A Meditation on the

Joyful Mysteries of the

Holy Rosary

by Yoshi Matsumoto

email: MatsumotoBooks@gmail.com
Introduction: A Note Before Reading

This book is a compilation of my personal meditations on the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, the Catholic prayer. That is all it is. I am not a professional theologian nor a philosopher nor a priest nor a monk nor a clergymen. Nothing herein is dogma. Much herein may very well be wrong. I am but a layman who has spent a great deal of time praying the Rosary and meditating on the meanings of it and I have hear-in put pen to paper to record my thoughts. I hope it will be of use to you. I hope that it will open up the scriptures and the Christian faith to you in a way that you have not experienced before and I hope you grow to love God more because of it. Most of all, I hope it encourages you to spend more time in contemplation and in prayer. If this book is to be viewed as anything, let it be viewed as a seed for beginning your own meditations on the Christian mysteries. Take what I have written and chew on it and then from that grow your own meaning and understanding out of the stories and texts. Treat this work as fertilizer for your own prayer life. A bit of compost to help the gardens in your soul to grow.

This book is divided into three parts:

1.A short introduction to the Rosary, the mechanics of praying it, and some general advice for getting the most out of this prayer. This is all included under the chapter titled: "How to Pray the Rosary."

2.Five chapters follow this, each devoted to a separate mystery of the five Joyous Rosary Mysteries. Each chapter is prefaced with the scripture readings relevant to the mystery and a haiku of my own design. I apologize up front for the haiku. I have always wanted to be a poet but I'm afraid I'm not a very good one.

3.An appendix is included at the end, which lay out for you all the common prayers associated with the Rosary for your reference. If you would like to begin praying the Rosary, please use this appendix to help you in the recitation if needed.

One last note, as you may have guessed from the severely amateur attempt at artwork currently passing for this book's cover, this is an entirely one man show. All of the artwork, writing, editing, proofreading, formatting, and so-on, has been done solely by myself and thus there are doubtless many errors that I did not catch. I beg your pardon. If you happen upon some ridiculous typo, please don't think too poorly of me for it.

Please, enjoy the book.
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How to Pray the Rosary

(The Mechanics)

Prayer is almost the wrong word for what the Rosary is. Not, mind you, for any fault of the Rosary's, but because what most people think of when they hear the word "prayer" has almost no relation to what the Rosary is trying to accomplish. To most people, prayer is little more than a petition. It is an act of asking for something and, in most cases, it is little more than that. When most people think of prayer, they think of people with bowed heads and closed eyes asking God to heal an illness or to protect a loved one or to give them money. From the outset, I want you to know that that is not what the Rosary is about. There's nothing wrong with that sort of prayer mind you. Petitionary prayer is a right and good thing to do and the Rosary contains within it several petitions. However, at the same time, if one's prayer life is limited exclusively to petitionary prayer and does not go any deeper, one is greatly missing out. The word "meditation" is more appropriate to the kind of prayer we are attempting with the Rosary. It is a prayer designed to center one's mind on God and the things of God. A prayer to sit and stew for a time upon who He is. The Rosary is not a prayer about asking for something. Rather, it is a prayer about becoming something. During the Rosary one fulfills the edict of the scriptures to "be still, and know that I am God." It is a method whereby the creature sits and mediates upon his Creator and becomes thereby more his child, more his friend. It is deep prayer. Prayer with many surprises lurking inside.

The word itself can be a bit confusing. "Rosary" refers both to the set of beads used as a prayer aid and to the actual prayer said while using them. I will endeavor to use the uppercase "Rosary" to refer to the prayer and the lowercase "rosary" to refer to the beads. I might slip up at this. Forgive me. Once you have the distinction between the Rosary and a rosary clear, the very first thing you should be told is that you do not need a rosary to pray one. The beads are unnecessary and by no means should lack of access to a set prevent you from enjoying the meditation. Fortunately, the Rosary is based around the number ten and so you can just as easily substitute your fingers or toes for a set of beads if you need to. Not that a set of beads is not a nice thing. They can be made to look handsome and if you make a habit of praying with a set then you might find after a while that simply picking them up helps put your mind in a more spiritual mood. But they are an accessory. A nice accessory but an accessory. If you think the beads will help you then by all means get a set. If not then forget them. The prayers are what's important. A rosary is a wholly secondary thing to the Rosary itself.

The second thing you ought be told is that the Rosary can be quite daunting for the beginner. It is complicated. So complicated in fact that it is one of the few prayers that needs diagrams and tables in order to show you how it works. Don't panic though. The Rosary follows an internal logic and, once your grasp it, you find that it is no where near as complex as it first seems.

The Rosary can be broken up into three stages, as follows:

The Rosary = Opening Prayers -> Rosary Circuit -> Closing Prayers

Of these, The Rosary Circuit is further divided into a set of five:

Rosary Circuit = Decade 1 -> Decade 2 -> Decade 3 -> Decade 4 -> Decade 5.

The "Decades" are so called because each is a set of ten. Each decade is a collection of ten "Hail Marys" bookended on the front by an "Our Father" and on the back by a "Glory Be" and an "Oh My Jesus." If you are unfamiliar with these names, they are simply the titles of common Catholic prayers and are included in the appendix of this book for your reference. At base, the Rosary is simply a recitation of the opening prayers, followed by five of these "decades", and concluded by a set of closing prayers. That's it. The confusion only enters in because the Rosary is not really one prayer but four. There are four separate Rosaries and you say each one on a different day of the week.

Again, if all that sounds confusing, please, do not be alarmed.

As mentioned, the Rosary is a meditation. During each decade you are given one mystery about the Christian faith to meditate upon and there are four sets of these mysteries, each a grouping of five centered around a common theme. The Joyful Mysteries (the subject of this work) is a set of mysteries concerning the birth and childhood of Jesus. The Luminous Mysteries is a set concerning his life's ministry and miracles. The Sorrowful concern his Passion and Death, and the Glorious his Resurrection and the founding of his Church. In general Catholics follow a weekly calendar that prescribes a given Rosary for the day of the week and this is useful because if you follow this regiment you can be assured that you are saying the same prayer that day as millions of other Catholics all over the world. It is a method of synchronizing the prayers of the global faithful, be they in Zimbabwe or Antarctica or Japan. However, note that the regiment prescribed by the weekly calendar is a suggestion, not a rule. If you would rather not pray the Rosary according to the schedule you need not but, unless you have good reason, it is good practice to pray in communion with the rest of the Church.

The four Rosaries are as follows, each shown in its place upon the weekly calendar:

In other words, if it is Sunday and you are saying the Rosary, then to pray with the global Church you would need to recite it while meditating upon the Glorious Mysteries. If it is Friday, then you should focus instead upon the Sorrowful ones. You'll note that each Mystery set is given two days of the week except for the Luminous which is only given Thursday. This is because the first three (Glorious, Joyful, and Sorrowful), go all the way back to the 1200s and the Luminous by contrast is incredibly recent, being added to the Rosary only in 2002 by Pope John Paul II. Personally, this makes me a little sad because the Luminous Mysteries are my favorite. On the other hand, it also makes Thursdays more special, and that day has become permanently associated with the Baptism of Jesus in my mind.

You may be wondering about how one meditates while saying a prayer. A fair question. If you're unfamiliar with such things it may take a little bit of work to get right. Essentially, during the decades the Hail Marys are used more or less as a mantra, words to simply occupy the mouth while the mind focuses upon the things of God. This does not mean the Hail Marys are pointless, not at all, but it does mean that you should focus less on the words of these prayers than on the mystery behind him. Naturally, if you do not know the Hail Mary by heart this will be rather hard. Until you have the prayer memorized using the Hail Mary as a mantra will be impossible and you will be forced to expend your mental energy getting the words right rather than focusing on the mystery at hand. That's okay. Say the prayers badly until you say them better. It will come. As Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force and you must force yourself to say the prayers even when it is difficult. Likewise force yourself to say them even on days when you are lazy. You must treat it like going to the gym, a thing that is sometimes hard but which you know will be beneficial. The Rosary is spiritual exercise, offering you all the challenges of a physical exercise and all the same opportunities to make excuses for why you didn't do it. Go through the Rosary in rote manner until the words flow naturally from your lips. Then proceed on to the deeper meditation, using the Hail Marys as a backdrop against your contemplative effort. Now, onto the mysteries themselves.

As stated, each of the four Rosaries has five mysteries associated with it, each to be meditated on during the decade of the same number. They are as follows:

 Let us walk through one decade of the Rosary, just so you get the feel for it. Let's say its Tuesday, and you're on the third decade. You would progress through your meditation on the mystery of Christ's crowning with thorns as follows:

1) Say the "Our Father" prayer. Focus on the words of this prayer. Mull each sentence our Lord has given us.

2) While meditating upon the story of Christ being crowned with thorns and its meaning, repeat the "Hail Mary" prayer 10 times, keeping count with either your fingers or by fingering across a set of beads. (Note: Each decade of beads on a rosary is separated by a larger bead. When your fingers hit the larger one, you know you've reached the end.)

3) Return to a focus on the words of the prayers themselves. Say the "Glory be" followed by the "Oh My Jesus."

That's it. As you go to the next mystery, you simply repeat those three steps but replace Christ being crowned with thorns with Christ carrying his cross. Then repeat again, finishing up by meditating upon his crucifixion and his death. Now, once you have the structure of the mysteries and the Rosary Circuit straight, the opening and closing prayers are straightforward. They do not change by day of the week or season of the year and they are the same for all four Rosary sets.

Let's look at the closing prayers first because they are easiest. After you have finished the "Oh my Jesus" of the last decade, you recite two prayers, the "Hail Holy Queen" and, aptly named, "The Rosary Prayer." Again, these prayers are given in the appendix in the back.

The Closing Prayers = Hail Holy Queen -> The Rosary Prayer.

Now the opening prayers are slightly more complex but only because they are like a "mini-decade" with the Apostle's Creed thrown on top. The opening prayers are meant to get the mind and heart in the right state, to orient the soul so that it can pray properly. For most people, the beginning of a meditation is the hardest for the mind is still worried about all the goings-on of life and busy with all its to-do lists and appointments. The opening prayers are a warm-up. Again, just like physical exercise. The opening prayers allow you a chance to limber up and get into the proper frame of mind before running round the track of the Rosary circuit (and perhaps now you see why the beards are designed in a circle). You do this by repeating the Apostle's Creed and then going through a mini warm-up "decade" consisting of only three Hail Marys, still keeping the same Our Father on the front and the same Glory Be and Oh My Jesus on the back. Traditionally, one is suppose to offer each of the Hail Marys for a specific virtue you would like God to grow in you. The virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity are most commonly cited, but you can substitute other virtues if there are other areas of your life that you need particular help with.

The Opening Prayers = The Apostles' Creed -> Our Father -> 3 Hail Marys -> Glory Be -> Oh My Jesus

So. Now we know how to say the Rosary:

Rosary = Opening Prayers -> The Rosary Circuit -> Closing Prayers.

Again, if this seems overly difficult do not panic. Put in the effort to get good at the Rosary and I promise you will not be disappointed. Truly, the Rosary is a life changing prayer.

