Mary, I Will Overshadow You. Be Not Afraid!

I wonder what the annunciation of Jesus' conception was really like factually, what the angel's message (that is, God's own message) sounded like and how it came to Mary. I imagine the months that would have passed without Mary having a period and her anxiety about what might be wrong, and then a subtle sign here, an ambiguous symptom there, and eventually the full realization of the inexplicable fact that she was pregnant! That would have been a shock, of course, but even then it would have taken some time for the bone deep fear to register: "I have not been intimate with a man! What will Joseph think?" and then, "O God, I can be killed for this!" while only over more time comes the even deeper sense that God had overshadowed her and that she need not be afraid. God was doing something completely new and would stand by Mary just as he promised when he revealed himself originally to Moses as: "I will be who I will be," --- and "I will be present to you, never leaving you bereft or barren."

In the work I do with people in spiritual direction, one of the tools I ask clients to use sometimes is dialogue. The idea is to externalize and make explicit in writing the disparate voices we carry within us: it may be a conversation between the voice of reason and the voice of fear, or the voice of stubbornness or that of impulsivity and our wiser, more flexible selves who speak to and with one another at these times so that this existence may have a future marked by wholeness, holiness, and new life. As individuals become adept at doing these dialogues, they may even discover themselves echoing or revealing at one moment the very voice of God which dwells in the deepest, most real parts of their heart as they simultaneously bring their most profound needs and fears to the conversation. Almost invariably these kinds of dialogues bring strength and healing, integration and faith. When I hear today's Gospel story I hear it as this kind of internal dialogue between the frightened, bewildered Mary and the deepest, truest, part of herself which is God's Word and Spirit calling her beyond all she has known before but in harmony with her people's covenant traditions and promises.

This is the way faith comes to most of us, the way we come to know and hear the voice of God in our lives. For most of us the Word of God dwells within us and only gradually steps out of the background in response to our fears, confusion, and needs as we ponder them in our hearts --- just as Mary did her entire life, but especially at times like this. In the midst of turmoil, of events which turn life plans on their heads and shatter dreams, there in our midst will be the God of Moses and Mary and Jesus reminding us, "I will overshadow you; depend on me, say yes to this, open yourself to my promise and perspective and we will bring life and meaning out of this; together we will make a gift of this tragedy for you and for the whole world! We will bring to birth a Word the world needs so desperately to hear: Be not afraid for I am with you. Be not afraid for you are precious to me."

Annunciations happen to us every day: small moments that signal the advent of a new opportunity to embody Christ and gift him to others. Perhaps many are missed and fewer are heeded as Mary heeded her own and gave her fiat to the change which would make something entirely new of her life, her tradition, and her world. But Mary's story is very much our own story as well, and the coming Feast of Christ's nativity is meant to refer to his being born of us as well. The world into which he will be brought will not love him really --- not if he is the Jesus our Scriptures and our creeds proclaim. But our own fiat will be accompanied by the reassuring voice of God: "I will overshadow you and accompany you. Our stories are joined now, inextricably wed as I say yes to you and you say yes to me. Together we create the future. Salvation will be born from this union. Be not afraid!"

On Merton, Suffering, Solitude, and the Making of the Hermit

[[The contemplation of the Christian solitary is the awareness of the divine mercy transforming and elevating his own emptiness and turning it into the presence of perfect love, perfect fullness.]] [Merton's ideal solitaries] are thus, [[the paradoxical, tormented solitaries for whom there is no real place; men and women who have not so much chosen solitude as been chosen by it. And these have not generally found their way into the desert either through simplicity or through innocence. Theirs is the solitude that is reached the hard way, through bitter suffering and disillusionment.]]

[[Dear Sister, I have wondered for some time what makes a person want to be a hermit. It just never made sense to me unless the person was broken and embittered by life and needed to withdraw from that by giving up on people and even on God. It's the solitude that I can't justify. Community made sense but not solitude unless hermits were people who were unable to participate in community for some reason. When you have written about the creation of the hermit heart in your own life it sounds like it involved a lot of suffering but you don't come across as bitter or broken. Thomas Merton has written about this very thing (please see what I quoted from "The Hermitary" site); have you seen this already? But I wondered what makes your heart a hermit heart and not the heart of an embittered survivor of suffering. Is the answer in what Merton wrote about mercy?

Do you think Merton is correct in characterizing the "ideal solitary" as he does? If this is true it must be really difficult for dioceses to "discern" this kind of vocation. Do you know what I mean? In religious life candidates are screened for their health and wholeness and backgrounds involving suffering raises red flags for the vocation personnel. But if ideal hermits are "tormented solitaries" what does a diocese look for in determining authentic eremitical vocations?]]

