María, la Madre de Dios. Parte 1
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[Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. PRESENTS]
[Fr. Thomas Keating St. Benedict Monastery
Snowmass, Colorado]
[Mary the Mother of God:]
[A Model of Lay Contemplative Life]
[Part I]
(music)
Today's talk is going to be
about the Blessed Mother
as an example of,
best example perhaps,
of the contemplative path.
Of course, we don't claim
only our Blessed Mother is an example of this,
like a precious jewel, she shines from every side.
Most of us have one or two talents
that we shine at,
but she shines in every way you look upon her.
She's just delightful.
And so full of wisdom in her example
and so full of meaning in what
she stands for as an archetype
of some of the great spiritual principles
of the Christian religion.
I'm going to talk to her in a kind of,
about her in a kind of folksy way,
if you don't mind,
and show you how almost any situation
that you might find yourself in—even a bad one—
you can find her there ahead of you
with lots of experience to share
and the incredible compassion
that goes with people
who have passed to the next life, successfully.
We can do more for those we love
after we're dead, it seems,
because while we're alive
we have so many limitations and faults
it's a wonder anybody loves us.
(laughter)
But, let's look at the first example:
Here's Mary, a little girl of fourteen or fifteen,
and she's already married
according to Jewish custom, to Joseph.
We don't know much about this wonderful man,
but the custom, among the Jewish folks then,
was after you were married,
you still lived in your parents' home
for another few months.
And so you didn't engage in conjugal relationships
until you moved into your husband's house,
if you were a woman.
So, here is Mary, minding her own business
and getting ready for her life with Joseph,
when all of a sudden out of no where,
this angel comes and says,
"Hi."
(laughter)
"Bless." Uh, "Hail, full of grace—"
That's quite a greeting. "The Lord is with you."
And she was troubled by this, we're told,
and then the angel goes on
to give her this grandiose idea of
who she's going to bear.
It's going to be the Messiah;
It's going to be, rule over
the house of Jacob forever.
Uh, this is a big shot!
She's going to have as a child,
and you think she would be interested.
(laughter)
Her response is anxiety or agitation
or she was upset.
She didn't know what to do with this idea.
And so she prudently says, "How can this be,
since, I don't know man?"
Now to grasp the full meaning of that question,
let's look at what the consequences
of saying, "Yes," would be.
First of all, she would become
what we know in our day,
at the very least, an 'unwed mother,'
to all appearances.
We're talking now of how this situation
looks to other people
who don't know the mystery.
First of all, it attacked—one, two, three—
what we call the energy centers',
or the instinctual needs for happiness
that are important in childhood,
but which she had never built into drives
for happiness or substitutes for God,
because from the moment of her consciousness
she experienced the divine union.
It's the lack of that,
that is the cause of all our troubles in growing up
and why we seek substitutes other than God
for the true happiness which is in God.
God is the true security, the true freedom,
the true and infinite love.
So, she.
What that invitation
proposed to her was
that she give up all her security
as a Jewish woman.
Marriage, it was pretty important;
it was the true security.
She had that.
With this pregnancy, it would be gone,
because Joseph, being a just man,
would not marry an adulterous woman.
In other words, what did this announcement do,
put Joseph in?
Either it made him look
as if he was the father of this child
when the common agreement was
that you don't have sexual relations
with your spouse until you move in.
So that put a doubt on Joseph's integrity
or his fidelity to the Jewish customs.
Secondly, if Joseph wasn't the father,
then to all appearances it would mean
that she was an adulteress.
And this is why Joseph had such a hard time
when he perceived that this was going to happen.
So either he was a disreputable character,
or she was, in this otherwise disreputable town.
Remember, one of the disciples said,
"Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
So it wasn't the best place to live.
Well here you see these thoughts
pouring in on Mary,
with this angel's grandiose description
of all that she's going to be,
and she saw through that apparent façade of glory
that was being offered her
to the real nitty-gritty problems of life.
She was going to have to face being known
as an unwed mother or an adulterous woman
and in a small town
with lots of relatives running in
to the house all the time, as this was the custom,
other people are going to know.
And this shadow of this mysterious birth
and its cause
would follow her, probably, all her life.
She would always be under a shadow.
In other words, where did Jesus come from?
Joseph's infidelity to the law?
Or Mary's infidelity to Joseph?