(Some Simple Prayer Advice)

Below are a few suggestions to aid you in your prayer life. If you are just beginning to pray, this advice may be helpful to get you started. Better men than I have written better and far more extensive books on prayer and I encourage you to seek them out. Additionally, if you are seeking to deepen your pray life I recommend meeting with your priest for advice and guidance, preferably on a regular basis. Reading the works of the saints and various Christian mystics and contemplatives can also be invaluable. Thomas Merton is one of my favorites. If you are fortunate enough to live near a monastic community, great masters of the contemplatively life can usually also be found there and, in my experience, they are very willing to help. Above all make prayer a habit, a discipline (for discipline is the root of the word disciple). We are not all called to be priests or monks or nuns, but we are each of us called to pray. May God bless you, pray he blesses me.

• Posture is important. You can pray from any position and any place however I find that certain postures allow me to "forget" my body more and enter into deeper contemplation. Typically I will sit on the floor in a sort of hunched over crossed-legged position because I find this easiest on my back. Many like to pray the rosary while kneeling, either behind a pew or beside the bed but I find that I become too distracted by the discomfort in my knees or back for this to be effective for me during longer sessions. Find for yourself a posture that allows you to focus, whatever this looks like in practice will depend on you. I will often pray simply sitting in a chair, or while driving the car, or while out for a walk, but I do not pray in positions that will have me constantly fussing with myself, repositioning, or thinking about the aching of a joint. Comfort is key. That said, I caution strongly against praying in a reclining or laying down position because one is libel to fall asleep. Quiet alertness. That is what you're going for. Be still, but also be awake.

• Don't overdo it. Like anything else, you can push yourself to hard and become burnt out with prayer. If you are just starting the rosary, it may be helpful to not try and tackle the full thing in a go. A good session with a set of rosary beads can take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, and few people are able to concentrate through the whole thing on the first attempt. Instead, break it up. For example, you might pray the opening prayers and one or two decades in the morning, another decade on your commute home, and the last two and the closing prayers before bed. Or you might pray one decade every other hour, or split it neatly between a morning and an afternoon session. Whatever works for your schedule. Treat it as you would treat weight lifting: Get your reps in, but don't over exhaust the muscle.

• Work in your own prayers. The Rosary is highly customizable. Though the core prayers (The decades of Hail Marys, the Our Fathers, etc) should remain, one should feel free to add to the Rosary as needed. For example, I will occasionally throw in a recitation of "The Jesus Prayer" in between each Hail Mary, or I will end each decade with a personal impromptu prayer for myself or someone in my family. It will take a while to get used to the standard Rosary for the beginner, but after a while you should feel comfortable enough with it to make the Rosary your own. This should not be an impersonal prayer. It should not be rote recitation. Put yourself into it. Offer yourself to God through it. Yell at him if you need to. Ask Mother Mary to tell God off if you are mad. Tell Christ that you love him. Speak openly of your deepest desires and greatest fears. Prayer should be the laying bare of the soul before its maker. Be frank. Do not be afraid. God can handle whatever you throw at him.

• Be consistent. Easier said than done. It is most important to develop a prayer routine, to make it a habit. Again, like weight lifting, it must not simply be a sort of New Year's Resolution activity that you being eagerly and drop weeks later as it gets too hard. Find an amount of prayer that you can stick to, and stick to it. Even if at first you do not finish a whole Rosary every day, just finish a little bit and be consistent about doing that little bit each and every day. Continual effort begets continual progress. You must be disciplined.

• Use the scriptures. While not required, it is helpful at times to read the scriptures that accompany each mystery before beginning your meditation upon them. I will sometimes pray with the Bible beside me and either read the whole story of each mystery before starting the decade, or weave the ten Hail Marys in between my readings of the verses. The mysteries of the Rosary cover the bulwark of the highlights of the gospels and a Christian should be as familiar with the gospels as he is with the back of his own hands. Read the stories. To properly meditate upon something you must know the subject matter.

• Walk. If you are a person who has trouble sitting still for long periods, fine. Pray the rosary while going on a walk around your neighborhood. This can be a very useful experience, as you will find that the mysteries of the physical world going on around you will often open up aspects of the mysteries of the Rosary that you had not previously considered. You will perhaps see a woman holding an infant and get an intimation of what Mary must have looked like holding Christ. Or maybe you will see the sun shining through the clouds and get a sudden flash of what the Ascension really means. Prayer is for God, but it is also for you. It should not be a torturous thing. If you find sitting still in the quiet difficult then by all means pray as you walk outside. Pray as you walk on a treadmill. Pray as you pace back and forth across the kitchen. This is a fine way to exercise both spirit and body at the same time and you might find that you have introduced a few miles of exercise into your day just by trying to be faithful.

• Practice makes perfect. You will find your optimal prayer method only through repetition. Don't be afraid to adjust or try new things as you begin. Use all of the above suggestions or none or any combination or something else entirely. Only pray. That is the important thing. However you need to structure it so that you spend time with God each day, so be it. God has made us all different and we will all spend time with him differently. Try, do not be afraid to make mistakes.
Meditation One: The Annunciation

# Scripture

The Gospel According to Luke — Chapter 1, Verses 26 Thru 38

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, "Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end." But Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?" And the angel said to her in reply, "The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God." Mary said, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

# Meditation

Rotting on the vine,

Eden's offspring birth a fruit —

Serpent could not reach.

On a starry night long ago, the angel Gabriel winged down from Heaven. Whether he flew in the traditional sense of feathered wings beating upon the air or simply manifested himself in the Blessed Virgin's presence by the sheer impulse of his will, I won't pretend to know. The modes of locomotion used by angels are most likely quite beyond me. Regardless, the technical truth of precisely how he came down is a rather secondary thing to the spiritual truth that he did come down and if you imagine a winged being resplendent with the light of God gliding above the clouds on a spring evening, I dare say you will be right enough. I'm sure many saints and theologians would disagree with me, claiming that angels are beings of pure intellect and thus have no physical body with which to "wing" through our skies. Fine. But nonetheless the image of glowing angel soaring through the air will provoke in you the correct feeling, a sense of awe and wonder, the notion that we are here touching on something that truly is divine. For how angels come down is secondary to the fact that they do come down indeed and this particular angel had come down twice before now, once quite recently and another some time ago. Only six months prior had this angel visited the home of poor old Zechariah and foretold of another miraculous birth to come. He had told the old man that his wife, old like himself, much too old to conceive, would bear a son named John. And before that, roughly six hundred years before that, the angel had likewise come to the prophet Daniel and explained to the seer the meaning of his cryptic visions of calamity and war. He was a busy angel. Apparently there were many important things that greatly needed to be said.

Of course, what's interesting is that by this point in the story the other of Gabriel's predictions have already come true. Elizabeth was at that very moment pregnant with The Baptist. Daniel's vision of the goat with a great horn coming from the west and trampling roughshod over the ram had indeed been fulfilled. As Gabriel had told the prophet, "The goat is the kingdom of the Greeks, and the great horn upon its head the first king. The four horns that arose in its place when it was shattered are the four kingdoms that will come from his nation, but without his strength." True. This had indeed happened. As Luke's gospel opens we find ourselves in the ruins of the great goat's warpath, for Alexander had indeed come as promised. His armies really had torn asunder all the kingdoms of the East and he really had died prematurely. He really did leave his conquered holdings to be divided among his generals and Gabriel really had spoken truly when he said that none of these men would be his equal. As we sit with the young virgin in her room on this evening, the great sufferings foretold to Daniel by the angel have already come to pass and in the years since Israel has been broken and scattered and mended and broken again. The great tumult brought upon the land by the Persians had given way to the tumult brought by the Greeks which in turn had given way to the tumult brought by the Romans and now here we find our Blessed Mother, in a small house, somewhere in the backwaters of a piecemeal empire, one of many simple ordinary people just trying to survive.

It was a dark world our Mother's. A cruel one. It seemed simultaneously wrapped in the iron grip of tyrants but also curiously unstable, as if any day now another army or another revolution would come marching through the land and tear down whatever order still somehow stood. It was a world where the authorities did not take kindly to dissidents. A world where they could and often did nail such people to planks of wood. Our Mother's was a world ruled by the sword and we can understand why she might have been afraid at the sight of the angel. Doubtless the heavenly being was frightful to behold in his own right, but also Mary would have heard readings from the Book of Daniel in the temple... she would have been familiar with this creature as the bearer of particularly bad news. The people in those days could be forgiven if they were hopeless. After all, there seemed little reason to hope. They could even be forgiven for losing faith because, well, there seemed little reason for that either. The pagan gods and goddesses, Hermes and Apollo, Zeus and Venus and Jupiter and Mars. Were they not stronger than Jehovah? At this point in history, doubtless they certainly seemed so. Oh there were old tales, sure. I have no doubt that all around the land Jewish mothers told their babies about the great deeds of their God, how he had rescued them from Egypt, how he had parted the Red Sea. Little Jewish children grew up hearing the stories of how Yahweh had helped Joshua conquer the land of Jericho and given Gideon the victory over the Midianites and granted David the power to beat giants and... and... And those were just stories. Weren't they? Stories from a long long time ago. What had Yahweh done for anyone lately? After all, there certainly were a lot of giants trampling over the land now. Can you sense the desperation? Can you enter into our Mother's world and feel the trepidation and the fear of those around her. Their everything hung in the balance. Their people were oppressed. Foreigners ruled their lands. The religion of their ancestors was an old and fading memory and many were converting to the strong and powerful deities of the Greeks and Romans. The Messiah was long promised. The Messiah had not come. Our Blessed Mother was one of those still keeping the faith. She still had hope. Despite the centuries of fire and death she was one of those still patiently waiting for the Lord her God to bring an everlasting peace. She would be rewarded. Sooner or later the meek always inherit the earth. After all, there were other prophecies besides those of war and goats. On the people dwelling in deep darkness, a light was about to dawn.

Perhaps it strikes some as peculiar, maybe even sacrilegious, to suggest that God would impregnate the womb of a mortal woman. For that is precisely what we're talking about. I wonder if perhaps Christians talk about the virgin birth so much that we've forgotten how truly odd a thing it is to claim. When Christ says he is the son of God, he means it. He means that his parents are Mary and God Almighty. He means that God is the one who provided the energy for the power of generation within her womb. He means that his Father is, literally, the ultimate reality underpinning the cosmos. He means that, whatever it is that we mean by the word "God", that thing impregnated his mother. Are you embarrassed? On some level you should be. Such words doubtless conjure images reminiscent of just those sorts of pagan ideas that Christ came to overthrow. Images of the golden gods swooping down from Mount Olympus and stealing human brides. Images of deities copulating with fair-haired virgins in the most animalistic of manners. Perhaps this is why the early church fathers were so insistent on the fact that Mary was a virgin, to indicate that such imagery is indeed not what they were talking about. God is spirit, they insisted. He is indeed the Father of Jesus, but, not like that. But images of Poseidon storming out of the sea and carrying a young virgin back to his watery domain aside, there is perhaps another, deeper reason, that such talk of God fathering children makes us blush.

