Preparing for Christmas

In the run-up to Christmas, I have been giving a talk on Our Lady in Advent and would liek to share with you these few words that seem to come to me in prayer:

We wait
for the coming
of Christ,
in union with the woman
who holds heaven
in her heart
and who touches
the edges of eternity
with her hand.

Did you hear of the lady who was expecting twins--one of them an optimist and one a pessimist? The latter complained that soon he would get the push-out and that would be the end. The optimist on the other hand said: No! Every thing will be fine. I can hear my mother's heart-beat and it is good and soon we'll see her smiling face and it will be just wonderful. The best is yet to be. Advent, then is not just a season of four weeks. It is a kind of on Going Principle of Christian development.

In the Christian life of the spirit, the wonder of wonders is, that we are like unborn infants in the womb of Mother Mary, or if you prefer--in the sacred womb of Mother Church, for Mary is the Icon of the Church. We are only truly born in the Sprit at the moment of death. That is why the death of the Saints is called their Dies Natalis-- their Birthday.

When Mary consented to be mother of Christ, whether at the time she ralised it or not, she conceived in her herself, not only the Head of the Mystical Body, but the Whole Christ, members as well as Head. Otherwise, in the words of St. Augustine, she would have given birth to a monster. The splendid reality is, that we as it were in the process of gestation, being carried by Mary who objectively speaking is truly our Mother.