I have posted this in the past at points when I have experienced something in the day's liturgy that speaks directly to me in a way that lets me know God is present and active, and intimately so. I have written in the past that my spiritual director and I have been doing a particular kind of inner work that leads to the healing of various forms of personal woundedness. There have been moments in the past 7.5 years where I have experienced significant healing and the sense of newness that comes with that and I have written about this occasionally --- the last time with the publication of "Classical Gas" which so well-reflected the way I was feeling.
This Christmas/New Year's has been the same kind of season: a time of great promise and the realization of that promise achieved in unimaginable ways. God's grace and a lot of hard work (made possible via Grace!) have achieved the deepest and most fundamental healing Sister Marietta and I have been working towards. As a result, the language of Mary's Magnificat has been strong in my mind, along with the promise associated with Paul's letter to the Romans, and also this song that so beautifully echoes the Magnificat. (Because some of my own experience is the result of trauma (childhood and young adult) whose deepest effects reach into the present, many lines in this song speak to me vividly; today it was, [[. . .Your mercy will last from the depths of the past to the end of the age to be.]] God is doing something new (kainetes) in our world with the Christ Event; God is doing something new in (and through) us in Christ.
Unimaginable healing and growth can come to us when we let the Spirit of the Risen Christ and his Abba work in us in this way. He does not spurn our weakness; instead, it is in and through our weakness that God's power is perfected! (2 Cor 12:9) Through the transformation of that same weakness into the medium of God's grace, our own brokenness can become the astonishing revelation of God's wisdom and justice. Let us open our hearts to God's creative presence in ways that resonate with Mary's song and with this Canticle of the Turning as well!
My thanks again to Sister Michelle Sherliza, OP for the wonderful video version of this song.
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