We moderns like our religion strictly spiritual after all, we see religion as a thing encapsulated purely in the realm of the mind. We have inherited from our culture a kind of detached stoicism. A philosophy that has at its heart a distaste for the body and all things of the flesh. If a person is religious today, and he most likely isn't, then the odds are that he views the body as largely superfluous. As though it doesn't matter. His soul is what's important. Of course by this he tends to mean something like a ghost nestled somehow inside his body. A floating vapor stuck somehow behind his eyes. A pure and shining spirit trapped inside a squishy smelly corpus which he considers little more than a system of machinery made of meat. We like our body and our soul as clearly delineated things, thank you very much. On the whole, we think it would be better if the two simply never meet. But that's just it. The scandal of the incarnation is that they do meet. Spirit and flesh come together so profoundly that they cannot be untangled. God is spirit. Yes. And, also, at the same time God is a baby growing in woman's womb. The modern man has trouble believing that the actions he takes with his body have any bearing whatever on the health and status of his soul, certainly not his sexual or reproductive actions. Therefore the idea that God Most High would, or for that matter even could, engender a functioning zygote inside a living, breathing, human woman is seen at best as something quaint, at worst as something gross. It's an old idea for old people in old times. An idea for people not so enlightened as we. An idea for those too ignorant or dimwitted to know that such things are strictly speaking impossible. To those who think this way I can only say that you are wrong. It is not an old idea. It is an idea as fresh and new and pregnant with possibility as it was two thousand years ago. Of any of the competing ideas on the table, it is the only one capable of bearing fruit.

I don't know how it could be otherwise. I personally have little use for the detached and distant god many people seem to espouse these days. A sort of god who may or may not be there in theory but who is certainly never expected to show up in practice. Tell me what hope there can be for we creatures of blood and bone save that something of the Divine should come and make its home with us. For that is what "Immanuel" means. "God with us." Quite right. Christ came to be with us. To partake of our human experience. To live a life as we live. To die a death as we die. To breath air with lungs like ours and to trod the wet soil of the earth with two feet and ten toes. Somehow people have gotten the idea that Christianity is a religion set against carnal things. It is not. If I am not my body I don't know what I am and if that body and its flesh are detestable things to the Lord Most High then I am indeed in sorry shape. Thankfully it is not so. The God of Christianity does not hate the body. He is not indifferent to the flesh. Quite the contrary. In truth Christianity is the most carnal of all religions for its God loves the flesh so much that he took it upon himself. He is so worried about the body that he made it his solemn pledge to raise it up from the ashes once more on that Great Last Day. This is why the Christian church has such an emphasis on the material world, why it blesses water and salt, why it insists that all new believers be washed in a ritual bath, why it uses incense and the laying on of hands, why it kisses icons and genuflects, constantly bending the knee and bowing the head. It is why the religion revolves around a meal. It is why the height of the Christian life involves grinding up a morsel of food between your teeth and drinking down a goblet of wine. Our God is a physical god. He came in the flesh and has the flesh even still, and by this he has made our bodies the greatest possible instruments of prayer. Any worship of this God must of necessity involve the body for this sort of Christ is not content to be merely interested in the saving of our souls.

The Annunciation is joyful because it is a revelation not only of God's plans for a little village girl in first century Palestine, but a revelation of God's plan for himself and for the whole mass of humanity. "I will be with you," he says to us. "I am one of you. Whatever else may come in the vast expanse of space and time, know that God is a human being, just like you. I am human. God is human. Forever and always you may count me as one of your own species. Forever and always I know what it is like to be you. I lived, I laughed, I cried, I played tag with the neighborhood children behind my mother's house and I worked a blue-collar job and suffered the loss of my dearest friends. I am one of you. God has become man so that man might become God." This is the plan. When people say they are seeking God's plan for their life or for their purpose, I always smile a little. He has already told us the plan. He has already given us our purpose. We are to be deified. To develop and grow into the image of Christ and thereby become joined forever with the eternal Godhead never to be separated or cut-off again. We are to be made holy. To become sons and daughters of the Lord Most High, heirs of the entire cosmos. This is your purpose. This is the reason that you exist. To return to Eden. To walk again with God on the loam of the forest in the cool of the day and to be not ashamed.

Of course, all this hangs in the balance as we now await the virgin's answer. She must consent. It is her choice. It is not in the nature of God to force things and indeed nothing this beautiful could ever be forced. Whereas Eve disobeyed in the Garden, Mary must now obey. The actions of the first mother of the old creation must be countered by the actions of the first mother of the new and all of heaven and earth wait with baited breath in the silence following the angel's words to see what the blessed virgin will say.

"Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me as you have said."

With that Mary changed the course of eternity.

Henceforth all generations have called her blessed.

Mary, Full of Grace, pray for us.
Meditation Two: Mary's Visit to Elizabeth

# Scripture

The Gospel According to Luke — Chapter 1, Verses 39 Thru 56

During those days Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, "Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled."

And Mary said:

"My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;

my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

For he has looked upon his handmaid's lowliness;

behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed.

The Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is from age to age

to those who fear him.

He has shown might with his arm,

dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart.

He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones

but lifted up the lowly.

The hungry he has filled with good things;

the rich he has sent away empty.

He has helped Israel his servant,

remembering his mercy,

according to his promise to our fathers,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

# Meditation

Eve and Elijah

Let us dance before the ark —

Mother has come home.

It cannot be too oft restated that our Blessed Mother is the ark of the covenant incarnate. Many Christians today, as in the past, look askance at Catholic or Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God, thinking at best that it is strange and at worst that it is idolatry. While certainly it is possible to make too much of a to-do about Mary (if one were to hold her higher than Christ for example), it is all the more possible to care about her too little. For myself, I try to love the Blessed Mother as much as Christ surely loved her when she held him in her arms or cooked his favorite dinner, for I personally cannot see how loving someone the same way Jesus did could ever be wrong. Remember, this is no ordinary woman. This is the woman God himself calls "Mom." Ah, but recall your old testament. Remember that the ark of the covenant held within it exactly three things: The rod of Aaron, a jar of manna, and the tablets of the holy law. Does not Mary within her womb hold precisely the same? For what is Aaron's staff if not a symbol of the office of the priesthood, and what is Christ but our own great high priest? What is manna except bread come down from heaven, and has our Lord not called himself exactly that? What are the tablets but the Word of the Most High Father Almighty? What is Christ but that same Word now made flesh? Priest, bread, word, held as a shadow dimly in the ark of old covered in gold, held now in perfection within the virgin's womb. Upon the Catholic reading of the scriptures, it is clear that for the old covenant to be fulfilled it had to be incarnate in the whole, ark and all. Mary is that incarnation. She is the ark of the new covenant. And if the ark which held the spirit of God had to be perfect and kept within the holy of holies, how much more perfect had to be the ark which held his body, which grew and nurtured his ten little fingers and his ten little toes? The infant John leapt in the womb of Elizabeth before the coming of the new ark as surely as David leapt before the procession of the old. Wise men stand in reverent fear therefore of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, just as the ancient Israelites stood in reverent fear before their gilded box. Mary carries God to her cousin. She likewise carries God to all of us. She is the door through which the Divine entered the world and by her intercession still are many opened to the graces of her Holy Son.

We are told that Mary went "with haste" and why she felt the need to go so urgently to her cousin is a question of some interest and I personally think there is a two-fold answer. The first was simple practicality. Our Lady was given a rather extraordinary vision and in it told a rather extraordinary thing and it is only natural to question such an experience. Any sane person, and Our Lady certainly was sane, would rightly want to make sure they hadn't just imagined it all, or were losing their marbles, or having a trick played on them by a dark spirit masquerading as an angel of light. I would not be at all surprised if Mary went "with haste" to her cousin in part because she wanted to confirm the angel's story. Was Elizabeth really pregnant? Was she really now also pregnant too? As she made the journey perhaps in her mind there was a hectic war between one side of her that really wanted to believe the message of the angel and another side that thought that such a message was on the face of it impossible. There was after all little to nothing in the religion of her people that suggested that God could become a man, and it must have seemed more than a little odd that she of all women would be chosen for such a thing. Fear, uncertainty, disbelief, awe, anxiety... all these and more besides perhaps raced through her mind as she made the trip up into the hill country. She had to know. Was this true? Was all of this really going to happen?

That is one aspect. I think of course that there is another, one evidenced by the fact that she stayed with her cousin even after seeing Elizabeth's rounded belly and getting confirmation of the angel's prophecy. Our Lady seems to have been a deeply practical sort of woman. Practical and profoundly humble. Gabriel may have just revealed to her the divine plan for the salvation of all mankind but, after all, that doesn't mean there are not chores that need to be done. At one level Mary seems almost more concerned that her cousin might need help with all the housework than she is with impending incarnation of God. "Yes, yes," she seems to say, "Heaven and earth are moving to rid the world of eternal darkness. Fine. But my goodness look at this mess." There was much to do in preparation for a new baby and her cousin was old and young spry hands would be a useful addition to the expectant house. Indeed, better than any of us Mary must have known that "Heaven and earth moving to rid the world of the powers of evil", is but another way of saying that the dishes need to be done. What better start to defeating the dominion of Hell than with the simplest act of love towards one's own dear neighbor? "Here," she seems to say to us, "come join me in helping my Son redeem all existence. You wash. I'll dry." Men dream of setting the world right through great acts of heroism and that is fine and good. But instinctually Mary knows that such acts of heroism that shake the world are useless if not balanced by equal acts of humility that shake the heart. She is, in effect, putting a woman's touch on the salvation of mankind. The two greatest men to ever walk the earth may be coming, sure. But both Jesus and John the Baptist will need a cozy crib to lay in when they do.

In the same moment Our Mother also banishes any though of being lazy. In haste she goes to the hill country, moving with the unhindered mind of a woman possessed of a total clarity of thought. She is not worried if she is making the right decision, nor fussing about leaving her fiancé, or concerned about all her own work that will go left undone back home. Her mind is uncluttered. Free from the sorts of thoughts which women in particular find themselves plagued with, the sorts of thoughts which make it obvious that women are by far the more practical and sensible half of Man. "How will I get my house together?" "Where will the baby be born?" "Do we not have that big trip coming up nine months from now and what will poor Joseph eat while I am gone?" "Can we afford this baby?" "What will my mother say?" "Where shall I put the crib?" "We're not married yet. What will the neighbors think?" No. Doubtless she had all these thought and a hundred more besides but they do not paralyze Our Lady into inaction. She sees another in need and feels called to go and love and she obeys, leaving the rest to God. Our Lady's hasty march into the hill country may rightly be seen as the first journey on the warpath as Christ marches against the powers of darkness. Christ leads the battle but a woman carries his standard. Get behind her and follow into the thick of the fighting but be in shape. She marches fast.

