Love’s secret

And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.

 (Luke 1:31)

Love labors in the silent darkness, far from garish lights that blind our eyes to all that is truly holy. Love toils secretly where no one can see, working out its holy purpose that the wonder of every age may appear according to the inscrutable timing of the divine heart.

What was it, Holy One, that you should think, “Here and now, in this girl, I will fulfill my heart’s desire to live among human hearts with a human heart all my own, feeling everything life holds and every fear death stirs?

Your life stirred in the secret darkness of Mary’s young womb—she of no renown, living in a place the world would have forgotten long ago, if not for the child she birthed.

You chose Mary, which should spark a flame of hope in every human breast, especially when we wonder if our lives have mattered … or if they still can.

For in an out-of-the way place, in this peasant girl, eternity entered time. Through Mary, you blessed the world and every moment of history with a light that has never gone out … and never will.

And we who need the light of this child to shine in us, hunger to hear the divine promise to Mary ringing also in our ears.

“You will conceive.” Sounds strange, but each of us is pregnant with the light of God, eager to fill us and be born, bursting out in a love that fills our eyes with tears and our words with blessing for every broken heart and troubled space we encounter.

Sit in the silence and know … the Holy One, the Loving Mystery whom we will never understand, toils in the darkness of your soul, hidden, unknown, until those moments when you feel new life, Love, that is … stirring within for this weary old world, and oh-so blessedly for our own weathered hearts.

Pr. David L. Miller

Say ‘yes’

Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:38)

Mary said, “Yes.”

She didn’t know what would happen to her or to her child. She had no idea of the elation and sorrow the years would bring. She couldn’t know she would experience the most searing pain a parent can ever know. She barely knew who she was at her tender age.

She knew only that her heart needed to say, “Yes,” to this divine messenger bearing strange and unexpected news, a request that comes to each of us, wherever we are and regardless of our age.

Love longs for your consent, your surrender to Love’s will to do in you what only Love can do.

Love, the Holy Mystery, speaks in our silence when the clamor of the daily fades away. In the quiet, we feel and know the whisper of truth … we are made for something more. Made for Love, we are, for this Love who took birth in Mary, the Mother of our Lord.

Nothing else finally satisfies—successes, happy times, the diversions, entertainments and substances with which we distract ourselves from the One who speaks in our silence. Nothing else is enough.

Only Love will do, the Love who longs to be born in you, to fill you, the Love whose voice gets drowned out by all the stuff our culture suggests is “really living.’

We are what we are, beings made by the Love who is born in human form from Mary’s “yes.’  Love speaks in your silence, longing for your “Yes.”

Most us, like Mary, don’t know who we are half the time. We don’t know exactly where we are going, and we haven’t a clue where our lives will end up.

But we know you are Love, Holy One, so please, be born in each of us.

Nothing else will do.

Pr. David L. Miller