Thank you for your observations and questions. I have written recently again, though briefly,  about fraudulent hermits; what you are asking about is really one of the more significant ways people betray the eremitical vocation or substitute an inauthentic version of the life for the real thing. What Merton was saying first of all, as I read him, is that solitude must open the door to the one wishing to live an eremitical life; one cannot simply decide to live solitude and do it without such an opening. The second thing I believe Merton is writing about is how the door of solitude is often opened to a person. One of the main ways is through suffering that isolates in any of the many ways this occurs. But I agree with you that suffering is not sufficient to truly discern an eremitical call; it is a beginning and might be suggestive but it is not definitive.

On Unredeemed Suffering and the Door to Solitude:

Moreover, if a person has nothing but her suffering and if that suffering  remains unredeemed or un-transfigured by the grace and love of God, she will never be a hermit in the proper (Christian) sense; instead she will remain an isolated, broken, and possibly embittered person but one who is largely, if not entirely incapable of proclaiming the Gospel with her life. Such a person ought not be admitted to profession as a canonical hermit because while she may "not have a place" --- one element of Merton's description --- neither can she live out the mission or charism of the canonical hermit. Genuine solitude is redeemed and transformed isolation. It is marked or characterized by its relational tenor, a unique but very significant and paradoxical form of relatedness, of ecclesiality and community. The place the hermit has is unusual but very real. The door solitude opens to us is unlocked in part by significant and long-term suffering a person experiences through the first half of her life, but at the same time the door of Solitude can only said to be opened if the person has come to know the potential healing and transformation of her woundedness by the unqualified love and eternal life of God.

While persons whose first half of life may be marked by significant suffering are sometimes important and illustrative of the way some eremitical vocations are born, as you say they are sometimes also difficult cases in regard to discernment by dioceses. This is especially true if suffering remains the defining dimension of the person's life.  When I began this blog more than a decade ago I wrote about one needing to be a hermit in some essential sense before one approached a diocese with a request to be professed. What I meant then and still hold is that one has to move from being an isolated person for whom physical solitude may merely mirror or even exacerbate the alienation that can come from and be a source of suffering to being one for whom solitude is a relational reality which heals isolation and is the context for real reconciliation. Hermits know more than physical solitude; they know communion -- with God and others. And this means they can (and in fact must) know the healing of whatever suffering marked their earlier years. When dioceses work with potential candidates for profession they must look for those persons for whom physical solitude is a unique form of communion and symptom and source of healing.

My Own Healing and Growth Work:

In my own inner work I have become even more convinced of this truth.  Both of the quotations you cited are important but in regard to becoming the hermit I am called and consecrated to be I especially resonate with the first one. [[The contemplation of the Christian solitary is the awareness of the Divine mercy transforming and elevating [her] own emptiness and turning it into the presence of perfect love, perfect fullness.]] This is the one which mirrors my profession motto, [[(God's) power is made perfect in weakness]] --- a motto I chose precisely because it reflects first the nature of the Christ Event and then my own story with and in light of the grace of God. My own story involves suffering, yes, but far more than that it is the story of God's grace, a grace which, as I have said here many times, brings light out of darkness, life out of death, and meaning out of senselessness and absurdity. What Merton says, what Paul says, what the Christ Event makes real in space and time, and what authentic hermits of all sorts also say is that suffering plunges a person into the depths of isolation and readies her to hear God's invitation to depend on God alone. When, and to the extent that invitation is accepted one's life is entirely transfigured into one of wholeness and holiness, one is defined in a new way. Suffering may not ease entirely and may even increase in some ways, but it will no longer be the thing which drives and defines the person.

 And this means, of course, that one whose defining experience is the mercy of God will show this to those discerning her vocation. The one who wishes to become a diocesan hermit will reveal the mercy of God as the ground and source of her suffering's redemption and her life's transfiguration. Without this her solitude will be nothing more than physical and maybe spiritual, and emotional isolation. She will be a lone individual --- her suffering will have made her this on a number of levels, but she will not be a hermit in the sense the Church uses the term. On the other hand those individuals who have made the journey that Merton describes, the journey through serious suffering and into the mercy and love of God, may well have discovered the eremitical world solitude herself (and only "Solitude" herself) admits them to.

Summary: A Note to Dioceses on the Charism of Diocesan Eremitical Life

To reiterate then, Dioceses which are careful in their discernment will not eschew a person whose life is full of suffering so long as that life is also one defined and clearly transformed by the grace of God experienced in eremitical solitude. Such a diocese is careful to look not only at the suffering but at the fruits of that suffering which would  demonstrate it has been transfigured by the mercy of God. When the latter is not clearly present, when for instance, the person's message is self-centered and full of expressed pain but little else, when, that is, her life is defined by her suffering and not by the grace of God, the diocese will have to wait and watch to see what kind of vocation is actually present. They will give the person some reasonable time in physical solitude to see what changes occur. Generally speaking, if the person is called to be a hermit, isolation and a focus on suffering will be transformed by the love of God into genuine solitude (a unique but very real expression of reconciliation and community in Christ)  and the proclamation with her entire life of the healing and redemptive love of God.

