![]() ![]() Why did they love Mary so much, and why with such visceral devotion? Their sincere and foreign devotions cast this overly familiar figure from my childhood nativity plays and colorful illustrations of children’s Bibles in a strange new light. Each morning, we would rise with the tropic sun to attend Mass, whose trailing coda of requisite prayers consistently concluded with an invocation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, addressed by the community as, “Cause of Our Joy.” To punctute their prayer, a procession of Missionaries of Charity and sundry mass-goers would kiss the hands and feet of the Immaculate Conception in the chapel, as they departed. One summer, I lived across the alley from the Missionaries of Charity Motherhouse in Kolkata. The piety which surrounds Mary often scandalizes and discomfits. Mary herself, however, can be the subject of intense myth-making and spiritualization. The fact of her personal, historical reality boldly resists our proclivities to spiritualize or mythopoeicize an embarrassingly historical faith. The mysterious figure of Miriam of Nazareth is a symbol of the personal in the midst of the story of universal salvation: a reminder of the scandalous particularity of God’s entrance into history. Her availability is not to an idea, a principle, or power but to a person-the personal Word of God who speaks to her, within her and ultimately through her. Miriam of Nazareth is the locus of the Word’s silent enfleshment, the first human being who, completely other to God and capable of resistance, offers not resistance but sheer availability. But persons are, to loan a phrase from Rowan Williams, “utterly resistant to the self.” To encounter a person is to encounter a world populated with not simply extensions of our own ego or projections of our thought, but radically other beings, who offer the real possibility of communion-i.e., union with that which is intimately not-I.Įnter Mary. The Word became flesh, meaning not just a conceptual sharing in a substance or noetic nature, but descending into a heart which beat faster in fear or in love, protected by the delicate rib-cage tabernacle of an oh-so-destructible body.Ĭoncepts are manufactured by human minds for human manipulation. Thus, to this commonplace indignity of birth into contingency the divine person submitted himself. To take up flesh, or pitch one’s tent among, meant and means taking up the facts of living shared by the other members of the chosen or choosing ontological community. This comedy of irrupting into particularity has been true for every human being throughout time and space, and the birth of God was no exception. To be born means to be thrown into the world drama in a specific time (e.g., 1991, the Renaissance, 4 BCE) and a specific place (e.g., Newark, the American Southwest, Edina Children’s Hospital). To become a human person means to be born: a physical, messy, risky business. But this is not what it is to be or to take up flesh. 1 + 1 = 2, and Incarnation remains simply a more subtle cosmic algebraic formula in which 1+1 = 1. The story is more like a mathematical formula. When imagining Incarnation-in both our intellectual and pious imaginaries-we too often recite a story something like this: notional God theoretically unites to abstract human nature. This seismic shift in the orientation of creation, this cataclysmic re-location of the logos into the corruptible world of mortality took place not in a hermetically-sealed scientific laboratory or in the archetypes of myth, but in the flesh-and-blood of a human person. And of course, there is this one that makes a mockery of Oak Park, the neighborhood I call home.In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and several verses later the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. There was one for Modesto and one for Fresno and one for Bakersfield. There is one in which Stockton is the shadowy place. ![]() There was one in which San Francisco was the light and Oakland was the dark. This meme made the rounds a couple of years ago, and people edited it over and over again to update the “joke” for their context. Mufasa is instructing Simba and says, “Look, everything the light touches is Sacramento.” Simba notes that the light doesn’t touch everything he can see and asks, “But what about that shadowy place?” Mufasa answers, “That’s Oak Park. The image in the meme above comes from The Lion King and shows Simba talking with his father, Mufasa. Editor’s note: Sam Greenlee preached this sermon on Januat City Life Church in Midtown Sacramento, CA. ![]()
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