Sermon on the Feast of the Assumption 2010

by Sr Gabriel

My Son is dead
I can’t hold yesterday
…..too terrible…
Such cruelty…..a
Sword has pierced my heart.

If I had known
It would end like this,
Would I have said
‘Yes’?

I can’t believe it
Was all for nothing.
He spoke of ‘going
Away and coming again’.

There is a flicker of hope—
I just can’t believe that it is all over.

We just have to wait.

These words may well have been in Mary’s mind as she faced the bleakness of Holy Saturday, as we now call it.

She pondered, ‘would I have said yes’? But fortunately for us she did say ‘yes’ as portrayed in a snippet of  a poem by David Scott:

In such an ordinary room
The angel came skidding to rest:
She on a bench of prayer
He to get news off his chest.
………
She sat as still as the chair
Staring at the cool, tiled floor
And the silence was deeper there
Than she’d ever heard before.
Neither knew how to break it
Neither was wanting to press.
It was probably only a minute
But it felt like an hour to say ‘yes’.
‘Yes’ was the shape of the farmhouse
‘Yes were the trunks of the trees
‘Yes’ was the gate on its hinges
‘Yes’ brought the world to its knees.

Between these two events, the Annunciation and the Crucifixion we have 33 years of Mary’s life. Years in which we see repeatedly her pain of not being able to understand who this man was, this child whom she had brought to birth. Years of pondering in her heart those enigmatic words so often uttered which cut right through to her soul:
 ‘Why were you searching for me, did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’
‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’
‘Who are my mother, my brothers and my sisters?’

When Mary uttered her ‘Magnificat’, her hymn of joy and praise I suspect that she had no idea that events were going to turn out as they did.

There is so much that we can learn from Mary, so much we can learn about what it means to let Christ be born in us, so many pointers to how we need to live out that Christ-life rooted deep within us.

It is said that Mary was the first contemplative because she ‘pondered these things in her heart’. She was willing to hold the questions, the many sayings and events that she did not understand and ponder over them, hold them, give them room to make their meaning clear, wait until the kairos moment came about. So, one of the things we could take from Mary is giving questions room to gestate in our hearts. Not wanting a quick and easy solution to problems or an escape route into something more pleasant and enjoyable. But being prepared to sit and hold situations, tensions, questions that are hard and uncomfortable. In this, as in so many things in our monastic life we would be being counter-cultural, going against society which very often seeks a quick fix.

Rilke wrote in ‘Letters to a young Poet’:

‘be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now’.

Like Mary, when we make our Solemn Profession, when we say our ‘yes’ to the monastic life with all that that entails, we really are taking a leap in the dark. We have no real idea of how our life will unfold. Our vow of Conversatio Morum which implies saying our ‘yes’ at every moment of every day very often brings with it the pain of not understanding, the pain of having a sword pierce our heart.

Like Mary we are called to stand at the foot of the Cross and share, as much as we are able, in the Passion of Christ. What does this mean for us in our world and with our circumstances today? This may mean different things for each of us. For me it means being aware of, being open to, the suffering in the world; trying to stand at the interface between suffering and God’s love, to be a channel, as far as I am able of that love into the situations of suffering and brokenness. I believe that this is what happens when I pray, that God uses that prayer to heal parts of his broken world in ways that I neither know nor understand.
So I would say that Mary is indeed our exemplar: her willingness to live ‘yes’ not knowing where it may take her; her patience in pondering life’s hard questions and her preparedness to stand alongside Christ in his suffering.

‘She did not cry, ‘I cannot, I am not worthy’,
nor, ‘I have not the strength’.
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
           raging,  coerced.                 
Bravest of all humans,
          consent illumined her…
Consent,
           courage unparalled,
opened her utterly.'

                              (Denise Levertov)