Imagine Elizabeth in her home on the day Our Mother comes. She is perhaps in the kitchen preparing food for the sabbath, or maybe out back tending to the few chickens she and Zechariah keep for their morning eggs. It is not a shack. Often it seems that when we modern people think back upon the past we imagine the whole mass of mankind living in little more than hovels. In our mind's eye our ancestors appear as savages clothed in scraps. We see them as dirty and smelly, beset by constant sickness as they huddled beneath roofs already half fallen down. No. Not at all. Elizabeth's home was likely typical of those around her, meaning that it was not fancy but certainly more than civil. Sturdy walls kept out the wind and gazes of nosy neighbors and the roof was solid enough to be walked on and used as additional living space, a practice common in the time. Large earthen pots likely sat beneath the eaves of the four corners to catch any precious rainwater that might decide to grace the desert and from these drink animals like donkeys and goats and perhaps a cow if the two of them had the money. By day the animals would graze outside within the confines of a small fence and by night they would be brought into the home, kept in a small courtyard open to the air or in a back room where they wouldn't be too smelly. The floor might've been dirt or stone, depending on their income, but if it was dirt is was solid and smooth for Elizabeth swept it every day to ensure the feet of her small family would not get dusty. Outside the street was busy and crowded, their home one of many densely packed together for safety and community. As Our Lady arrives into town, she can see the smoke rising from a hundred tiny fires as the women prepare the morning meals and there are bands of men passing her, heading out into the fields in groups of five or six to tend the sheep. Children are running, largely unattended, playing at all sorts of wild games. One of them bumps into her, not looking where he is going, and she laughs and says its alright as he apologizes, never mentioning that she has the creator of the cosmos in her belly, the child none the wiser. Our Lady finds her cousin's house and calls out her name in a sing-song voice from the path leading up to the front door. Inside the infant John hears and leaps within his mother's womb. God has arrived. It is time to dance.

"How is it that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?" Elizabeth asks and this is indeed a very fine question. A question that should likewise be upon the lips of every believer every single morning when they rise from off their beds. How is it that we have the privilege of having a relationship with the Mother of Our Lord and what peasant ever hoped for such? One might, dimly, hope that the King might care enough about his subjects to save them from the enemy. One could never imagine though that the Queen might come for dinner. We, here, now, in our everyday lives have the same access to the Mother of our Lord that Elizabeth had and the Theotokos can hear our cries and intercede for us through prayer. She delights to. There is nothing that makes her happier than bringing God to others. Than bringing God to us. I tell you, if you do not feel the love of Mary in your bones you do not have as much of Jesus as you could for He himself has made each of us her children. Did he not say so? Did he not, upon the cross, give her to us and us to her? When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there, did he not say, "Woman, behold your son," and to the disciple, "Behold thy mother?" Perhaps some read this as merely an injunction for one man, John, in who's gospel alone this account is found. But is that not too simple? Is that not indeed contrary to the very words of the text? Our Lord does not give The Woman to John, but rather, "to the disciple whom he loved." And is that not all of us? Does he not love each and every person committed to following him wherever he may go? "From that hour the disciple took her into his home" in the same way that Elizabeth did and in the same way that we all must. We have as our example both the mother of John the Baptist and the Apostle John, two of the holiest saints in heaven. If they took Mary into their home, shall we be so bold as to say we have no need to do likewise?

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock," says Our Lord. And did he not do exactly thus here and now within Mary's venerable body? "Elizabeth!" She cries, her knuckles rapping against the wooden door. Open it. Let her in. She brings God to you. Rest assured, wherever the Holy Spirit and Mary are, Christ shall be born. Invite both to dwell with you.

Mary, Ark of the New Covenant, pray for us.
Meditation Three: The Nativity of Jesus

# Scripture

The Gospel According to Luke — Chapter 2, Verses 1 Thru 20

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. So all went to be enrolled, each to his own town. And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. While they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Now there were shepherds in that region living in the fields and keeping the night watch over their flock. The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were struck with great fear. The angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests."

When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them.

The Gospel According to Matthew — Chapter 2, Verses 1 thru 23

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, "Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage." When King Herod heard this, he was greatly troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. Assembling all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They said to him, "In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it has been written through the prophet:

'And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

since from you shall come a ruler,

who is to shepherd my people Israel.'"

Then Herod called the magi secretly and ascertained from them the time of the star's appearance. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and search diligently for the child. When you have found him, bring me word, that I too may go and do him homage." After their audience with the king they set out. And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was. They were overjoyed at seeing the star, and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother. They prostrated themselves and did him homage. Then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed for their country by another way.

When they had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him." Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled. "Out of Egypt I called my son."

When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi. Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet:

"A voice was heard in Ramah,

sobbing and loud lamentation;

Rachel weeping for her children,

And she would not be consoled,

since they were no more."

When Herod had died, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead." He rose, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go back there. And because he had been warned in a dream, he departed for the region of Galilee. He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He shall be called a Nazarene."

# Meditation

Contained by flesh, tomb

Every star inside his eyes —

Grass for his pillow.

I confess that I am not in the habit of being overly rigid about Christmas. I understand neither the secular view that Christmas preparations ought to begin only on December 1st (or after Thanksgiving for those in the States), nor the traditional Catholic view that confines the season to the boundaries of advent. My own personal celebration of our Lord's birth begins somewhere around early October and finishes up a little after New Year's Day, which, I realize, is somewhat extreme. I cannot help it. For me there is in the Christmas story a vision so striking that it is fully capable of arresting my attention for a quarter of the year. It has everything you could want in a story, prophetic visions, dreams, a villainous king, three exotic magi coming from parts unknown, simple shepherds and wonders in the sky. It is an absolutely glorious thing, and made not a drop less glorious by the the fact that it has been tangled up with older traditions like the winter solstice and the Yule log fire. There is nothing to my reckoning more tedious than the fashionable insistence that Christmas is somehow diminished because it was not invented whole cloth. Nothing more tiresome than the man who exclaims that the Season is somehow less just because it borrows. Fool's talk. People who say such things, who say that Christmas is not authentic because it is not original, understand neither originality nor Christmas, and certainly do not understand Christ. For Christ's religion is not one that destroys, but one that redeems. It does not wash away what is there, it only makes what is there clean. To make a man a Christian is not to burn the old man down to ashes and erect a new one in his place. No. It is to baptize the old man, to wash the dirt away. In the same manner, when the Christian religion enters some new territory it should by no means burn down the culture or the practices of the people in encounters there. Not at all. It should rather baptize them. It should, in a word, Christen them. That the Christmas table is surrounded by Yuletide greetings is not a point against Christmas anymore than it is a point against Yule. Indeed, if our modern holiday is but a baptized version of older snowy traditions from the pagans, so much the better. Christianity is, after all, interested in the real things. Real, honest, organic life. The kind of life that emerges spontaneously from people when they are happy or sad, in love or in pain. Inventing a ritual whole cloth out of nothing would be quite the opposite of that. Baptizing and washing clean the ritual that was already there, that is truth. It is the same with all the Church's great festivals. All Hallow's Eve is not hurt a wink by the fact that it was born out of the Gaelic harvest just as Easter suffers not all all from pastel colors and bunny rabbits. If you are one of those Christians who finds yourself embarrassed about all the elves and jolly old men and pagan pine garland coming to your Lord's birthday party, I can only say that you should not be. Let the elves come to worship too. If Santa Clause contains some remnants of Odin or if his sleigh ride is but a rehash of the Wild Hunt, fine. It is not a cause for consternation but celebration. Rejoice! Odin too has bowed down before the manger. In Christianity all that is good and natural and pure in Man may find its place, and our particular penchant for making myth and stories and having silly games with children is no exception. Christ's birthday party was, after all, an unusual affair. We would do well to keep it strange.

It was full of riffraff and it was smelly and my goodness was the whole thing terribly disorganized. Of course it was. The King had sent out his servants to bring any who would come. God desired that his house that evening should be full. For as in our Lord's parable, the rich had certainly been invited first. The owner of the inn and all those inside with money to afford a room had been offered the chance to attend the celebration, but they refused. The buildings of those days were modest affairs and certainly not soundproof, and the voice of a harried Joseph pleading with the innkeeper for a room could scarcely have been kept out by the walls. Would it be at all surprising if a Roman official traveling through Judah that afternoon, had heard through his door the uneasy groaning of a woman with a well rounded belly? Would it be strange if a priest was occupying the room upstairs, saying his prayers a little louder to drown out the noise of a panicked man with his pregnant wife below? A merchant perhaps was in one of the rooms, and he thought about sharing his space with the holy couple. But, well, he was planning to buy a field in the morning and had a lot of thinking to do about the negotiations. Another man was there on his honeymoon and he couldn't open, he'd just taken a wife. Doubtless, they all had their reasons. The little town of Bethlehem was filled that night with people who simply had better things to do. They were offered a gift and we cannot know how many heard the offer and decided not to take it. The Christ child might have been born in their own room, and they present for the greatest moment in all of time and space. But, alas, life gets in the way. They would not come to the party. All those good and sensible people. Not tonight anyway. Exactly as Jesus said he would therefore, the Father sent his servants out to into the fields to find those who would.

In the Parable of the Great Feast, when those first given the invitation to the King's banquet reject it, the King sends instead for the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame, and it was exactly those sort of men that the angels found out in the field that night. The shepherds were doubtless such men and though for the sake of symmetry we usually arrange our nativity scenes with three shepherds to match the three magi, in reality we have no idea what number of smelly herdsmen actually came. We can be certain though that they were exactly the sort of men no earthly king would invite to the birthday party of his son. For they were poor men, and dirty, and it is entirely probably that more than one was suffering from a injury he acquired on the job. From my own experience, the modern herdsman is a hearty fellow, often hardened from years of labor spent outside. I can only image that the ancient herdsman was all the more so, climbing over rocks and streams, living like a young David and protecting their flocks from the bear and wolf. One may have been old and losing his sight. Another may have lost a digit from a careless moment with a knife. They'd all been kicked by animals at least a dozen times and more than a few had likely been bitten. Surely they were not much to look at, these men to whom the angels sang. But... they would come. That was enough. Our Lord will happily spend his birthday surrounded by goats and cattle and strangers from the wilderness if such creatures are happy to be there. After all, our Lord told us to go out of our way to invite those with no ability whatsoever to repay.

Modern men perhaps take this too far. Rightly seeing that our Lord extends his message to the poor and broken, they neglect sometimes that he sends it equally to the rich and whole. It is only that the poor are more likely to receive it that makes them favored guests. We must remember that the rich man is not only invited but welcomed just the same when and if he comes. For the rich were invited and at least three of them showed up. In my own time I have seen a great deal of emphasis placed upon the evangelization of the poor and the marginalized, which is all to the good. But we cannot forget that the rich and the powerful need Christ just as much, if not more, than the shepherd and the sheep. In my own estimation, the rich of this world are currently quite under evangelized, and we seem content to think that because it is difficult for them to pass through eye of a needle we are justified in not trying to make them thinner. Not so. Love the marginalized, yes, but in a time such as ours where so much emphasis is placed upon loving the poor, we may need to be reminded of the opposite, that we are called also to love the wealthy. For some of the wealthy will come, and when they do they may well blaze a trail to our Lord so mysterious that two thousand years on people are still trying to work out what it means. Kings shrouded in the mystery of the orient, following a distance star, bearing gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. These men show us the proper way to be wealthy, just as the shepherds show us the proper way to be paupers, and the way of both is the same. Thanksgiving. Worship. Charity. At our Lord's birthday party both rich and poor came with all three of these virtues and on bended knee each gave as much of them as they could. The message is clear and the message is egalitarian, for as much as it may be distasteful to modern ears the Lord is no respecter of persons and from each man he asks the same, regardless of his station. Anyone who will follow the star is welcome. Anyone who will sing with the heavenly host and shout glory to God in the highest has a place. The party is open to all, rich and poor alike. In fact, as the oxen there that night will tell you, you don't even have to be human.

