Now when the magi had departed, behold an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and His mother and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy Him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This
And she gave birth to her first born Son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. -Luke 2:7 In the Mexican culture, there is a Christmas-time tradition called Las Posadas. In this tradition, a couple dressed up as Mary and Joseph go from home to home, asking if there is any room at “the inn.” Each home takes on the
And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. -Matthew 1:18 God’s grand plan for our salvation involved incarnating the Word of God into the flesh, for God to become like one of us. And this would happen in a way that was both miraculous and understandable. The understandable
And she gave birth to her first born Son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. -Luke2:7 Every Nativity play I have ever watched has a scene where Mary and Joseph go to an inn and are told that there are no rooms available. They are, however, told that there is a stable out back and are shown to a
St. Ephraim the Syrian: If he was not flesh . . . And if he was not God . . . The facts themselves bear witness and his divine acts of power teach those who doubt that he is true God, and his sufferings show that he is true man. And if those who are feeble in understanding are not fully assured, they will pay the penalty on his dread day. If he was not
GOD IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER Recently there has been much discussion…as to whether our theological understanding of God has not been too masculine to the detriment of the feminine. For our purpose here it can be said that Fatherhood, as Louis Bouyer has pointed out, belongs to God alone in His essence of absolute Source of Being. Only God is totally perfect, complete, independent and therefore He alone is Love, capable of sharing Himself
UNION BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS Carl G. Jung in his book: Answer to Job discusses the importance of Mary as the archetypal symbol of the feminine in all human beings. “But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are
FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing
MARY – THE PERFECT CHRISTIAN I would like to avoid such an approach and begin by basing our deeper devotion to Mary on the fact that God has given her to us as a realized type of the perfect Christian. Mary, in her continued process of growing into a greater fullness of grace, even in her glorified relationship to Jesus Christ, to the members of His Body, the Church, and to the whole created universe,
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