That's what you call a 'double bind'.
(laughter)
This is the classical procedure
that God seems to have with people
who are taking the spiritual journey seriously.
And it's by means of these
apparently impossible situations
that bear no solution
that one is pushed to a new level of consciousness
in which one perceives the whole of reality
from a new perspective,
and the apparent opposites
that are re-reconcilable
from the point of view of reason,
become resolved—not rationally—
but from a higher perspective
that sees them as complimentary.
And not in opposition.
The 'double bind' is when two opposing goods
seem to be God's will for you,
or important for you,
and you can't decide which to do.
So, you go through a period of intense confusion,
of being like a ping pong ball
going back and forth across the net,
"Shall I get married?"
"Shall I enter religious life?"
"Shall I say yes to the angel
and lose Joseph and all security?
Shall I say no to the angel
and maybe deny God's will?"
I mean, this is a tough situation.
I advise you not to imitate Our Lady too closely.
(laughter)
This is a dangerous women! Believe me!
When you get down to the actual facts.
Wonderful, but the more wonderful you are,
the more searching the trials are going to be,
because God seems to relentless
in trying to transform us more and more
into the divine life—what He is—pure love.
So, so notice how Mary's instinctual needs
are contradicted in this program
that the angel suggests
of her becoming the mother of the Messiah.
First, lack of security.
She'll probably lose Joseph.
He's a just man. He'll probably divorce her.
She lost all her affection and esteem needs
in the fact that she knew,
what will her parents think of her?
Can she possibly tell anybody about this mystery?
Who would believe it?
Or if they believed it,
wouldn't it be vanity or pride to say,
"I'm the mother of God"?
How many of us—
What would you ladies do
if you were presented with this problem?
(laughter)
And, then finally, she lost all control of her life,
because she apparently to judge
by the conversation,
as at least how it's been traditionally interpreted
by fathers of the Church all through the ages—
she had decided
that God wanted her to be a virgin,
to remain a virgin and it's predicted
that Joseph had agreed to this,
and so it meant that her understanding
and her discernment process
of what God willed in her life
was completely thrown in the waste basket by God.
In other words, could she trust anymore,
her own discernment?
She has, or would she consent
and have no more control over her life,
because what she thought she should be doing,
God didn't want her to do?
Now these same dilemmas
take place in our personal lives
on the spiritual journey every now and then
through family problems,
work problems, vocational problems…
It's almost God's favorite pattern
of developing your spiritual potentialities
to their full.
And no amount of rational conviction
that sees into this marvelous plan of God
from after the fact can hinder or mitigate
the pain of being in the middle of it
and having no idea what to do.
The angel says, very sweetly,
"You're going to be the mother of the Messiah.
He's going to be called the son of God."
What does that make you?
She doesn't think once
of what it will make her.
She thinks of all the difficulties
that this is going to be making
for her mother, her relatives,
and especially for Joseph.
And we know from Matthew
that Joseph was terribly distraught.
He didn't know what to do.
He was a just man.
The law said put away an adulterous woman.
He wanted to do it privately,
but for him, it was the crucifixion,
an anticipation in his own participation
in Christ's passion, death, and resurrection.
Because it really was the loss of Mary
and for him nothing greater
could be lost, just as for us,
perhaps, after Jesus, nothing greater can be lost
than our childhood
or early life confidence in Mary.
She is the new Eve, to bring in an archetype here.
Eve introduced us as a family to the serpent.
Mary introduces us a family to Christ,
and she is the mother of all those
who are in the Spirit.
And the Spirit is ready to invade our life,
but the Spirit opposes our over-identification
with our instinctual values of security,
power, control, affection, esteem,
that have gone wild and exaggerated in early life
because we didn't know at that time
what the true happiness is
and sought symbols of those
instinctual ideas or hopes for happiness
in the wrong places.'
What traditional calls 'Illusion'—
not knowing where happiness really is
and 'concupiscence'—of seeking the wrong things
instead of true happiness,
or too much of good things,
which is more or less the same problem,
instead of seeking true values.
And then the final traditional consequence
of original sin is—
if you ever know what true happiness is,
the will is too weak to pursue it anyway.