It's worth noting that tradition holds that the stable our Lord was born in was actually a cave. Throughout the ages, most Christians have believed that it was naught but a hole in a cliffside. A little cavern serving double duty as both a convenient spot to pen up animals and the place of divine salvation for the whole human race. Writing in the second century, Justin Martyr attests that the early church knew specifically the cave into which Christ was born and today upon that site rests the Church of the Nativity, a most beautiful and holy place, a little chapel nestled neatly over the grotto where Light came into the world. Chesterton wrote well of the significance of the True Man beginning his life in the cave and we need not revisit it here other than to remark upon how marvelous it is that God chose the darkest of places in which to be born. And born he was. To the eternal glory of Man we may now and forever count God himself as one of our own, with flesh as we have, with the same kind of blood beating in his veins and the same food and drink passing through his stomach. He died as we die and he was likewise born as we are born, just like everyone else. And, also, not like anyone else at all. I tread on shaky ground here for the modern man is uncomfortable with the miraculous. The resurrection, the transfiguration, the healing of the sick and all, I suspect that those things are accepted among the faithful more out of a sense of familiarity than anything. The Church speaks of them with such repetition that the shocking nature of the claims is mostly missed and we nod in agreement to stories of corpses coming back to life as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But for whatever reason, the miracle of our Lord's birth is seldom mentioned. So seldom in fact that in many circles it is all but forgotten and I wonder seriously if most Christians are even still capable of believing it. Do not mistake me. The virgin conception is talked about all the time. It is the virgin birth which is almost entirely ignored. I think people are embarrassed about it. It seems somehow, too magical. Too much like something out of a fairy story. Perhaps. But the early Christians were insistent upon it and I will be too. For it is integral to the story of Christ, and, if indeed it is a fairy story, then it is a fairy story that makes sense of the whole world.

The wise man stumbles carefully here. Of all of the mysteries of Our Lady's rosary, it is this which is the most personal. Indeed, our Lord's birth is the most personal of all miracles for there is no more solemn moment than the parting of a child from his mother and we sinners have been invited into contemplation of the most holy of such partings, the holy place of holy places. I will therefore say it as the ancient Fathers said it, who in their wisdom tried to preserve all modesty. For on that silent night our Lord was born unlike other men. The night was silent precisely because it was without pain. Our Lady, being preserved from original sin in her immaculate conception, did not suffer from its ills and so endured no pain in the birthing of her child. Rather, as the Fathers said, Christ passed through his mother as light passes through glass. No tearing or rending. No blood. He came out of the womb the same way he came out of the tomb, by passing through the walls. Remember, the stone was rolled away for the benefit of the women coming to look for him, Christ was already gone.

Perhaps this shocks you. I know it did me when I first heard it. I spent my whole childhood as a Christian and never heard that the ancient church taught such a doctrine. Years later, as I went through catechesis during my conversion, I was never once told that the Catholic Church teaches this doctrine still. It simply never came up. I learned about the Virgin Birth quite on my own through private study and I doubt seriously that my upbringing or catechesis was extraordinary in this omission. Christians today are just as apt as I was to have never heard such a thing and, if they have heard of it, they seem likely never to say so in public. I don't know why. Perhaps it's just embarrassing. Perhaps it is simply one miraculous step too far to be believed. For whatever reason we can accept that Jesus was both God and man, and that he performed miracles, and that he walked on water and healed the sick and communed with angels and rose from the dead. But bring up the idea that Christ was born by passing through his mother like light through the stain glass of a cathedral and Christians go quite quiet. A feeling of queer unease creeps across our modern hearts. We are uncomfortable. We feel silly. But, let it not be so. Rather, let us come again to understand precisely what our Faith is all about. Let us come again to see that the first Man and Woman fell and that God, thru Christ and Mary, is giving his creation another go. We say rightly that Christ is the new Adam for he makes all things new. Should it be any shock then that he starts this renewal with himself? With his species? What we are saying as Christians is precisely that the old order of things is passing away and that Christ himself is the first fruits of this revolution. The old way, the way with blood and pain and screaming, no more. No more. In Christ sin and its effects need no longer have a say. The Light has come into the world. Dawn has broken on a new and perfect day. Do not be afraid to come out of the past. Be not embarrassed to leave all those old things far behind.

You see, it is the nature of God to cross boundaries without destroying them. As God burned in the bush without burning it up, so he enflames each thing without turning it to ashes. He does not destroy. He does not break. He does not consume. Many fear that if they invite God into their life he will take them up on the offer. They fear that he will march in like a whirlwind and shake their foundations like a earthquake. They worry that he will burn them up, that the holy fire will not be content to rest inside their hearts and that their lives will be consumed by his coming, wrecked, destroyed, burned to a crisp. It is on the surface a very sensible fear. God is so much larger than we, so much more solid and bigger, that it is only common sense that if he should make his home with us that he would dominate and consume everything about us that makes us who we are. The fear of losing one's identity in the sheer magnitude of the Godhead is reasonable. The terror of being absolutely swallowed up by the Infinite makes complete and total sense. Yes. Absolutely. But, also no. Not at all. Reasonable as these fears are, they are unfounded. They rest upon an idea of God that does not match what he has shown himself to be. As our Lord passed through the tomb without destroying the rock, so he passed through the door and stood among the twelve even though the door was locked. The angry crowd drove Jesus to the top of a hill in order to hurl him down and he "passed through their midst", without bowling them aside. The virgin birth is something like that. It is a sign of precisely how God works within the world. When he comes he will not destroy you. He will not enter into you and leave you broken. The walls you have erected in your life are mostly good, they only need to be permeable. He will fix your house. He will not tear it down. Meditate upon this. Think long and hard about what is says about the nature of the Divine that Christ would come into a woman and leave her without ever damaging her body. In such meditation you will get at the heart of what God is. You will understand him. You will understand his ways. You will understand the world and sin and salvation and, perhaps most importantly, you will understand why the weeds cannot be pulled up.

What do I mean? Simply, that life is full of both weeds and flowers, and it is an enduring question as to why this should be so. Of all the objections to Christianity and the Christian God, the existence of the weeds is the most cited and hardest to answer. That God be three-in-one or without beginning or end people seem able to accept rather readily. That he became a man born of a virgin also seems a small enough pill to swallow. However, understandably, the idea that he is all-powerful and all-good seems to many a circle too hard to square. It is no wonder. As far back as 300 BC Epicurus formulated this objection about the weeds and I'm afraid most of Christianity has yet to give a solid answer in reply. Epicurus said, more or less, "If God is able to stop evil and doesn't, he can't be all-good. If he's wants to stop evil but can't, he isn't all powerful. The fact that evil most certainly exists means he very well can't be both. One or the other perhaps, but not both. Take your pick." This is a good argument, and apart from the Virgin Birth I do not know if Christianity could rightly formulate an answer. But we do have the Virgin Birth. The birth, not just the conception. And the way our Lord chose to come into this world tells us everything about the way he choses to come into it still.

Our Lord told a parable about a man who sowed good seed. An enemy came in the night and sowed over his work with seed that was bad. As the plants grew, the man's servants noticed that weeds were arising all around the farmer's grain, strangling all the good that he had planted. The servants went unto their master and asked if they should pull the weeds up and I suspect that any of us would have answered "Yes". The master answers "No." "An enemy has done this," says the farmer. "But we must not pull them up. If you do, inevitably you will pull up some of the grain as well. Let both grow together until the harvest. Then we will separate the good from the bad." This is the problem. This is, in a sense, the whole problem. The good and the bad of this world grow together, side-by-side, and they are tangled up at the very roots. There is scarcely nothing you can point to in this world of ours and say, "Aha! Here is a good thing, in which there is no stain." No. That's not the way it works. When Creation fell it fell hard. There is mud on every surface and a silver lining in every darkened cloud. The same maternal love that causes a woman to sacrifice daily for her child can be morphed into a maternal tyranny that smothers the child half to death. The man who steals to feed his children does real evil, but with good intent. Many who give to charity do so for evil reasons, merely to put on a good show before their peers. Nonetheless, their charitable giving probably does real and noble work, even if born out of ignoble motivation. The horrors of Communism were rooted in some degree of real and honest concern for the poor, just as the Nazi gas chambers were rooted in but a cancerous version of a right and natural love for country and kin. The man who murders out of jilted love is evil, certainly. But he is not wholly evil. His murder is born out of real and genuine Love, however perverted it may have since become. You see, every good and righteous thing in this world is performed by men in part for unrighteous reasons and every evil and terrible thing performed in part for true and good ones. Our world has been mixed up. Tangled at the roots. Great and terrible knots have been tied and even the very best of us cannot pull ourselves free from every one of the ten-thousand tendrils of Sin. "Eve, by her disobedience," said Saint Irenaeus, "tied the knot of disgrace for the human race. But Mary, by her obedience, undid it." Quite right. For the human solution to such tangled nests is to cut them apart. That is not God's solution, and eternal praise to him for it. He prefers to undo the knot. He loves each and every part of every flower in his field and he will do nothing to break even one part of anything that is good.

If God had come into the world by tearing apart flesh and spilling blood, then I dare say he would by that have shown himself to be quite a different sort of God than what we Christians claim to worship. Certainly, he would not be the sort of God for whom any defense could be made regarding the problem of evil. For if he was willing to break and to destroy in order to perform the good of being born, he would have no excuse for refusing to break and destroy in order to perform other goods now. His entrance would have been predicated on destruction, and therefore likewise would have been the salvation that he offered. Had Christ come into the world amid blood and gore he would have shown himself scarcely different from all the pagan deities he meant to replace. Certainly the parable of the field would have been quite different. The master would have demanded his servants rip up each and every weed around his flowers and consequences be damned. Literally speaking, damned. He would be a God who cared only for perfection, not a God who cared only for Love. Some people think they want that sort of God. A God who tolerates nothing but a field of pristine plants standing in perfectly ordered rows, a God who tolerates only a pristine world without a trace pain. Are you sure? Have you really thought that through? Arrogant men blaspheme against their Creator and mockingly ask why he does not come down and get rid of all the horrors of the world if indeed he is so great. But do they really want that? Are they really certain they themselves would not be counted among the horrors? The man that asks God to step down from heaven and set everything right by force is a man asking for his own destruction because he himself is part of everything that is wrong. He himself is broken. There are weeds wrapped around his own soul. No. No that is not the way of the Father. Ours is a God who will work tirelessly and with utmost patience to untangle each and every flower from the weeds wrapped around its stalk, even if that flower is screaming at him the whole time to just finish the job and pull the weed out. Do not be so quick to ask the Lord to gather all that is wicked and cast it into the fire. Do not assume that if he did so you yourself would not be hurled into the flames.

