We tend to engineer life more than just live it. We are all overstimulated and drowning in options. We are trained to be managers, to organize life so as to make things happen. This is what has built Western civilization. It is not all bad, but if you transfer that to the spiritual life, it is pure heresy. It doesn’t work. It is not Gospel. We might be economically rich but not usually spiritually fertile.
If Mary was trustfully carrying Jesus during this time, it is because she knew how to receive spiritual gifts, in fact the spiritual gift. She is probably the perfect image of how fertility and fruitfulness break into this world.
If we ourselves try to manage God in any way, or even to manage ourselves, we will never bring forth the Christ but only our small selves. The Eternal Christ, you might say, is precisely that part of you that you have received as a gift.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent
“The life of Jesus is not just for his own time and for the time that has come after him, but is for men and women of all time. His redeeming work has been available to every member of the human family from the beginning of the world. This perspective involves what might be called vertical time: the eternal values breaking into horizontal or chronological time. … Thus, at each moment of our lives the eternal values that have come into the world through Christ are available to everyone as historical time unfolds. Our historical lifetime is given us precisely to grow into vertical time, which scripture calls ‘eternal life.'” … The Word of God was always present beyond time. In the incarnation, he become present in time”
~Thomas Keating, “The Incarnation,” The Heart of the World
G. K. Chesterton wrote, “When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he [sic] for the first time has begun to live.”
Jesus in his proclamation of the kingdom told us what we could prefer to life itself. The Bible ends by telling us we are called to be a people who could say, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20), who could welcome something more than business as usual and live in God’s Big Picture. We all have to ask for the grace to prefer something to our small life because we have been offered the Shared Life, the One Life, the Eternal Life, God’s Life that became visible for us in this world as Jesus.
What we are all searching for is Someone to surrender to, something we can prefer to life itself. Well here is the wonderful surprise: God is the only one we can surrender to without losing ourselves! The irony is that we actually find ourselves, but now in a whole new and much larger field of meaning.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations fo
