EPHPHATHA–“Be Opened”

“Let the Lord enter…”–such a plea from the psalmist’s heart to our hearts in this weekday Mass Responsorial, read as Advent unfolds into Christmas. Our parish has been engaged in Fr. Mark Toups’ Advent mediational called “Rejoice” these last weeks; I am indebted to Fr. Mark for a spiritual shortcut, a quick litmus test as to how much “letting” I am choosing. His distinction between ruminating and relating popped off the page at me–what a ready filter for what goes on in my brain at any given moment!  Am I turned in on myself in ruminating, or am I “let(ting) the Lord enter” by opening that particular spasm of anxiety, self-doubt, fear, judgmentalism, impatience, resentment, sadness, worry, indecision, self-deprecation–or whatever occupies my interior–to Him? This may seem like Spiritual Life 101, but how constantly that litmus test invites me to check my self-absorption at the door and instead relate what I am experiencing to Jesus. Yesterday, for instance, out on Christmas errands, I found myself in a downward spiral: “Why do you put yourself under such pressures?” came the internal muttering. “Here you go again, loading on twice as much as you should, and ending up squeezed and drained.” My mind spun with what awaited me at home, while simultaneously marveling at how friends of mine remained so peaceful. “Eighty years old, and here you are. Same old/same old.”

DING!!–rumination. The remedy? Relating. Jesus, I open all of this up to you. You are Emmanuel. God with me. God with me. God with me. The God to whom “all my ways are familiar,” “who knows “when I sit and when I stand,” who ‘knows my thoughts from afar” (Ps139), who comes “not to condemn, but to save’ (Jn 3:17)–who is ‘leaping over the mountains and bounding over the hills’ (SoS 2) to husband my anxious heart this very moment. I am fiercely loved, right here putting groceries in my car. I am not alone. He is not only with me but within me, and He is my sufficiency. Christmas has come in this supermarket parking lot. By God’s grace I have “let the Lord enter” my frailty. With that “DING” from the Holy Spirit, the primary effect of the Fall–to turn inward and hide from the Father’s plaintive “Adam, Adam, where are you?”–is reversed. No longer closed in on myself, I breathe in my primary vocation, to receive.

My weakness is safe with the One who took on flesh as a vulnerable baby. Fr. John Cameron, in his “Prayer Before a Manger,” writes, “O Emmanuel, may the assurance of your unfailing Presence be for me the source of unending peace. May I never fear my weakness, my inadequacy, or my imperfection. Rather, as I gaze with faith, hope and love upon your incarnate littleness, may I love my own littleness, for God is with us.” Oh, dear Jesus, may I abandon all self-striving, all pride, and learn to “love my own littleness,” because it is exactly there that you are Emmanuel. And when I open my littleness to you, not only do you, with infinite compassion, accept that littleness, but you exchange it for the very fullness of your life. And, while that “exchange” culminated in your Cross, when you “became sin so that in you we could become the very holiness of God” (2 Cor 5:21), your redeeming of all that was misaligned in us began at the moment of your conception. Cardinal de Berulle (1575-1629) assures us that by “living a complete human life from conception to the last breath, (You) touch and hallow every stage, every state, of every man’s existence.”  How unfathomable, the truth of St Peter’s words, “in Christ, the Divine Nature has been lavished upon us (2 Pet 1:4). Christmas, Christ’s Mass–the “Divine Exchange”–at every point!  Your embryonic state, your dependent infancy, your childhood, your adolescence, your adulthood, your suffering and your death–your whole human life gives those stages in us a place to rest, to be touched, to be restored.  You are Emmanuel at every turn, including supermarket parking lots. You became man, so that man could become God, as St. Athanasius proclaimed. Oh, stretch our hearts to contain such glory, dear Lord!  As we behold your infant beauty, may we accept our powerlessness, our dependence, our abject need of you, and “let you enter”–let You become us, so that we can become You.

Your vulnerable crib invites us to do just that. One summer in my late teens, home from college and in a dejected, “ruminating” frame of mind, I poured out my heart to my beloved grandmother. “Bon,” she responded with sudden conviction, “I’m going to pray my ‘beautiful’ prayer for you.  I won’t tell you what it is exactly–it’s a secret– but it has to do with putting you beside Jesus in the manger. Beautiful things will happen.” Within days, the man who has been my husband for nearly sixty years entered my life. My vocation was before me. My Nanna, widowed in her mid-thirties with four children and the Great Depression coming on, had learned where the power in littleness was, and without knowing all the theology behind her prayer, entered its mystery with rock-solid faith. She couldn’t afford rumination; she needed to relate to the God who could save her. Every moment had to be Christmas–Emmanuel–her weaknesses safe with a tiny Babe. In that crib with Him, her vulnerability became a tower of strength for her twenty-two grandchildren–and continues so from heaven. She could have written the closing lines of St. Julie Billiart’s Magnificat meditation (Fourth Sunday of Advent ’24): “Here is the holy crib of our dear Jesus; I will place everything in it, everything, everything.  I believe that before very long we shall see things we should never have dreamed of.”

Come, Holy Spirit. Nudge me from ruminating into relating in this new year. Help me, moment by moment, to turn from the fall and into salvation. Teach me to ponder, as Mary did, so that my entire being may be open to the very life of God.  Your manger, dear Jesus, tells us You do not threaten; You only beckon.  Let us snuggle into your crib with you, naked and needy, secured by your Father in the tender care of Mary and Joseph, where my weakness becomes strength in You, where together, I living in You, You living in me, we can grow into the full stature of our humanity. What abject wonder–that in this humble place I am invited to become with You, in St John Paul the Great’s magnificent description, the “human face of God and the divine face of man.” Surely, “a thing I should never have dreamed of.” Thank you, my dearest, vulnerable Savior.   Amen