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meditation of the day

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

The whole thing was to happen secretly. There was to be no announcement. The psalmists had hymned Christ’s coming on harps of gold. The prophets had foretold it with burning tongues. But now the loudest telling of his presence on earth was to be the heartbeat within the heartbeat of a child. It was to be a secret, and God was so jealous of his secret that he even guarded it at the cost of his little bride’s seeming dishonor.

This proved that God knew our Lady’s trust in him was absolutely without limit…. She was to give him her body and soul unconditionally, and—what in this new light would have seemed absurdly trivial to anyone but the child-bride of Wisdom—she was to give him her daily life…. She was not even asked to live it alone with this God who was her own Being and whose Being was to be hers. No, he asked for her ordinary life shared with Joseph. She was not to neglect her simple human tenderness, her love for an earthly man, because God was her unborn child. On the contrary, the hands and feet, the heart, the waking, sleeping, and eating that were forming Christ were to form him in service to Joseph.

Yes, it certainly seemed that God wanted to give the world the impression that it is ordinary for him to be born of a human creature. Well, that is a fact. God did mean it to be the ordinary thing, for it is his will that Christ shall be born in every human being’s life and not, as a rule, through extraordinary things, but through the ordinary daily life and the human love that people give to one another.

Our Lady said yes. She said yes for us all. It was as if the human race were a little dark house, without light or air, locked and latched…. But one day a girl opened the door, and the little house was swept pure and sweet by the wind. Seas of light swept through it, and the light remained in it; and in that little house a Child was born and the Child was God.

Caryll Houselander

Caryll Houselander († 1954) was a British artist, poet, and spiritual author. / From The Reed of God. © 1944, Caryll Houselander, Christian Classics, a Division of Thomas More Publishing, Allen, TX. All rights reserved.