Thursday, January 2, 2014

Mary Speaks for all the Lowly



MARY speaks for all those who have been lowly, on the outside, at the bottom, colonized, suppressed, and totally outside of the halls of the princes and power wielders. If she has been favored and blessed, if she is a sign of the ultimate and greatest power, then the lowly who follow her can believe themselves favored and backed up by the universe. They may make their demands and unite against the princes who oppress them. If the hidden is real, if it is true that spiritual power is greater than the power of guns and bombs, then the lowly and the oppressed have hope. If the Almighty sides with justice, hopes can be fulfilled and all can win equality.

It is no accident that almost always the cult of Mary has been a cult of the people. Everywhere "folk Catholicism" has maintained a devotion to Mary in the face of opposition and dispar­agement from theologians and leaders of church and state. True the major central doctrines of Christianity were frequently obscured by crude superstitions and by importation of pagan myths and rites into the cult of Mary. But as at the beginning of the devotion of Mary and in the first developments of under­standing of her, perhaps it has been something more subtle which has fired this devotion. Perhaps it has been the realization in Marian cultic practice of the importance of the lowly and humble and outcast and oppressed who will triumph in the end. If Mary, the young unmarried pregnant girl, can believe in the incredible happening that she is a part of, if she can trust herself and believe in her role in the great story, then the most ordinary people can believe in their parts in the drama. Her exaltation is their exaltation. She carries the banner for all those powerless ones whom the princes have ignored as they go to and fro on the earth making policy, making war, making fortunes, and bringing destruction everywhere. Mary is the cham­pion for all the obscure, peaceful ones who live in the corners of the world, who work, who help each other, who bear chil­dren and hope to see them live and prosper—those who do not aspire to the thrones and the vanities of princes.


The poor may have seen a defender of their cause in the woman and mother. She is beloved in an infinite variety of feminine forms, from young virgin to older mother. By exalting Mary as queen of mercy, queen of peace, a mother most gra­cious, a mother most wise, in all of the traditional devotions, there has been a hope that the feminine qualities which have been demeaned for so long in our society could have their day and could be influential in ordinary life. The high, cool exercise of power and judgment was never seen as part of Mary's role. She never rejected the poor and the lowly or those who tried and met failure time after time. While Christ's mercy and ten­derness and feminine qualities were often obscured by the male princes and powers who fought in his name and killed in his honor and taxed for his representatives, still Mary as mother could guard that aspect of the Christian message which her son's followers hid so successfully.

Sidney Callahan
The Magnificat

Christmas 2013



Even though I wasn't able to celebrate with you this Christmas, I want to share a homily from a few years ago.


First of all: take a deep breath.
And here we are again, gathering in the deep darkness of winter to praise the light, like so many generations before us.
In the spirit of all who came before us and are gone, the family of all people everywhere, of loved ones who are not with us tonight, or who may never be with us again,
tonight we call forth the spirit of Christmas, and pray that this spirit may live in our hearts the whole year through.

The spirit of Christmas.
We hear that phrase a lot this time of year.
Speaking only for myself, I don't think I ever really feel it until this very night, when the work is finally done, and there is only this delicious timeless waiting in the dark.
This feeling doesn't come from shopping, it doesn't come from parties, it doesn't come from cards, it even doesn’t come from watching Christmas specials with the possible exceptions of The Grinch and Charlie Brown.
The feeling we seek, the spirit of Christmas, comes only from our hearts, if we can find it and court it and bring it forward.

I really don't quite know how to describe it, other than to say that when I feel it, suddenly I am a child again.
The spirit of Christmas is the spirit of a child.
Tonight my prayer is let us all be children again.
Children of hope, children of change, children of vision, children of God.
For a child's wondering eyes there remains nearly infinite promise and possibility.
Her imagination has not yet fallen asleep to our culture's lullaby of wealth and habit, or to her own fears and insecurities, to her certainties about love and life and death.

For a child magic is real.
He asks, "Why not?" "Who says it can't happen — whatever it is?
Who says you can't be who you were meant to be, who says you can't break down walls with the power of your love,
who says you can't forgive and be forgiven,
who says you can't start all over again, like the sun already making its slow way back to bright light of summer?"

What does your heart, your Christmas heart, say is truer?
The world whose creative possibilities and unifying beauty and wondrous power have no end,
or the world of boundaries and limits and certainties and opinions that we adults choose to live in most of the time?
Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate tonight, was very clear where he stood on this matter.
He said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
Here was a teacher who found the truth not in the powers of the world, not in the well-trod ruts of his culture, but in seeds, in trees, in lilies of the field, and in the real lives of the poor and in their daily work.
He drank wine like a badly-behaved teenager.
He told his truths in strange mind-bending stories.
His spirit of giving was so great it called for giving everything away if it was asked for, a coat, a cloak, a cheek.
He saw no limits — for Jesus even the mountains would move for us if we only knew how to ask, and there was room for everyone in the great mansion of creation.
Everyone!

Out there in the adult world, it is so easy to dismiss his vision as childish and naive. Childish, yes.
Naïve?
Only if we can't find the child within our heart.
Only if we have given up — and I know we haven't because we're here.
So let us celebrate his beautiful childish vision of a just and loving and peaceful world.
Let us pledge ourselves to bring it about.

For tonight is Christmas eve, and the spirit of the child is among here, and for just a moment everything single thing you dream of, everything, really is possible.