(laughter)
And this is the... insight
that we're trying to communicate to you,
not just through the practice of centering prayer,
in which it arises spontaneously,
but in the conceptual background for it
in the invitation to love,
which looks at the diagnosis
of the consequences of original sin
in terms of modern psychology,
which give you a detailed account of what's wrong
instead of just the general theological principles
that I just enunciated.
Well, here's this little girl,
truly the object of the most intense waiting.
St. Bernard has a marvelous sermon on this
in which he says, "All humanity, all the deceased,
living and dead, are waiting on Mary's fiat.
Will she say yes or will she say no?"
Well, she didn't have any idea
what she was going to say,
when she asked the question,
but notice her prudence.
She had damn good reason to ask,
"How is this thing going to be, for God's sake?"
No, she didn't say that,
but "How is this thing going to happen?"
"'Cause I don't know Joseph yet
in a conjugal way,
and I'm certainly
not going to know some other guy."
"How is it going to happen?"
Unfortunately He didn't tell Mary in advance,
"I'm going to solve this dilemma for you, dear."
(laughter)
He waited.
And he left her in that double bind,
absolutely destitute of human help,
and projecting the laws of her family and Joseph,
a permanent shadow over her whole life
in a small gossipy town...
(laughter)
And her whole plans for her life,
her capacity to discern
what the Spirit wanted of her,
completely undermined.
In other words, she must have been devastated
on the human level
and reduced to that kind of emptiness
where there's nothing left except the leap
into God's boundless confidence and trust.
And so her fiat, her self-surrender,
is letting go of her whole life,
with it's expectations,
her idea of happiness,
even though it was un-tinged
by the false values of the false self.
Everything she had or was or could do
is poured into that one word,
the symbol of every fiber of her being
and all her faculties.
Surrendering to the ultimate mystery:
God as mystery.
And it's that acceptance of the unknown future
that many of us have to accept.
I think everybody has to accept at points.
When you marry a man or a woman,
boy that's a real decision.
(laughter)
I had never made it myself.
(laughter)
But from what I've seen,
it's a leap into the unknown future.
And in some cases,
several unknown futures, I understand.
(laughter)
Hasn't Elizabeth Taylor been married eight times?
What an unknown life she's led.
(laughter)
But suppose you enter the religious life.
Here it's like marrying fifteen people you don't like.
(laughter)
I see there's some religious here, yes.
(laughter)
And it could be more!
I lived in a monastery with eighty in 1900.
But at least you wouldn't choose these people,
if you had a choice.
So it is a surrender to an unknown life,
and for those entering the priesthood,
the bishop changes every now and then,
doesn't he?
He retires and dies,
so the next one may be totally different.
So again, the Christian life
is a journey into the unknown.
You've gotta surrender to do the best you can.
But more than that, you've got to trust this God
who doesn't tell you in advance
what the future's going to be.
He doesn't tell you.
And that's the contract.
Once you say yes,
then you begin to find out.
It begins to make sense.
It begins to reassure you and so on.
But here is where Mary stands out magnificently
for all of us,
and that's what we mean by saying,
"Imitate Mary's fiat,"
which means a lot more than, "Okay,
I'll put up with it."
It means, "Here I am.
Do with me anything that you want."
"I'm ready to go anywhere or nowhere.
To be something or to be nothing.
To be actively involved
in the service of the church
or be secretly involved in some cloister.
Or to mix them both up."
So, let's take just a final look at this...
most important event in Mary's life
which launched her contrary
to her own understanding of God's will,
in an unknown and unforeseeable future
that she totally accepted in advance.
Okay, so she said yes...
(laughter)
to our great relief.
And so she is,
so she is the paradigm of saying
yes to God in the double bind,
which you certainly will experience,
perhaps many times over,
and perhaps in classical dramatic fashion,
if you're on the spiritual journey.
And if you are on the spiritual journey,
it's heart is contemplative prayer,
the inner transformation of our faculties
into God's way of doing things.
The angel, the certain practicality said,
"Why don't you go and see Elizabeth at this time?"
"She's having a baby."
Notice that was very thoughtful,
it gave her a chance to get away from it all.
(laughter)
Especially as one is becoming pregnant,
I understand, in an unfriendly atmosphere,
it's nice to go someplace else...
fast.
And so she went with haste
to visit her cousin Elizabeth,
leaving behind her either unknowing
or beginning to suspect mother,
relatives, and Joseph,
to handle their double bind as best they could.
What could she say?
What could she say?
