Holiness Thrust Upon Her

Father Jim Callan

December 20, 2020

You might remember the story of a big oil refinery that caught on fire.  There was a huge conflagration, it was a 20-alarm fire. They called in fire fighters from all the metropolitan area. About thirty minutes in to the fire an old beat-up fire truck arrives from a small town and cruses past the other fire trucks and glides to a stop just yards from the fire.  The fire fighters get out and hose each other down and then train their hoses on the fire and they put it out!  Surprisingly enough.  The oil company is delighted and they throw a banquet for the fire department and they give the fire chief $10,00 at the banquet. A reporter, after the banquet was over, asked the chief what was he going to do with the $10,000.  The chief said that the first thing they were going to do was “…to bring that fire truck in to the garage and we are going to get those dam breaks fixed!”

So the moral of the story.  Some people are born holy.  Some people achieve holiness during their lifetime and other people have holiness thrust upon them.  Think of the doctors, the nurses, the EMTs, the ambulance drivers during this Covid time.  Caring for patients.  They put their lives in danger every single day and many of them are dying.  I don’t know if they were born holy but certainly holiness has been thrust upon them.

Today’s gospel is the story of Mary of Nazareth.  Now the church said that Mary was born holy.  The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  That Mary was born without sin.  But isn’t it truer to say that Mary had holiness thrust upon her?  

Now people have called Mary the maternal face of God, but Got has her own maternal face.  Mary is one of us.  She had to make decisions the way we do.  She is one of us.  So when the Angle Gabrielle visited Mary it caused some major change of plans.  Before this Mary had a nice life planned for herself.  She was engaged to a wonderful man, Joseph, they were planning on a nice honeymoon; she thought she would have a nice quiet Palestinian family in Nazareth.  She would bring her kids to the Synagogue and everything would be cool.  But all of a sudden her plans are changed.  Interrupted by an Angle. She is summoned by a power that she didn’t understand. She is recruited for a role that she didn’t audition for.

Now artist all over the centuries have tried to capture this woman, the enunciation we call it.  Some paintings show Mary very pious.  Folded hands in prayer or with open arms.  But one artist, Lorenzo Veneziano in the fourteenth century showed Mary in a state of panic and she has to hold on to things just to keep herself from falling.  That’s probably true because Luke says that Mary was deeply troubled.  Deeply shaken.

Now first Mary goes through some objecting. Some questioning:  How can this be since I don’t have a sexual relationship with a man?  But notice she doesn’t consult any man?  She doesn’t ask Joseph, she doesn’t ask her father, and she doesn’t ask any priest.  She doesn’t seek anybody’s permission. She knows she can figure it out herself.  She discerns the voice of God within her and commits herself.  She has no idea how this will change her life but in the end she says “yes.”

You know, maybe we are like Mary.  I think we are.  Most of the time when we do God’s will it is pretty routine.  We go to work.  We raise a family.  Do some volunteer work.  But every once in a while isn’t it true that it seems like God throws a curve ball.  Has that ever happened to you?   Everything is cool and then all of a sudden there is a curve ball. 

God asks us something:  A) that we have never considered before; B) that we thought we were incapable of doing; and, C) that we consider a burden.  But in the end, like Mary, we deal with it and we say yes. 

Maybe you had to make a decision about pulling the plug on a ventilator for a loved one.  You debated the pros and cons but then you pull the plug not because it was heroic but because it was the right thing to do.

I remember in 1993, Dick Connedy and Jeff Larson came in to my office, they sat down in the chair and they surprise me.  They said, “Will you marry us?”  I quickly asked myself some questions like:  What will the Bishop think?  What will the parishioners think?  Will I lose my job?  And all this debating happened within a split second.  I ended up saying, “Yes.  I’ll do your wedding.”  Not because it was heroic but because it was the right thing.

I know a woman, Cindy, who made an appointment with me one time to discuss a very critical question.  Her brother needed a kidney transplant and she was a match. So the question was should she donate her kidney to her brother.  As we talked we discussed the real dangers involved for her in this operation.  But you know what? All through this conversation I knew she had already made her decision.  She had already made up her mind.  She was going to give that kidney.  Not because it was heroic but because it was the right thing to do.

When we were building the Corpus Christi health center on Webster Avenue years ago it cost $103,000 and we were $3,000 short.  We tried everything. All kinds of fund raising.  We couldn’t get that last $3,000. So as a last resort I went to my father.  I said, “Dad could you give us the $3,000 to finish the project?”  And he gave it to me and we finished the project. But years later after my mother died, we were talking the two of us, and he said, “Jim, do you remember that time years ago when you asked me for that $3,000?”  I replied, “Sure I do!”  He asked, “Did you ever think that I would say no?”  I said, “No.”  He said, “That’s funny neither did I.”  All along he knew the answer was yes.

