Fourth Sunday of Advent
Once there was a five-year-old boy who liked to play Superman. He would take a red cape, swing it over his shoulders, and pack his days with daring escapades. At summer’s end his mother enrolled him in kindergarten. The teacher asked him, “What is your name?” He answered “Superman.” She smiled and cast an amused glance at his mother, then asked again, “What is your real name?” He replied a bit louder, “Superman!” Then the teacher said in a very kind voice but with insistence, “I need your real name for our records.” Seeing he had to tell her, the boy glanced around the room, and indicated that he wanted to whisper in her ear. She bent down and he said, “I’m Clark Kent.”
Mary of Nazareth never heard of Superman or Star Wars. The people of her time longed for the coming of the Messiah to overcome evil and restore the kingdom. So, the thoughts of young Jewish girls after puberty were about weddings and the possibility of fulfilling prophecies by becoming mother of the Messiah. Mary had no pretensions of greatness. She was from Nazareth, a town so poor even tax collectors ignored it. But she also had another kind of poverty, a virginal inner space, an untouched womb that had never experienced intimacy with man. Mary was Capax Dei,1 ready to receive the gift of God, and she was amazed and could not contain her joy when she did.
In a poem titled The Quickening of John the Baptist,2 Thomas Merton describes Mary’s journey to visit Elizabeth. He writes: “Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails? … You have trusted no town with the news behind your eyes. You have immersed Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas. … The day Our Lady, full of Christ, enters the gate of Elizabeth … her salutation rings … like a Charterhouse bell and the unborn Saint John wakes in his mother’s womb.”
The subtitle of Merton’s poem is The Contemplative Vocation. The joy bursting from Mary is not spilled over men busy with their fishing boats, or before gossiping women at the well. It is carried by a word from her mouth into the silence of listening contemplatives. Merton addresses St. John in his mother’s womb: “Sing in your cell, small anchorite! … Oh, burning joy! … [to] know [Mary’s] cloistered Christ. … Your joy is the vocation of … [those who are hidden] … the silent Trappist, the granite Carthusian, the quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, waiting in the darkness.” Merton goes on to describe contemplatives, “We are exiles in solitude, … listeners … waiting for the first drums of Christ the Conqueror. … But in the rare days, when [Mary], … appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails, then, like the wild baby, the unborn John who could not see a thing we wake and we know the Virgin’s Presence [and] receive her Christ into our dark night … In the flame of God’s fire … we burn and bound and bounce with happiness.”
But it’s too short! Like the uncontained joy of five-year-old Superman that ended with the questions and amused looks of a kindergarten teacher, Mary’s joyful visitation also came to an end. When she journeyed home there was no mention of haste, or clothes like sails. She returned to the questioning looks of Joseph and the amused glances of her neighbors. The uncontained joy of the Messiah’s Mother began to be pierced by swords of sorrow. Likewise, the small anchorite, John, had to leave the solitude and silence of his mother’s warm womb after nine cloistered months. Always an anchorite, he went as a young man to the contemplative desert until the day he was torn out of that womb to die under the axe of King Herod. The life of Jesus also came to a premature end with questions, laughter, mockery and cries for his crucifixion.
Like little Superman and John the Baptist, like Mary and Jesus, we are grateful for the joys we experience in life, but let us also be prepared for heavy crosses, and even to lose life itself for the sake of following Christ.
- Capax Dei, an expression of St. Irenaeus indicating the our capacity to receive God.
- Thomas Merton, Tears of the Blind Lions, New Directions, NY, 1949, 8.