Something happened in the night. She couldn’t recall all of it.  Was it a dream?  Was it real?  She awoke and knew instinctively that something was different. No…EVERYTHING was different.  She was scared and afraid to move.  The floor felt cold and somehow safe.  She sat up and stared at the doorway dimly lit by the new days light.  It was not so much bright as it was hazy.  What lay outside?  What would the day bring?  Would she dare walk through it?  Then she remembered something.  It was troubling.  It was comforting.  Both of these at the same time.  She didn’t feel her “self.”  Who was she?  She said out loud what she now remembered…

“The Lord is with You…”

The unsettling anxiety came in another wave. How could she feel this strange safety and odd trust when everything she knew before was gone now?  How could she trust this trust?  What was it that was ‘over’ now?  Had something concluded?   What died?  Where was she now?  On the verge of somewhere completely unfamiliar, but yet something that she was familiar with in some indescribably manner.  Would that account for the feeling or the intuition that it would be OK?.  That it was OK and it is OK?  Here and Now!  Yet… it is still kind of scary…

When we hear the story of the Angel Gabriel approaching Mary (Lk 1:26-38) and advising her of the role she would play in the human incarnation of Christ, I think we immediately glaze over.  The story is familiar in the Christian tradition and this very familiarity can work against grasping anything new about the story.  For one thing, the very fact that it is a story about someone else gives us a safe distance from the possibility of it touching us on a personal level that could actually encourage resonance.  A young Jewish teenage girl informed by a divine messenger that she would be giving birth to the Son of God.  I wonder, though, if this fantastic storyline is so far off from Who we are and how we experience our world today?

In the opening of this reflection, I attempted to inquire into how Mary may have reflected back on her own experience. It occurs to me that for all the ‘joyfulness’ that we may associate with this story on one level, it is quite frightening on another.  I think it’s not incorrect to say that Mary may have had a death experience in this story.  So, what died you may ask?  Well, perhaps the world, as she knew it, ended in a sense.   Even if we attribute all of the piety and even spiritual precociousness to Mary that we want, do we really think that she had any idea of what this all meant?  She is told that God found favor in her. Had she known what that ‘favor’ fully meant I wonder if she would have consented. And yet, she trusted.  She trusted – not knowing.   But this trusting was no naïve nod but instead a fierce surrender to a new life that she knew nothing about.

The Cistercian mystic Thomas Keating tells us not that death leads to resurrection and transformation, but that Death IS resurrection and Transformation[i].  It’s the deep intuition that death and resurrection cannot be separated from one another.  When we lose someone we love, the feeling of loss and the accompanying grief are overwhelming.  And yet, my own experience of this and what I have heard others share as well is that there is – sometimes after a long period of time – a deep sense of presence that those who are ‘left behind’ experience.  It is familiar but also not familiar.  The loved one is not, so to speak, physically with us as we experienced them before, but they now permeate the very fibers of our lives, the world as we experience it and the people around us.  It is ‘them’ but it’s not them – It’s curiously even MORE them.  I cannot explain that and don’t even want to try.  However, it speaks to me of the intractable connection between death and resurrection, which really is the two-sided coin of what we refer to as birth and New Life!

Isn’t this what we mean when we speak of Christ? Venturing out beyond the life we know and sometimes hold onto entirely too tightly, and letting go, or even giving ourselves over to the unknown, trusting in some odd way that in our giving over we are indeed receiving a gift ourselves.  This is no small thing.  It is the work of Love and it can be quite terrible.  It can end one life, but never without blossoming forth in another new life. The key is to learn how to really let go of what we THINK about life so that we can recognize and simultaneously then receive the absolute Newness of the Life offered, which comes to us in the wholeness of body, mind, and heart.

We have all been visited by Gabriel in our lives. And Gabriel tells us the same thing that was told to Mary:

“The Lord is with You!”

Christ is never absent – always with and in us – but we oftentimes do not allow Christ to surprise us with something entirely New! We are afraid of this ‘death’ because it means letting go of the reins of our lives that we have grown accustomed to and trusting that we will be brought through, or carried into a radical More-ness of Life that we cannot even begin to imagine.  This death/resurrection moment is not simply tied to our physical mortality but deeply embedded in our spiritual mortality, meaning precisely that the process of mortality is immortality or rather Eternal Newness in Christ.  Isn’t this Nicodemus’ question to Jesus, ““How can a person… be born again? Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?”

This is not merely a cosmetic procedure – it is a complete Christ makeover!  And the price tag is Trust, which is not mild-mannered at all.  IT’s a fierce commitment in relationship to SomeOne who will Not abandon us but only give us MORE, if we only recognize and accept this more-ness of Life!

The Lord is WITH YOU now… and you…now…and you…now!

…then the angel departed…

[i] The Gift of Life: Death & Dying, Life & Living – A Conversation with Thomas Keating and Carl J. Arico (Contemplative Outreach, LTD: 2014), pp. 11-12.

     (originally published December 20, 2018)