The glow of God's light shining from a human being.
Pictured is one of the important messages of our Advent journey: remembering we are called to be human in the manner Mary showed us: if we knowingly say 'yes', our joy of living will be found by birthing the Light of God into the world.
Often in mythologies, only gods birth gods but not in our Christian story. Our Christian story tells us that God depends upon we human creations of God to carry God into the world: We, imperfect, flawed vessels of flesh and blood are designed to emit Light that is not human.
I've always believed Great Stories remain alive, no matter how long ago they were formed, because Great Stories contain truth. Even when we do not fully understand the truth of a story, our gut resonates or our heart sings and the story keeps finding hearts and minds to live from.
For me, one of the truths of the incarnation is found in Mary's role: our humanness is not only used, it is essential to God's plan. The gospel of Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus: a long line of human beings who kept the promise of the Messiah alive through centuries. Luke gives us the Nativity narrative and the people so familiar to our telling of the birth of the Christ child. And John offers the gorgeously poetic: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God ...and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory."
Those who 'beheld His glory' were so altered by the experience that the trajectory of religious history was forever changed. Each 'beholders' heart was ignited when the Spirit of God came upon them; in the form of an angel, a dream, a star far, far away, a flame of love, the hearing of a story - God has infinite ways of offering the opportunity for 'yes.' For over 2000 years, millions of people have whispered yes to the God in their heart.
Oh, you'll find flaws in every person (except maybe Mary) who answered 'yes.' Read the Gospels carefully and you'll discover the disciples were at times very slow learners; they screwed up in almost every manner possible except one: they loved Jesus and desired most of all to learn to how to love as He showed them.
Read scripture carefully and you'll find multitudes of unique personalities and wildly varying ways they loved. Why? Well, it seems to me this affirms the idea that God needs a diversity of lovers to fully illustrate His story of love. Or at least that's my take as I believe each person is a creation of God, deliberately chosen to live on earth and tell a story of loving that can only be told through their living. Each individual creation of God has a purpose for being alive.
But there's a paradox to God's design for bringing His light of love into the world. My love of stories leads me to suspect that perhaps it is the paradox that keeps us telling the story over and over as we travel the circular liturgical calendar. Each journey through the seasons allows us to glimmer the story's message in greater and greater fullness.
The paradox of God's design for bringing love into the world is our humanness. We must be fully human in order to be fully alive, and living the story God has entrusted us demands we be fully alive. Both realities: humanness and relationship with God, must be embraced. The is no 'cure' for being a flawed and imperfect human - this is the design. There is however a 'remedy' for the various miseries of being flawed, imperfect, cantankerous humans: we glimpse the beginning of this truth in Mary's story.
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