Mary, Mother of God and Ever Virgin, Our Lady Undoer of Knots, pray for us.
Meditation Four: The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple

# Scripture

The Gospel According to Luke — Chapter 2, Verses 22 Thru 35

When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord"), and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: "a pair of doves or two young pigeons."

Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts. When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:

"Sovereign Lord, as you have promised,

you may now dismiss your servant in peace.  
For my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the sight of all nations:  
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,

and the glory of your people Israel."

The child's father and mother marveled at what was said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: "This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too."

# Meditation

Smoke from the alter,

The sound of lambs approaching

Smiling, chubby cheeks.

The philosophers that lived before Christ had a sight better time of things than all of those who have come after. Before the birth of Jesus one could reasonably take the pronouncements of men like Socrates and Cicero at face value and, using them as a guidepost, be reasonably assured that you were building a virtuous and noble life. The basics of morality were more or less fleshed out and what constituted "the good" and "the bad" were well enough agreed upon that a Germanic pagan could find common ground with an Egyptian one, and everybody believed that they had the truth of things more or less in hand. Man was here, on Earth, the highest creature, but noble as that might be Man's dignity was a tenuous thing for his life was often nasty brutish and short and, in the grand scheme of things, didn't seem to matter overmuch. There might be something after the grave or there might not be, nobody was overly sure, but whatever happened after one died it was generally agreed upon that not dying was better and staying alive was everybody's top priority even if they all knew they were unlikely to stave off Grim Death for very long. Wealth was good. This was quite obvious. Power was good too and this was more obvious still. Both things helped you stay alive and good, virtuous people pursued them. If you didn't have them it was clearly because you were being punished. You had transgressed in some way against Nature or against the gods, gods who by the way were a mixed bag of characters, no ancient religion being stupid enough to ascribe all-knowing benevolence to the deities of a world riddled with things like cancer and starving children. Some gods were good. Some were bad. Like the people that worshiped them they ran the gamut of morality from one end to the other and most fell somewhere in between where they might be nice to you on Tuesday but have a temper on Wednesday and be right ready to kill you by Thor's day. Even the ancient Hebrews seemed to have this concept of God, the Yahweh of the Bible often not acting overly different from the pagan deities nearby. Most gods could be "bought off" with enough prayer and sacrifice, it was true, but that didn't mean they cared in the long run about the plight of individual people. Why would they? Nature didn't seem to care too much about Man when she froze him to death or made his crops fail or had his children eaten by lions. It seemed rather stupid to ascribe to the gods of Nature more empathy than one might get out of a rain or a whirlwind. Besides, Ra was busy with the sun and Odin had a host of frost giants to slay, worrying about Olaf the grain farmer's inner peace just wasn't something particularly high on the divine agenda. In short, it was generally agreed upon in those days that things were more or less exactly how they seemed. Winter was cold, life was hard ,and the world was cruel. Get while the getting was good. Death was coming and whatever Death was it didn't seem to have much pity.

But...

But then something happened.

On a day that seemed not special at all, God entered the world.

It cannot be overstated how radical a concept that this was. The Ancient West was much the same as the Ancient East, which is to say it was much the same as the Modern East, which is to say it was much the same as the Ancient Americas and Ancient Sub-saharan Africa. In all these places, both then and now, the people of the pagan religions saw no reason whatsoever to expect that tomorrow would be any different from today. The cycle of death and birth and the changing of the seasons and the moving of the stars had after all been going on for a shockingly long time. So long indeed that everyone agreed that it had always gone on that way, and that it always would, history being seen as a great cosmic wheel turning on itself, repeating the same story over and over, never getting anywhere, never changing, always returning back to where it first begun. The hindus believe this still, as do many of the buddhists, as did the Mayans and presumably the Aztecs, as did the pagan religions of Europe, as do many of the new age movement today and the vast majority of modern atheists. Despite the modern controversy on the matter, trust me when I say that The Big Bang Theory is a thoroughly Christian idea. Indeed, it is an idea that was first formulated by a Catholic priest, Monseigneur Georges Lemître, and no wonder, for only the Christian worldview has a metaphysics that actually goes somewhere. In opposition to the cosmologies that come most naturally to Man, and to the ones he finds in his religions round the world, the Bible postulates a beginning to the cosmos, and an end, and completely absent from it is this notion of a wheel of time or cycles of aeons which repeat again and again. The Christian is not stuck in a karmic cycle, nor plastered to the wheel of samsara. He believes in a single definitive moment in which Creation began and a coming definitive moment in which it will end. The Christian is indeed the only person who truly can believe in progress in the most literal sense, for only the Christian believes that something radically new and different actually happened. The Christian cosmology is not a continuous day after day of the ordinary material world ticking on like a clock. Things can burst into it from the outside, from beyond, and they can disrupt and change it, they can set reality on a different and final course. Something happened. Things were no longer exactly as they seemed. Jesus burst onto the stage like a bolt of lighting and the cosmic wheel of karma ground to a screeching halt. None of the philosophers have quite been right ever since.

Perhaps you will now get a sense of what Simeon was waiting on. Perhaps now you can grasp what he was saying when he prophesied that many would fall and many would rise. With the coming of Christ the old order of things had passed away and the old conceptions of reality were no longer tenable. The old man entered into the temple and took into his hands a new creation. Literally. He held a baby boy who was not at all of the same world. Of course the sadducees and the pharisees will have to perish now, as will all the books of the law that sustain them. Of course they will be supplanted by some fishermen, a peaceful revolt of peasants proclaiming that it is the meek who are highly favored and the poor who are most blessed. Of course the temple will have to fall down and of course all the pagan religions have been placed on notice. Of course the Roman Empire will be converted to the religion that worships this new child and of course the Holy Emperor will be one day replaced with a Holy Pope. Of course everything is upside down now. One might even say that it is inside out. The world belongs not to the powerful and the rich but to the poor and the lowly. The favor of God is not upon the strong but upon the weak. The wretch can be forgiven. The blind be made to see. The hungry shall be filled and those who thirst will thirst no more.

Naturally, under such conditions it is no wonder that the philosophers have all gone wrong. After Christ the very concept of what is "wrong" has been upturned. It is not so much that Nietzsche was wrong when he denounced Christianity as a slave religion, he was only wrong in thinking that this was bad thing. It is not that he was wrong in saying that "God is dead", he only erred in thinking that God would stay that way. Marx was not incorrect to observed that the proletariat are at times oppressed by the bourgeoisie. He was only wrong in thinking that therefore the bourgeoisie had the enviable position. Sartre was not incorrect when he said that a man has radical freedom, only in considering such freedom to be a condemnation on the man. No. No you see the coming of God into the world has made a mess of all such things, for in this God we see a man who came preaching the exact opposite of all good sense. Turn the other cheek. Give and do not expect to be repaid. Love your enemy. Do good to the one that hates you. Rejoice when you are persecuted. Know that you are blessed when all seems wrong. If you would save your life, lose it. If you would be forgiven of the worst things you've every done... simply ask. Simeon held in his arms that day a new thing. Something so new and different that it literally marked the cross-roads in the history of Man, everything before him being "B.C." and everything after being, well, "after-Death." Of course, I am well aware that the abbreviation A.D. properly stands for "anno domini", latin for "in the year of our Lord", but the folksy misunderstanding that its stands for "after-death" is not a misunderstanding at all. For the baby in Simeon's arms truly does represent the age after Death for the baby would grow to trample it. Death, where is your victory? Grave, where is your sting? Mary and Joseph bring a child into the temple that changes everything. Indeed, he makes all things new.

Is it any wonder then that this upheaval is resisted? Does it come as a surprise to any that this child must therefore be contradicted? The old order of things never goes quietly into the night and Simeon surely meant what he said when he prophesied that this child would be spoken against. It has to be. The infant that he holds is nothing less than a divine rebuttal against the world and all its ways. The King of kings had come and at his feet every other ruler is now compelled to toss his crown. Well, it is no understatement to say that the world started fighting back against the Christ-child from that very moment in order to keep their crowns upon their heads. It is no understatement that the world fights back against him still. The great red dragon that John saw in his revelation really was laying at the feet of the woman about to give birth, ready to devour the child from the very instant that she brought him forth. The dragon rages still, devouring Christ's message and his followers, and the pages of history are covered in the blood of the martyrs who followed faithfully this baby to their deaths. The Bride of Christ is ever on the march against the powers of darkness, fighting evil and sin with her strange and unique martial art of love and self denial. At the coming of the bride-groom the denizens of the underworld did tremble for Simeon holds within his arms an eight pound miracle that will burst wide the gates of Hell and set all the captives free.

Ah, but what of the ceremony? What of the actual ritual that we find ourselves observing now, the rites of sacrifice and purification that prompted such prophecy of cosmic upheaval and overturn? What are we to make of it? What can we learn? Why are Mary and Joseph there and for what reason did the law demand a sacrifice be offered over a new born child? Well, I confess that the full meaning of such rituals escape me, yet only a man of great hubris would condemn as foolish a practice held sacred by all of humanity's ancestors. For certainly the Christian faith holds that the ancient Jewish rites were especially unique and holy, but the idea of offering sacrifice over a new born child is one hardly limited to the Hebrews and we must therefore posit that it was especially necessary. I suspect that much of it has to do with the simple fact that the ancients did not have the power to fool themselves. Lacking modern medicine, surgery, genetic drugs, and fertility treatments, he was not able to delude himself into thinking that he held the reigns of life and death within his hands. Whether or not one's wife conceived was entirely out of your control and if a couple struggled with infertility there was little beyond praying that they could do about it. Likewise, if a woman did conceive, the birth was almost totally out of anyone's control, and the life of mother and child seemed to hang on little more than the fickle whims of Fate. It was therefore obvious to ancient parents that they did not "own" their child. They did not make him. He was not theirs. Just as they had no power to induce fertility in a barren women nor breath life back into a still born or to protect a woman from a breach... they had no power to claim the baby. It was a gift. Somehow, for some reason, God, the gods, Fate, or providence had smiled on them, and at this moment they were holding a warm bundle rather than a cold corpse. It was appropriate to give thanks. To acknowledge that the child was, as it were, on loan. Ceremonially they went to give the child back to the Lord within the temple and then to pay for him, ransoming him back from the priest. It was a way of saying, "this child is a gift." "He is not ours." "You gave him to us and his life is in your hands." "Perhaps one day you will see fit to take him away for us again." "So be it." "Thank you anyway." Mary and Joseph join the legion of parents throughout the ages who have been forced to acknowledge the same. They lead the way for those of us with children to right thinking of our relationship with our children and our God. Ultimately our offspring belong to Him. He gave them to us. We have a duty to give them back.

