B is for born

 Tuesday, Dec. 1

Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’ (Luke 1:41-42)

Today, the word is born.

A hawk sails through the gray dawn as the weight of November rests heavily on my heart. Perhaps you feel it, too. The want of light stirs rumination as the days grow shorter this time of year.

A story in the paper of a decades old tragedy deepens these reflections. It tells of several nuns who, on Dec. 1, 1958, risked their lives in a roaring conflagration to save dozens of children at Our Lady of the Angels school in Chicago.  They put their bodies between encroaching flames and their children.

The love that so obviously moved them stirs the heart and awakens an insistent question. What longs to be born in me? What blessing, what love, lives in my hidden heart yearning to be given away before my time on this earth is done?

The Christ before whom we bow at Christmas lies within us, pressing on the womb of our souls that we may give birth to a love more beautiful than any we have known.

So, blessed are you, for you, as Mary, carry the Christ. Listen to the still, small voice within you in these darkening days, for it is Christ, there, longing to be born amid joy and wonder.

And pray, ‘Come Lord Jesus, be born in me.’

Pr. David L. Miller

 

Voice of the masters: “What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? … What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”” (Meister Eckhart, 1260-1328)