Saturday, March 26, 2011

How Can This Be?

Stop.

Look at the simple, humble face of the Virgin Mary and just let it sink in for a moment: what she did yesterday.

This awesome decision, the fruit of a quiet, uncomplicated, pure heart.

Mary, I don't have a heart like this. I am complex, anxious, distracted. I am trying to write a blog entry about you and watch a hockey game at the same time.

Okay, the hockey game is over.

Why are we such busy people, Mary? So little of what we do is necessary. Wait, its time to say the family rosary. That means its time for me to say fifty Hail Marys and think about everything under the sun while I keep trying to remember that I am supposed to be dwelling on the Mysteries of my salvation, of the only thing that matters in life. Everyone is waiting on me, so I'll be back. Help me, Mary, to know what I should write this night.

As I expected, I spent much of the rosary drifting off onto thoughts about what I should write on this blog. I don't remember if I came up with anything. Silence. You must have lived a great deal in silence, with God. You pondered things in your heart. In silence the heart can speak the desires inscribed on it by God. I must say, though, Mary, that I have always loved your mind. Saying to the angel, "How can this be...?" Not from hesitation, but because you wanted to embrace the will of God in a fuller way, with an awareness of its correspondence to your life. You knew that God wanted you to give yourself to Him in virginity. You were committed to this gift. Now came this revelation that you were to be a mother. "How can this be...?" The correspondence between the two realities is a miracle, a new event in the history of the world, for "nothing is impossible with God." You wanted there and then, with all of your love and all of your reason, to open yourself to the divine possibility of the humanly impossible.

I ask this question to you, Holy Mother: "How can this be for me?" How will this divided heart of mine be transfigured into the likeness of God?

"Be silent, Juanito. Elizabeth is with child, flowers bloom on the barren hilltop, and a seed is planted and sprouting within you. And I am coming to help."