This you see is the sword that pierces through Mary's soul. Our Blessed Mother knows this to be true. We are told repeatedly that Mary "treasures up" the things that unfold around her son within her heart, and as she does so it must slowly dawn on her what is the destiny of her son. As he grew and as he spoke to her and as she realized more and more what a strange and exotic creature her son really was, she must have realized at some point with a horror what it would mean for him to fulfill the law, to make the old covenant whole. Abraham was ordered to sacrifice his son upon the alter but at the last moment he was spared and the Lord provided a ram instead. Here, at the temple, Mary likewise offers up her son back to the Lord, only to be told that this time there will be no substitution. God is taking this baby. Her son is the lamb. As Abraham found the ram with its horns caught within a thicket, so she will find her son caught with a crown of thorns upon his head. As Isaac carried his wood up the hill so her son would carry his and at the sight of him the thoughts of many hearts would be revealed. Simeon spoke true. The child in his arms would have his blood drained from out his body and the image of his corpse would hang from every church. Look at him. See the baby held high in aged arms and know his fate. Here is the child that shows each man's soul for exactly what it is.

Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.
Meditation Five: Finding the Boy Jesus in the Temple

# Scripture

The Gospel According to Luke — Chapter 2, Verses 41 Thru 52

Each year his parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and when he was twelve years old, they went up according to festival custom. After they had completed its days, as they were returning, the boy Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Thinking that he was in the caravan, they journeyed for a day and looked for him among their relatives and acquaintances, but not finding him, they returned to Jerusalem to look for him.

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, "Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety." And he said to them, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" But they did not understand what he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.

# Meditation

Right where I started,

I see Him for the first time —

Wisdom, All-in-All.

The world is full of people looking for God in all the wrong places. All the wrong places and using all the wrong words to aid them in their search. I suppose it is not surprising. The word "God" obviously comes with a great deal of baggage and so many people quite naturally search about for verbiage that's a little lighter to carry. "God" may seldom come from the lips of a modern person but other stand-in phrases for him abound. You will hear people say things like "I'm looking for meaning" or, "I would like to find inner peace." Young people especially seem always to be going on about "finding their purpose" or "getting fulfillment." Now, none of these phrases have quite the same punch as the monosyllabic word "God", not by a long shot, but they do allow people express an ancient yearning within themselves that doesn't conjure up the image of a cross old man sitting in the sky. For far too many people, "God" means nothing more than a disapproving granddaddy, looking down upon them from the clouds with a scowl, watching for any minor infraction against a set of his arcane and incomprehensible rules. To say that you are trying to find fulfillment is infinitely better in polite company than to say that you are trying to find God. Say the first and everyone will nod along and give you personal advice. Say the second and most will take a pensive step back, worried that you might at any moment produce a flail and begin whipping yourself or others as chastisement for their sins. This is understandable. Understandable but also deeply regrettable. For all these euphemisms used in God's place walk the circle of the problem but do not get at the center. And the center is this: That the more things change the more they stay the same.

For all our differences, we in the modern era still feel the same old problem. Cellular phones, computers, plastics, and space shuttles may stand between myself and man of the ancient near-east four thousand years ago, but the inner heart of both of us is exactly the same. Had I a time machine, I could go back and confound this ancient man with many marvels. He would stare in awe and the flashing pictures on a television and he would rejoice at the heat produced by a radiator. Giant genetically engineered apples would thrill him and our great metal birds flying through the sky would be almost beyond belief. Yet, for all this, I dare say that if I told him I was looking for "inner peace", he would know exactly what I meant. For the desire expressed by such a phrase is a human universal and old as time itself. The ancient man would understand it as easily as he would understand the concept of friendship, or love, or worrying about the future of one's children. We might lament to him that, for all our technological progress, we still hadn't solved the central problem of existence. Namely, how to enjoy it. Here, at precisely this moment, the roles between myself and the ancient man would be reversed. We would tell him that we still had the old bugbear of deadness inside us. A hollowness that just doesn't seem to go away. We still have a what's-the-point-of-it-all-ness in the middle of our beings. A why-bother at the center of our souls. We have not yet invented a device to grant us bodily immortality and we are now not quite so sure that we would want it. As much as we do not want to die, we also sort of do, because going on as we are forever and ever seems like it would be a terrible burden and the point of living is not clear. Here the ancient man would nod. "What about your gods?" he would ask us, and we would tell him that we had none. At this, the only reasonable response on his part would be to fall to his knees and rend his clothes and pour ashes upon his head. We shall have told him that in the future there is no hope. For all Mankind's wishes and hopes and flirtations with faith, it turns out the universe is a dead thing after all. An uncaring machine we are all stuck in. An old clock slowly running down. We shall have told him that all Love eventually ends and all Hope is ultimately futile. There is no eternity. In the end, all there is is death. He might want to kill himself. More likely, he might want to kill us. We would not understand his reaction. This is because we do not understand God.

Aquinas answered the question, "What is God?" with the answer God himself gave from the burning bush. For those unfamiliar with the story, Moses was a shepherd out in the field and looking across the valley one evening he noticed a bush on fire. In itself, this was not an unusual thing. It was an arid land after all and brush fires were common but what was uncommon in this case was the fact that the fire simply kept on burning. As Moses watched, he noted that the fire did not spread to the other brush but also that it did not burn out. For hours he watched from a distance, increasingly marveling at the fact that the fuel of leaves and sticks never seemed exhausted. Curious, he approached, and as the ancient prophet drew near to the flame he heard a deep voice come from out of it: "Moses! Moses! Do not come any closer! Take off your shoes! The place where you stand is holy ground!" Strange. The story gets far stranger. The voice within the fire tells Moses that he must go to Pharaoh in Egypt and tell him that God demands he free his slaves and Moses is understandably scared and perplexed, more than a little hesitant to fulfill such a request. Moses asks the fire, "But, if I do this, whom shall I say has sent me?" This is a reasonable thing to ask because the ancient world had pantheons of pantheons of gods and Moses is, in effect, asking, "Ok. But which one are you?" To this the voice responds with the most iconic words in the whole Bible. "Tell them that I Am That I Am has sent you," the voice says. Curious. A confounding answer. One that has perplexed philosophers and theologians for thousands of years.

Alternative translations of the name the voices gives that might be more accurate are "I Am That Is" or, "I Am That Be." What does this mean? What is being said here? Bishop Robert Barron puts it like this: What does it mean to be a thing? Well, if to be a dog is to be an animal and to be Saint Peter is to be a man, then what does it mean to be God? Or again, if to be a spring mattress is to be a bed, or to be a honey bee is to be an insect, then what does it mean to be God? Again, if to be water is to be a liquid and to be iron is to be a metal, then what does it mean to be God? How do you finish the axiom for God? What is the solution to the equation, "To be ______ is to be ________?" when God himself is inserted as the first variable? Try this. Try it for yourself. Insert any thing you can think of into the first blank and see if an answer to the second blank doesn't come readily to your mind. To be seven is to be a number. To be air is to be a certain mixture of gas. To be John Wayne is to be a dead movie star. To be Caligula is to be a former emperor of Rome. But what is it to be God? What word or phrase would fit most succinctly and concretely in that second blank? Aquinas answers with the answer given from the burning bush. "To be," he says. "To be God is to be." I Am That I Am. I Am That Be. I Am That Is.

"Ipsum Esse" is the latin. "Being itself." "Existence itself. God is "I Am" or, "I Be." He is what is. God is Being. God is Existence itself. Take a moment to wrap your head around this claim for all of the ancient pantheons of gods and mythologies devised by Man were trying to get at this fundamental Truth but none of them hit upon it more succinctly. The fundamental claim of Christianity is not that God is an angry grandfather in the sky nor a bitter deity making rules for your destruction. No. Quite the opposite. The fundamental claim of Christianity is that, whatever exists, in so far that it exists, does so because it partakes of the Divine. God is, in the most real and literal sense, Life itself, and this is why the Christian faith holds that in order to "find inner peace" or "fulfillment" or "meaning", that you must be born again. You must come to life again. Your spirit must undergo the same process that your body did upon the moment you exited your mother's womb. The deadness, the what-does-it-matter, the why-bother and all the nihilism in the human soul is a rot and a decay. It is the stench of something not alive. It is the evidence of a lack of connection to Being. To Existence. To God. By definition your body cannot exist without partaking of the divine and by definition your soul cannot either. You feel dead inside without God because without God Dead is all there is.

Now, if you are a clever person, you have already come to the difficulty in such a saying. "If God is Being itself, Existence itself," you might be wondering, "then does that not include all the bad things that exist as well?" Certainly. To a point anyway. There are some bad things that are bad precisely because they're acts of non-existence, but that is a philosophical nuance too technical and complex to explore here. Suffice it to say that both good and evil things partake of the divine, and "live, move, and have their Being" in the Godhead. Pretty things and ugly things. Pleasant things and painful ones. Daffodils and butterflies partake of the I Am just as much as cockroaches and long legged spiders. A charitable heart keeps beating because it is united to the Father just as much as an angry and vicious heart does the same. All things, whatsoever they are, in so far as they exist, have being only because they are part of Being itself, only because they share some portion of the essence of the Divine. As Chesterton said in his poem:

But now a great thing in the street

Seems any human nod,

Where shift in strange democracy

The million masks of God.

The million masks of God. Quite right. Quite right. In a very real sense God is lurking behind every shadow and every rock. In a very real sense he is the image seen in a mirror and the eyeballs beholding the light. He is for that matter the light itself, just as he is sound and touch and the blond hair of a pretty girl or the strong rippling muscles upon a horse galloping through the field. The lonesome pine standing upon the hill is but God in disguise. The rolling rocks of a majestic mountain but an instance of the Godhead standing particularly still. God is in the freshly fallen snow laying upon the plains. Birdsong only exists long enough to reach our ears because it is a manifestation of the Father's energy and will. In a way that perhaps sounds scandalous to some, God is both the vast expanse of the night sky and every single star. He is the blossom of a flower and the flash of lightning in a storm. But. Also. God is a cancer cell. God is a murderous and bloodied knife. God is in the bullet and God is in the car accident. They Exist. God is Existence. This is all true.

In a way.

But also, not it a way.

If all the above sounds very "Eastern" in its philosophy then it is well to remember that Christianity is an Eastern religion. It is a faith born out of the sagas and stories of people traipsing through the desert and riding camels, it comes form men and women wrapped in loose cloth against the heat and struggling against the noon-day sun. Geographically, Christianity comes form a land on the same continent as India and China and if there is in Aquinas's naming of the Divine a sense of universal presence and "one-ness" that makes one think of the Hindu Ātman or the philosophy of the Dao then that is not surprising. When the Eastern religions say that everything is God behind a billion different masks, they are not wrong, from the Christian standpoint, they just don't have the whole story.

