“Wat, said Malle,’ have you thought that he has stained Himself, soiled Himself being not only with men, but himself a man? What’s that to be a man? Look at me. Look at you.’…they looked at each other, one saw a dusty wretched dumb lad, and the other saw a heavy slatternly woman… ‘And it wasn’t that He put on man like a jacket to take off at night or to bathe or to play…the Maker made Himself the made; God was unGodded by his own hand. ‘He was God’ she said, ’from before the beginning, and now never to be clean God again…Alas!’ she said and then, ‘Osanna!’”
‘…God that was too great to be holden even of everywhere and forever had bound Himself into the narrow room of the here and now!’”
The mystery of the Incarnation was no abstraction for Malle. Nor was it for the shepherds, the ones who listen, hear, go, seek and find and return praising God. Today is the feast of the simple, the seekers of God, the believers, of those, who like Mary, treasure and wonder. Cornelia surely belongs here. This mother of five made certain we understood that the Word became flesh and blood, was born after nine months in Mary’s womb and, as one writer has it, “moved into the neighborhood”. We are born out of Cornelia’s joyous realization that God became one of us and enters fully into our life. From our earliest days in the Society we have learned that here in the humble and hidden life of the Holy Child Jesus we find the treasures of God’s mercy and boundless love.
Flannery O’Connor says that “the longer we look at an object, the more of the world could be seen in it.” We have looked for a long time. We, too, have been Godded and are ready to go with the whole world rejoicing to find the Child in the narrow room of our here and now. And so we cry, “Osanna”.
CHRIST IS BOTH WITH GOD AND IN THE WORLD IN ONE MYSTERY OF PRESENCE AND MISSION.
Prayer
May our presence to God and others become simple and saving like that of the Word made flesh. Amen.
Elizabeth Loomis, shcj Team member, Spiritual Ministry Center, San Diego
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