That’s how it was for Mary of Nazareth.  God was asking a lot of Mary. She became an unwed teenager which caused scandal. Once Jesus was born her family became a refugee family.  That wasn’t easy.  She had to watch her son be executed by the Roman Empire.  So God asked a lot of her.  But you know what?  God asks a lot of other parents too.  Parents who raise an autistic child.  Parents who raise a mentally ill child.  A child with disabilities.  Parents who watch their child die of cancer. Parents who watch their black son get murdered by police on the streets.  

Maybe Mary said yes so quickly because she was a teenager.  Teens often act on the heart rather than the head. They are impetuous; they are caught up in the moment.  They feel deeply.  They respond quickly.  They take risks.  They jump in to things without considering all the consequences.  

I was thinking of Matt Ramerman.  He went to Haiti when he was 16 or 17 years old. He was a teenager.  When he saw the kids with no shoes he immediately took off his sneaker and gave them to one of the kids.  For a whole year when he came back to Rochester Matt wore sandals even in the winter just to remind himself of those kids that had no shoes.

So maybe think of Mary as a spontaneous, compassionate teenager. It is a quite different picture than we have been given.  That Mary was this docile, submissive, passive, obedient person.  Now these are the qualities that male theologians have put on her over the years.  The path to holiness that men thought women should travel. But maybe Mary was just tuned in to God in that moment in her own teenage way.  She loved God so much that she just wanted to do whatever God was asking.

God not only chose a teenager but a poor teenager.  God has a way of choosing the humblest and the poorest.  Both of people and places.  Mary was a Palestinian pheasant.  Nazareth was a backwater village of Galilee, which was a poor area, maybe like our Appalachia is today.  Jesus was born and laid in a manger and grew up poor.  So Christmas is a reminder for Christians that we have to be especially responsible to people who are poor and on the margins.

Last Wednesday I was doing the noon mass and there was a lady waiting at the lobby for me.  She said to me when I came out, “I don’t have any food and I don’t have any money until the end of the month.”  She was delighted with the Price Rite gift card that I gave her. Then she asked, “Do you have anything for my kids for Christmas?”  I asked her what she wanted.  She was very specific.  She said, “A pack of cards for my son and a doll for my daughter.”  Fortunately a parishioner had just dropped of some unwrapped toys and I let her choose a few and she looked like she had just won the lottery.  She was so happy.

It reminded me of a story that Mike Boucher told one time.  When a monk was praying in his monastery and he prayed that he would not die until he had met the Lord.  That the Lord would come to him.  Sure enough one day the Lord appeared.  Jesus appeared and just as they were starting to talk there was a knock at the monastery door and there was a beggar who wanted food.  So very reluctantly he left Jesus and he went the door.  It took him a half hour to get the guy all straightened out. He came back and Jesus was still in his room.  And Jesus said to him, “If you didn’t answer the door, I wouldn’t have stayed.” 

The Angle Gabrielle told Mary during this encounter, “Don’t be afraid.  You have found favor with God.”  Now this is true for us too.  That we have found favor with God.  You have found favor with God; I have found favor with God.  Simply just by being children of God.  And Christmas is a reminder of this good news.  Jesus didn’t come to close any gap between God and us.  But to tell us there never was a gap to begin with.  Jesus didn’t come to rescue a fallen, messed up humanity but to tell us that there was fall to begin with and we are not messed up.  He came to take the blinders off of us so that we could see the divine inside us, the beauty inside us and let go of all of our shame and guilt that we carry around.  That’s why Gabrielle says to don’t be afraid.  Why?  Because we have found favor with God!

In conclusion, Mary is not the maternal face of God.  She is not the ideal woman.  She is not the ideal feminine.  She is not a docile, submissive woman staying in her proper place, defined by patriarchal thinking. Mary is herself.  A Jewish, village woman of faith who speaks up for the poor and the marginalized. Through her Magnificat she advocates revolution.  She turns the hierarchy of wealth and poverty, power and subjugation upside down.  She speaks for God.  She is God’s prophet.  And Mary speaks from personal experience.  She understands oppression first hand.  First as a refugee, then as a citizen of an occupied country.  Later of somebody deprived of her son through a state sponsored execution.

It was not an easy life.  But she didn’t complain. She told the Angle, “Let it be done to me according to your word.”  And from that day forward she handled whatever challenges came her way.  Holiness was thrust upon her.