If one were to try and nail down a single principle that characterizes the Christian faith it would have to be, as Chesterton noted, that it is a religion which holds fiercely to both of a set of opposites at the same time. We believe, fiercely, that God is in all things. We also believe, fiercely, that it is a great mistake to point to any given thing and say that it is God, in the sense that it is worthy of worship or divine. That every human nod on the street is a greeting of God's million masks is a very astute and true revelation, for every man woman and child is an image of God. An icon of God. Man is made in God's image and all partake of the Divine essence and thus we may truly say that we are God's children just as Jesus truly tells us that God is Our Father. But... carry it not too far. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for using the masculine pronouns for God is precisely to ward off Man's tendency to carry the one-ness of God to those extremes. We say he is Our Father for precisely this reason, that we may know that our Creator has created us in the way a man creates, purposefully fending off the nothing that we have a Mother in heaven who has created us in her womb. For a man you see creates life by casting off from himself. It is the in the nature of masculinity to release creative energy outward, namely into the womb of a woman. The masculine addition to the creation of life happens completely outside the masculine body. He is distinct from it. Apart. Yes, in a very real sense the father is in the child for his own lifeblood flows within it. But, also, in a very real sense he is a totally separate thing, going about on his own. If we used feminine pronouns for God (as some modern heretical sects are now doing), we would slip all too easily into the notion that God has created us the way a woman creates life. By growing it inside herself. Connecting it to her organs and her blood and her food and her air such that it is highly difficult to say where the woman ends and where the child within her begins. If we spoke of God as a mother, we would all to easily assume that we were "apart" of her. That our faults were shared with our Creator. That our sicknesses were the sicknesses of She for, after all, we cannot tell where She ends and we begin. Christ tells us that God is our Father in part to remind us that such is not the case. The Creator has created by "casting off" things from himself. By separating them out from what he is. Therefore, like children born malformed, we may be sinful without our Father sharing in our sin. He is "in us", yes, but we may not be in him. If this seems a paradox you are correct. Christianity is a faith built on paradoxes and by that gains access to all the richness in the wold. God is in everything and yet everything is not God. God is One, and yet he is also Three. God is Spirit, but God is also man. I cannot explain to you how these paradoxes can be so. I can only tell you that by being so they most assuredly explain.

God is everything. God is all-things. God is Existence itself and all things which exist partake of him. He is One. He is Many. He is the wind and he is the rain and he is the sunshine glinting off the grasses dancing in the field. Likewise, he is in the cockroach. Likewise in the spider. Nothing has ever died without his approval and no one has ever gotten sick by a disease he himself did not, in some sense, create. God is the dance between Order and Chaos. He is an artist standing outside space and time and using Shadow as well as Light to make his masterpiece. God is Yang. God is Yin. He is Justice but he is likewise Mercy. Full of Grace without ceasing to be full of Wrath. He is both Spirit and incarnate flesh, a dweller of the highest heavens and a baby sitting upon a poor mother's knee. As a man, God is the force that cast his lot in with the Dead. He is the mighty hero coming back from the underworld to stand on equal footing with the Quick. He resides in Heaven but he also went to Hell. God is the meeting of Opposites. The explosive collision of polarities that gives birth to all things just as the in-breath works in conjunction with the out-breath to sustain Life itself. God is Meaning and God is Purpose.

God is Love.

God is a fiery hot passion that spoke Eros into the Void and birthed the cosmos in one gigantic bang.

If your life feels incomplete without him then it is no wonder and phrases like "finding yourself" or "seeking fulfillment" simply will not cut it. You need God. You need to Be. You need Ipsum Esse. Being Itself. But... how to find him? Well, the answer is that he must be in his Father's house.

Interesting isn't it? T. S. Eliot said that the end of all our searching shall be to arrive back at the place we started and to know it for the first time. Mary and Joseph would have visited the temple for the feast of Passover and it is very likely to have been the starting point for the exodus back home. Having attended morning prayer and perhaps offering a small sacrifice, Mary and Joseph would have gathered with their kinfolk and journeyed down from the hilltop on which the temple stood. They would have walked down through the streets and out of the city gate. They would've turned, walking the long and lonesome road back to Galilee. For whatever reason, when at last they discovered that Jesus was not with them, they did not return at first to the temple to find their son. They cannot be blamed. Most twelve year old boys are not the sort to spend a whole day in prayer, much less three, and they probably looked for him in all the more reasonable places first. Doubtless looking somewhere like the barracks would have been a surer bet as it would have certainly been a popular site for boys his age. Hundreds of children probably gathered there to watch the Roman soldiers do their drills and to marvel at the gleam of their helms and the flash of their steel.

But, Christ was not there.

The marketplace too would have been a good candidate. The hustle and bustle of a middle eastern bazaar, all the gold and goods of the Empire flowing through the streets in an orgy of commerce. Pearls and jewelry would have glimmered in the hot sun and carts full of juicy figs and pomegranates would have tempted passersby along the roads. The aroma of bread filled the air from baker's ovens, prostitutes and dancing girls likewise displayed their wares.

But, Christ was not there either.

What about the well? Might Jesus have been at the well playing with the other children as the camels came to get their drink? Might he have been playing games in the field or poking at all the herds of silly sheep with a long stick? Perhaps he had gone down to the ale house, and was even then listing to the wild stories of noon-day drunks as Mary searched frantically for him through the alleys. Maybe he snuck up on the ramparts of the walls to marvel at the wide world beyond the safety of the city or perhaps he had fallen for a girl when his parents were not looking and snuck off with her in a fit of young and stupid love? Might he have been gambling? Maybe he had fallen in with the wrong crowd? A group of angry youths such as himself already plotting to rebel?

No. No Christ was not in any of these places. That said, there was good reason to think he might have been and I for one would not be at all surprised if some or most of the above were swirling about in the heads of his holy parents as they searched for him those three days in Jerusalem. After all, by twelve one is beginning to display the personality one will have as an adult and adult Jesus was roughly spoken of by all for his frequent association with drunks and prostitutes and sinners. He likewise wandered off unattended for many days into the wilderness and sometimes spoke of being a king and overthrowing all the powers of this world. They called the man version of Jesus a drunkard and friend of prostitutes and expected him to lead a military coup and frequently lost him in the mountains or in the woods. For myself, I do not doubt that this same sort of behavior was already manifesting in the boy version of Jesus too and his parents probably had good reason to look everywhere except the temple for their son. At last though, out of nothing more than desperation, they were forced to and they found him with a shock. You see they had completed the circuit. They had returned at last to the place where they started, and now they knew their son again for the first time.

We all have to do this. Sometimes we have to do it many times. If you were raised Christian it is almost a requirement that you at some point become an apostate. In my own life, I have known very few genuine searches for the divine that did not start precisely by walking out of a church. Like Mary and Joseph, we may begin our journey in the temple, but we have to walk-about for a while before we find our way back.

It is nothing against the Church mind you. It is only the human condition that makes it hard to appreciate a thing unless you have gone without it for a while. Church is no different. At some point in our lives each of us wakes up and realizes that God is not where we thought. He is not in the church we say. No. There is only hypocrisy and guilt and overbearing rules and regulations there. How could God be here!? In this place with the smarmy pastor and the cold uncaring congregation? How could God be among these hypocrites and liars and thieves? So... we look elsewhere. We take to the streets. We flirt with harlots and laugh with drunks and we get right mad and angry and shout at the politicians that we need a revolution and then turn around and think of abandoning all of it and running off into the woods. We try different religions. We try no religion at all. We look and we look and we look for the thing which will fill the voids within our souls and we do not find it. At last, if we are lucky, one day we return as weary travelers to the place we left as bright-eyed youths and we find Jesus still right there. Sitting. Talking. We discover that he is in the same place he always was. It is only we who before had been too blind to see.

Not that our concerns were not valid. The Church is full of hypocrites and we are overburdened with guilt and people do use the scriptures and the catechism like a hammer upon our heads. They do. Of course they do. And likewise did the men sitting around twelve-year old Christ in the temple do the same. Christ himself would grow into a man that would tell them so right to their faces. Of course. The people around God are always going to be hypocrites... but he is still there. Right where he said. Jesus will always be inside his Father's house. He has to be. We are the only ones for whom attendance is optional.

Above all, you must not despair in your search for God. He has all the time in the world and a good deal more. He can wait. An honest seeker looking for the Divine will never be disappointed for those who seek shall always find. Only you must not ever give up. Never ever give up. At times when you feel that you can go no more remember Mary. Remember Joseph. How often in those three days must they have despaired, thinking the worst. How often did they imagine they would never see him again, believing him dead or kidnapped, lying somewhere bloody in a ditch? They did not give up. You must not either. Go. Search every nook and cranny. Look in every single place you think God ought to be until you've satisfied yourself that he isn't. For some it is then, and only then, that they are really able to go to Church.

Mary, Seeker of the Lost, pray for us.

May God bless you and yours.

-Yoshi
Appendix

Artwork used for each chapter:

1."The Annunciation", Fra Angelico

2."The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth", Bloch

3."The Adoration of the Shepherds", Pupil of Rembrandt

4."Presentation of Jesus in the Temple", Rembrandt

5."Twelve-Year Old Jesus Teaches in the Temple", Duccio

Prayers of the Holy Rosary

Hail Mary

Hail Mary, full of grace,

The Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women,

And blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,

Now and at the hour of our death.

The Apostle's Creed

I believe in God, The Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth;

And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:

Who was Conceived by the Holy Spirit,

Born of the Virgin Mary;

Suffered under Pontius Pilate,

Was Crucified, Died, and was Buried.

He Descended into Hell; on the third day He rose again from the Dead;

He Ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

From there He shall come to judge the Living and the Dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

The Holy Catholic Church,

The Communion of Saints,

The Forgiveness of Sins,

The Resurrection of the Body,

And life Everlasting.

Amen.

Our Father

Our Father, Who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be Thy Name;

Thy Kingdom come,

Thy Will be done,

On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily Bread,

And Forgive us our trespasses,

As we Forgive those who trespass against us;

And lead us not into Temptation,

But deliver us from Evil.

Amen.

Glory Be

Glory be to the Father

And to the Son,

And to the Holy Spirit.

As it was in the Beginning,

Is Now,

And Ever shall be,

World without End.

Amen.

Oh My Jesus

Oh My Jesus,

Forgive us our Sins,

Save us from the Fires of Hell;

And Lead all souls to Heaven,

Especially those most in need of Thy Mercy.

Amen.

Hail Holy Queen

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy,

Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope.

To thee do we Cry, poor banished Children of Eve:

To thee do we Send up our Sighs,

Mourning and Weeping in this Valley of Tears.

Turn then, most Gracious Advocate, thine Eyes of Mercy toward us,

And After this our Exile,

Show unto us the Blessed Fruit of thy Womb, Jesus.

O Clement, O Loving, O Sweet Virgin Mary!

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God,

That we may be Made Worthy of the Promises of Christ.

Rosary Prayer

Let us pray O God,

Whose Only-Begotten Son,

By His Life, Death and Resurrection, has Purchased for Us

The Rewards of Eternal Salvation:

Grant, we Beseech Thee, that while Meditating on these Mysteries

Of the most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary,

That We may Both Imitate what they Contain,

And Obtain what they Promise,

Through the same Christ our Lord.

Amen.
  1. Introduction: A Note Before Reading
  2. Donations
  3. How to Pray the Rosary
  4. Meditation One: The Annunciation
    1. Scripture
    2. Meditation
  5. Meditation Two: Mary's Visit to Elizabeth
    1. Scripture
    2. Meditation
  6. Meditation Three: The Nativity of Jesus
    1. Scripture
    2. Meditation
  7. Meditation Four: The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple
    1. Scripture
    2. Meditation
  8. Meditation Five: Finding the Boy Jesus in the Temple
    1. Scripture
    2. Meditation
  9. Appendix