Also generally speaking, all of this reflects the way the heart of a hermit is created and the door to eremitical solitude is opened when there is a background or history of significant suffering. It reflects the way a life comes to reveal the charisma or gift to Church and World c 603 calls "the Silence of Solitude" in such cases.  Suffering of all sorts can hollow one out and make one yearn for answers to the question of self that only God can provide. One lives the questions associated with meaning: does my life make sense? Is it meaningful? Is it moved by love, both as giver and receiver? How can I make sure my life is meaningful by ministering to others in a way which is redemptive for them?  Why have or am I suffering in the apparently gratuitous way I have or am? Where is God in all of this and how can I live for God and others? As important as living the questions is, through the grace of God mediated to one in all the ways it comes to us, one will also come to live the answer: namely, I have lived/am living all of this so that the Gospel of God in Jesus Christ is proclaimed loudly and clearly (or silently but with clarity and poignancy!) and the God whose power is perfectly revealed in weakness resonates within my heart causing it to sing a Magnificat of gratitude and praise.

Our Lady of Guadalupe: God is the One who Lifts up the Lowly

Fifty years ago at Vatican II the messiest, most passionate, and often "dirtiest" fighting to occur during the council took place during discussions of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. Out of nearly 2400 bishops the fight was divided almost exactly evenly between two factions, those nicknamed the maximalists and those nicknamed the minimalists. Both factions were concerned with honoring the greatness of Mary in our faith but their strategies in this were very different from one another. The maximalists wanted the council to declare Mary Mediatrix of all Graces and to proclaim this as a new dogma in the Church --- never mind that the thrust of the Council was not toward the definition of new dogmas. They wanted the council to write a separate document on Mary, one which effectively made her superior to the Church.

The minimalists also wanted to honor Mary, but they wanted to do so by speaking of her within the document on the Church. They desired a more Scriptural approach to the person and place of Mary which honored the dogmatic truth that Christ is the One unique Mediator between God and mankind. The Church would be spoken of as Mother and Virgin, for instance, and Mary would be seen as a type of the Church.

The minimalist position won the day (had only 20 Bishops voted differently it would have been another matter) and so, in Lumen Gentium after the Church Fathers wrote about the Mystery of the Church, Church as People of God, the hierarchical nature of the Church, the Laity, the universal call to holiness, Religious, and the Church as a Pilgrim people, they wrote eloquently about Our Lady in chapter VIII. Mary is highly honored in this Constitution --- as it says in today's responsorial psalm, she is, after all, "the highest honor of our race", but for this very reason the Church Fathers spoke of her clearly as  within the Church, within the Communion of Saints, within the Pilgrim People of God, not as a rival to Christ or part of the Godhead, but as one who serves God in Christ as a model of faithfulness.

It is always difficult, I think, to believe and honor the Christmas truth we are preparing during Advent to celebrate, namely, that our God is most fully revealed to us in the ordinary things of life. We are a Sacramental faith rooted in the God who, for instance, comes to us himself in bread and wine, cleanses and recreates us entirely with water,  and strengthens and heals us with oil. Especially at this time of the liturgical year we are challenged to remember and celebrate the God who turns a human face to us, who comes to us in weakness, lowliness and even a kind of dependence on the "yes" we are invited to say, the One who is made most fully real and exhaustively known in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place. Advent is a time when we prepare ourselves to see the very face of God in the poor, the broken, the helpless, and those without status of any kind. After all, that is what the Christmas Feast of the Nativity is all about.

I think this is one of the lessons today's Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe teaches most vividly. We all know the more superficial story. Briefly, in 1531 Juan Diego, an Indian Christian encountered a beautiful Lady on the hill of Tepeyac; she told him to ask the Bishop to build a church there. The Bishop refused and required a sign of the authenticity of Juan Diego's vision. Diego returned home to find his uncle dying. He set out again to fetch a doctor and avoided the hill where he had first met the woman and went around it instead --- he did not want to be distracted from his mission! But the Lady came down to him, heard his story about his uncle, reassured him his uncle would be well, and told him then to go to the top of the hill and pick the flowers he found there. Diego did so, gathered them in his tilma or mantle, and went again to the Bishop. Juan poured out his story to him and he also poured the flowers out onto the floor. Only then did he and the Bishop see a miraculous image of the Lady of Tepeyac hill there on the tilma itself.

