Categories: uncategorized
Date: 09 December 2006 23:00:49
I've been thinking a bit about some of the things Mary says in the Magnificat and also Joseph and Mary's journey to Bethlehem and the "no room at the inn" bit. We had an article in our church bulletin narrating and dramatising this and it started me thinking.
It seems that so often God choses to use things that are "on the margins" and seem completely inadequate for their purpose. Think of Mary and Joseph's journey- the pain, difficulty and danger of that kind of travel when heavily pregnant. Why didn't Joseph just leave Mary at home as only the heads of the households had to travel? Was it because the danger of leaving her unprotected was worse that the dangers of travel. Might she have been in danger of being stoned by those who thought her pregnancy indicated she had broken the law if left at home? Why would God chose to come into the world in such a precarious way? Again there is the precariousness of being born in a hovel amongst animals. Why again chose an obscure corner of the Roman Empire? In the past I think I would have answered all of this by talking about God's desire to really enter into humanity and identify with it, and of course that is true, but recently it has struck me in a slightly different, maybe more personal, way.
Mary talks about God filling the hungry with good things, scattering the proud and sending the rich away empty. Paul talks about God chosing the things that are not to shame the things that are. Again and again God seems to chose to use things that are ordinary or even downright inadequate to quietly fulfil his purposes. It has made me really begin to believe in a new and deeper way that it is OK to be "ordinary". Growing up in a family where one was expected to be "special", to sparkle and shine on some way or another (for example academically) my deep instinct is to believe I need to come up with some kind of "specialness" for God. But no - I can delight in being ordinary, human, even inadequate. I can join the long list of such people and objects that God took and used for his own purposes (stables, peasant girls, tiny amounts of loaves and fishes, fishermen, tax collectors, donkeys, crosses and sealed tombs). Of course there is nothing wrong with achievement in any field, but it's not more useful or special to God than "non-achievement". It means for me that maybe I can begin to believe that I can relax a bit and show my true self - warts, ordinariness and all. That my "failure" to shine or be outstanding in some way or another is not in any way a problem to God.
If you are able, please pray for me about this, as seeing something and being able to live in the good of it are not always the same thing!