So, with that great surrender
she had unquestionably moved
into what the resolution of every double bind is,
which is a leap into a higher level of faith,
which involves a conscious expansion
of one's knowledge of God
so that one sees the double bind
from a higher perspective,
God's view in which the opposing opposites
are resolved.
And one withdraws the question.
All our questions are because we don't know God.
When you move to a new level of knowing Him,
there are no questions.
At least while you adjust to that level.
Then, when you're adjusted,
you may be called to the next level.
Another double bind,
more questions.
And resolution:
you withdraw the questions.
So, she had withdrawn all her questions,
and just went to see Elizabeth.
Without thinking of herself anymore,
she went to do good.
Elizabeth was having a baby,
she needs help, I'll go.
In other words, the spontaneity of grace,
once it's established on a new level
is not look to at oneself to congratulate oneself,
but to move out, to serve others
proportionately to the inner-strength
one has received from God.
This is what God does, what He is.
Doesn't stay in Himself,
creates more and more wonderful creatures,
of every kind and everyplace,
and the universe is expanding.
Even in the Trinity the great relationship is that
each member lives in the other,
rather than in Itself or Herself or Himself,
whatever It may be.
God of course, the divine,
transcends all gender considerations,
because of His being.
And being beyond being—
which for us is just a concept—
God just is, whatever that means.
And this Is-ness penetrates everything
and deals with infinite tenderness
with every creature according to its nature.
So, God, of course, is loving this wonderful Mary,
and notice how he solves her problem.
She probably had the greatest
double bind of all time,
except perhaps for Jesus in the garden
of Gethsemane
when He felt himself called as the Son of God
to identify with sin,
alienation from God.
So, how would you handle that?
(laughter)
"He was made sin," Paul says "for our sake."
And that meant He had to lose in some way,
in some deeply personal way,
his relationship, at least temporarily, on the cross,
with the Father, who was all his Human life,
and utterly everything He was in the Trinity.
So Mary here had to say yes
to an impossible dilemma,
which was not knowing man and remaining a virgin
physiologically, and accepting God's will.
So, God did for her the impossible,
which was to make her a virgin mother.
No one had ever thought of that!
And it's never happened again,
so as far as I know.
But this is the end message of that fact:
That no matter what one's impossible situation is,
what the double bind is,
God always has a solution.
You can't demand it, you can only wait for it.
And it's in waiting that all the obstacles,
the walls, one after another begin to fall down.
But you don't tear them down!
Come across a wall on this journey,
you just sit there until it falls down.
(laughter)
And this might take quite a while.
But her reaction was very down to earth:
"Well, now that I'm transformed
into this new level of relating to God,
what am I supposed to do?"
"I better start practicing true religion."
"What's that?"
Elizabeth is having a baby.
She needs help in making
the diapers, the bassinet,
few other things.
I don't know exactly what they are.
Mary thought she did,
so she goes to Elizabeth as a servant.
This is the movement of transformation.
That's what "ministry" means.
It's not authoritarianism.
It's not dominating other people.
The first movement is God's movement.
You go and serve them.
Just as God serves us day and night
with the air and food and the earth,
this beautiful planet, which is a,
which probably is what was intended
to mean the Garden of Eden.
At least that's what it looks like from outer space:
this gorgeous blue planet.
White clouds and this black background
and everybody on it
living in perfect peace presumably.
Because it's so beautiful,
any kind of violence would be so out of place.
As you look at the human family
on this one little "ball"
in the middle of nowhere in space,
it's just crazy to have battles
and wars and violence
in a place where we have to work together
to survive,
'cause has no body else—as far as we know—
on other planets is going to help us.
So, this intuition of the oneness of human nature
was descending on Mary
as she realized that as the Son of God
became flesh in her womb,
He was taking to Himself every human being
not just as a family collectively
but individually.
So in this sense, you and I
spiritually were present in the womb,
insofar as we too
are living under the influence of the Spirit.
She's the mother of all those
who are participating in the body of Christ
which was totally the fruit of her body.
So in Mary, God becomes physically present.
In Mary, her body become His body.
He moves into her space, so to speak,
and makes it her own,
and in doing so, here's where she's archetypal.
She is the new age, and all of us who implicitly
are in Christ, have been, are in, her womb.
