to say “Yes.”