Every
December, Kathy and I drive up to New York, to spend a few days at Holy Cross
Monastery at West Park. We began last Tuesday morning, and as we got in the car
we heard the unfolding story of the Taliban siege of the Pakistani school in
Peshawar in which 145 people--132 of them school children--were killed. The day before we had followed the account of
the hostage taking in Sydney, Australia in which 3 people were killed. And the day before that we observed the
second anniversary of the Newtown shootings in which 28 people--20 of them
children--died. And of course in the weeks before all this we had witnessed the
protests over the failure of mostly white Grand Juries to indict white police
officers in the killings of unarmed black men.
It's
getting to the point in our world where opening the paper or turning on the
news is a courageous act. Just yesterday
we saw the senseless murder of two on-duty NYPD officers. I know that Advent is
a time of joyous hope and expectation, but it is hard to keep your mind on the
approach of Christmas when there is so much human suffering in the world.
So
last week felt like a good time to go to a monastery. Kathy and I usually make
our way to West Park on the Hudson by way of Manhattan, and we spent part of
Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at MOMA. After a car trip preoccupied
with suffering, hatred, and death, it is a healing experience to enter two museum
spaces devoted to grace and beauty. At the Met, I wandered into a gallery where
the artworks are in cases and you have to press a button to light them up. Intrigued
like a kid at a science exhibit, I pressed one such button and came upon
Botticelli’s Annunciation.
Botticelli
painted his Annunciation around 1485
in Florence. It's more a private,
devotional image than something to hang on your wall: painted in tempera and
gold on wood, it depicts the interchange between Gabriel and Mary we heard read
just now in our Gospel for today. In Botticelli's painting, a wall separates the
archangel Gabriel from Mary. He is in a waiting room, she in a bed chamber.
Both are in poses suggesting anticipation, contemplation, and humility. He is
kneeling in preparation to speak, and she is kneeling in preparation to hear.
Like many annunciation painting, Botticelli's shows us the moment right before
the news is told. He is just about to
tell her that she will conceive and bear a son.
The impossible is about to become possible.
As
you can imagine, I spent my time at Holy Cross Monastery thinking a lot about
Botticelli's Annunciation. In fact, I
downloaded the image onto my iPad and spent a fair amount of time last week
just looking at it. Aside from the obvious beauty of the piece, I continue to
be struck by the way it represents three truths that I think are important for
all of us to remember on the Sunday before Christmas. One is the sense of anticipation the painting
represents--a sense each of us needs to recover. Another is the deep interiority we see in the
faces of Gabriel and Mary. A third is
the radical importance of Mary for us who strive to follow her son. A word about each.
Anticipation. In this
painting, Gabriel and Mary are perched on the verge of something that will come
to them. They wait. The only work they do in Botticelli’s Annunciation involves preparing to speak
and to listen. In that sense, they show
us what Advent is really about. In our
place and time, we seem always to value action over contemplation. In Botticelli's painting, Gabriel and Mary
are still. They are quiet. They are waiting to take in big news from
outside themselves and consider what it might mean for them and for us.
Now
I'm probably not the best person to deliver this advice. Kathy Hall regularly reminds me that I have
the patience of a gnat. But we preachers
are not known for our consistency, so I’ll say it anyway. Advent is a time when we are asked to move
out of action and into contemplation. Of
course it is important that we take action.
But it's equally important that when we act we don't do something
stupid. The coming of Jesus will happen
in God's time, not ours. We are not in control of the universe. Mary has many things to teach us, but perhaps
the first of them is just this: we need
to learn how to wait.
Interiority. Botticelli's Annunciation
makes visually clear what our scripture implies about Mary: she has a deep interior life. When Gabriel
tells her the news about the birth of her son, her first response is a
question: "How can this be?"
[Luke 1:34] In the next chapter, near the end of the Christmas story
itself, Luke will tell us, "But Mary treasured all these words and
pondered them in her heart." [Luke 2: 19] Mary is a premodern person. Her interior life is not on display. It is hidden in her heart.
You
and I live in a time of self-projection.
But we humans have not always been this way. There was a time before
Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, a time before relentless self-promotion. You
and I can't stop talking (and when we're talking online, we're usually talking
about ourselves). In her quietness, Mary demonstrates personal, interior
character rather than outward, performative display. Does everybody need to
know what we think about everything all the time? As Christmas approaches, we
might consider what a gift such an internal conversion to silence on our part
might be not only to ourselves but to the world.
And
then there is the radical fact of Mary
herself. The church has said all kinds
of things about Mary over the years, but to me she will always above all be the
exemplary Christian person. When he
finally gets around to it, Gabriel tells her big and astounding news. She will bear a son, Jesus, and he will sit
on the throne of his ancestor David.
Jesus will be the "Son of the Most High God”. When you take this story out of the stained
glass we have wrapped around it, you see that Mary is being asked to do
something enormous. And how does she respond? "Here am I, the servant of
the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” [Luke 1:38]
Mary
accepts God's call to bear Jesus, and she does so not as a passive vessel of
grace but as an active participant in God's redeeming purpose. She says yes to a high, hard task. She will
not only be Jesus’s mother: she will go on to become both a prophet in her own
right and her son’s most faithful companion.
I
spent three days last week in a monastery, taking time to reflect on Luke’s
Gospel as portrayed in Botticelli’s Annunciation. Monasteries end their round of prayer services
each night with Compline, a rite that closes with a Gregorian chant called the
"Antiphon of the Blessed Virgin Mary". Having prayed and listened together
all day, the monks and their guests join once more to sing this simple text,
addressed to Jesus's mother on our behalf:
Gracious
Mother of our Redeemer, forever abiding
Queen of heaven and star of ocean, O
pray for your children,
who,
though falling, strive to rise again.
You, maiden, have borne your holy
Creator to the wonder of all nature;
ever
virgin, after as before you received that Ave
from the mouth of Gabriel; intercede
for us sinners.
[OHC
Monastic Breviary, p. 431]
As
you sing this antiphon at the end of a day, you cannot help thinking both about
what has already passed and what is yet to come. Together, we await the birth of one who will
scatter the proud in their conceit and fill the hungry with good things. Together, we try to make sense of the
violence in Sydney, Peshawar, and Newtown; in Staten Island, Cleveland,
Ferguson, and Brooklyn. Gabriel kneels in preparation. He is poised to announce
the birth of one whose life and death and resurrection will give us a way to
turn all this violence into redeeming love.
But
not yet. This is still Advent, not yet
Christmas. We wait, with Gabriel and
with Mary, in expectation of divine love being born among us again. We hold in our minds and in our hearts the
suffering of children, the inhumanity of violence, the pains and struggles of
everyday people just to get by. How we
can live in a world that has both Botticelli’s Annunciation and school shootings in it is beyond me. And because it is beyond me, I reach with
Gabriel and Mary and all who love her for the child that we have heard will be
born.
Gracious Mother of
our Redeemer, forever abiding
Queen of
heaven and star of ocean, O pray for your children,
who,
though falling, strive to rise again.
. . . intercede for us sinners.
Yes, Mary. Pray for your children and
intercede for us sinners. Pray for us all.
Amen.
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