And St. Augustine puts it very strongly,
"We live in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
while we live in this life
until we are brought forth
into fullness of glory
in the Kingdom of God in Heaven."
Okay, so this wonderful person
is going in haste, over the mountains,
apparently alone
and enters the house of her cousin Elizabeth,
who also has conceived
no other than John the Baptist
according to the infancy narratives.
And when Mary enters the house,
what do you think she says?
"Hello."
(laughter)
And that's enough
to sanctify John the Baptist in the womb.
In other words, she didn't have to say anything.
It was who she was that made all the difference,
because now through that double bind we saw
and her total self-surrender and trust in God,
it is God who is living in her.
And so, we can take this lesson from Mary,
which is not so much
what you say, but what you do.
And not so much as what you do as who you are.
And not so much who you are,
as the One whom you are expressing in daily life.
This is the mystery of transmission.
That is to say, not just preaching,
which is one way of spreading the Gospel,
but basically fairly superficial,
compared to this one.
In transmission, you don't have to say anything!
You just have to be
the expression of God's love and tenderness
in all the details of life,
however humdrum, however routine.
It's not what we do,
but the motive from which it's coming,
and the person who has that motive that transforms
and brings God into other people's lives.
And that's the ultimate transmission.
To bring, awaken other people
to the presence of God's love and action in them.
And this is what Mary
is the example of in that incident.
At the same time, she transforms Elizabeth,
because Elizabeth felt the child
leaping for joy in her womb,
and she shouts out the words,
"Blessed are you among women"
and "Blessed is the fruit of your womb!"
I hope you've heard those words before
and say them everyday.
(laughter)
But notice how God works here. Very important.
He puts Mary through this incredible double bind
without any indication in advance
of how it's to be resolved.
He resolves it in the only way
it could be resolved—
to be a virgin and mother at the same time,
something absolutely unknown in human affairs,
so she couldn't have in anyway foreseen it.
She just surrendered, and said to God,
"Look, this is a problem. You handle it!"
So she lovingly puts it back in His lap.
"I'm not going to conk out on Joseph.
And I'm not going to go against
my promise of virginity that you inspired.
I don't see how it's going to happen.
You say it's going to happen.
I say, 'I make the leap of faith.
Yes, you can do it.'"
So, so she became the Virgin Mother,
as I said, utterly unforeseen solution,
which means that there's always some solution
to your personal double bind,
no matter how impossible it may seem to you.
That's a tremendous example for a contemplative,
who usually goes through several cycles
of the double bind,
many times over, even.
When you surrender, then comes some reassurance.
In other words, then comes the confirmation
by some external event or some inner grace
that says, "Yes, you chose the right thing."
And here, it seems to me,
Elizabeth's unexpected praise of Mary—
her perception of the mystery in other words,
that even Joseph and Mary's parents
didn't perceive or know—
must have come as a tremendous confirmation
of this whole problem, process for Mary.
So at last she felt, "Ahhh, I guess I was right."
And this is a nice feeling to have
after going through a couple of double binds
at a deep level.
And so she...
God reassured her at times.
But notice reassurance is once in a while,
whereas daily life and the double binds
are predominant.
Don't be surprised by this.
Get that through your heads and hearts!
And then you'll truly be imitating
the Blessed Mother and of course Jesus,
to whom she leads us and whom she reveals
in so many ways.
But above all she's the bride of the Spirit
who teaches us how to be in total
but free and responsible submission
to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit
that God keeps giving us to transform daily life
or to support our ministry, if we have one.
And I certainly would include here the ministry
of marriage and parenting,
which are probably the greatest ministries
in the church.
I daresay someone will contradict me,
but I solemnly submit that the sacrament of marriage
is something that goes on day and night
for twenty-four hours.
And the other sacraments, as great as they are,
are temporary, in a sense.
Baptism of course has repercussions all one's life,
and the Eucharist is transforming.
But the sacrament of matrimony means
that one is sharing the love of God,
the tenderness of God,
in everything that one does in the marriage.
In how you pour the coffee,
in how you worry about the children,
how you have conjugal relations.
In other words, it's a twenty-four hour sacrament.
And hence,
personally parenting is so important.
Because if the parents don't do their job,
then we as children will bear the consequences—
probably—all our lives through.
[CONTEMPLATIVE OUTREACH
SILENCE SOLITUDE SOLIDARITY SERVICE]
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