But there was a deeper story. Remember that Juan Diego's people were an essen-tially subjugated people. The faith they were forced to adopt by missionaries was geared toward the salvation of souls but not to what we would recognize as the redemption of persons or the conversion and transformation of oppressive structures and institutions. It was more a faith enforced by fear than love, one whose whose central figure was a man crucified because an infinitely offended God purportedly willed it in payment for our sins. Meanwhile the symbols of that faith, its central figures, leaders and saints, were visibly European; they spoke and were worshipped in European languages, were dressed in European clothes, were portrayed with European features, etc. At best it was hard to relate to; it's loving God was apparently contradictory and remote. At worst it was incomprehensible and dehumanizing. Moreover, with the "evangelizers" who had forcibly deprived the Indians of their own gods and religion came diseases the Indians had never experienced. They were dying of plagues formerly unknown to them, working as slaves for the institutional and patriarchal  Church, and had been deprived of the human dignity they had formerly known.

It was into this situation that Mary directly entered when she appeared on Tepeyak hill, the center of the indigenous peoples' worship of the goddess Tonantzin, the "goddess of sustenance". The image of the Lady was remarkable in so many ways. The fact of it, of course, was a marvel (as were the healing of Diego's uncle, the December roses Diego picked and poured out onto the Bishop's floor or the creation and persistence of her image on Diego's tilma), but even more so was the fact that she had the face of a mixed race (Indian or Mestiza) woman, spoke in Diego's own language, was pregnant, and was dressed in native dress. And here was the greatest miracle associated with OL of Guadalupe: in every way through this appearance the grace of God gave dignity to the Indian people. They were no longer third or fourth class people but persons who could truly believe they genuinely imaged the Christian God. The appearance was the beginning of a new Church in the Americas, no longer a merely European Church, but one where Mary's Magnificat was re-enacted so that ALL were called to truly image God and proclaim the Gospel. One commentator wrote that, [[Juan Diego and millions after him are transformed from crushed, self-defacing and silenced persons into confident, self-assured and joyful messengers and artisans of God's plan for America.]] (Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe and the New Evangelization)

Here too then, in the truly unexpected and even unacceptable place, our God turns a human face to those seeking him. He comes to us in weakness and lowliness as one of the truly marginalized. In the process we see clearly once again the God of Jesus Christ who scatters the proud in their conceit, unseats the mighty from their positions of power, and lifts up the lowly. During this season of Advent Our Lady of Guadalupe calls us especially to be watchful. God is working to do this new and powerful thing among us --- just as he did in the 1st Century, just as he did in the 16th, just as he always does when we give him our own fiat.

Magnificat: On the Song Which IS the Hermit (Reprise)

Today's readings include the Gospel of Luke and Mary's Magnificat. Many of the characters in Luke's version of the Gospel story move from muteness, barrenness, fear, and confusion to prophetic speech and songs. In fact the move to canticles and prophetic speech is a sign of faith and the person's fulfillment in their vocations and humanity. Parrhesia or boldness of speech is the primary form of true discipleship, the result of the faith and hope which is the disciple's while the Christ is God's Word Incarnate. In light of all this, and also because of what I have written recently about the heart of the hermit, I wanted to reprise a post I put up here several years ago (2007) just a couple of months after my perpetual eremitical profession: Magnificat: On the Song which IS the Hermit. Of course, we are all called to share this vocation to incarnate the breath and word of God, but I think it especially describes the life and vocation of the hermit and particularly the paradoxical charism canon 603 refers to as the silence of solitude. I think this is the experience Mary knew and Luke captured so very well in today's Gospel.

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Theologians often think of the human being as a "word event," that is, we are responses to the words and being of others, crafted and shaped by those words and persons and creating ourselves (or being created) in response to reality around us. We can wander lost through the world, unformed and unknown, we can even impinge on others' lives without the dynamic of dialogue, or address and response, but it is only in response to another person's address that we actually have a personal place to stand, or that we come to be the persons we CAN be. More fundamentally, theologians recognize that we are each the answer or response to a divine word of address and summons spoken in the very core of our being. We speak of this reality variously: "God calls us by name to be"; "we have a vocation or call to authentic humanity"; "the human heart is, by definition, a theological reality and the place where God is active and effectively present in the core of our being", etc.

Of course, the definitive image of authentic humanity is Christ, Divine Word-made-flesh. Theologians reflect that each of us are called to be "Word made flesh" --- though not as definitively as that incarnation accomplished in the Christ Event, still with coherence and cogency, articulateness, truth, and power. Throughout our lives the incarnational word we are is shaped and formed, redacted and composed, in response to the Name or summons God speaks in the core of our being, and which ALSO comes to us (or is sympathetically sounded in us) in a variety of forms and intensities from without in the Scriptures, Sacraments, other people, nature, etc. And of course, it is also distorted and falsified by our own sinfulness, and by our defensive responses to the sinfulness and influence of others in our lives. While we are called to be joyful and coherent embodiments of the Word of God incarnated in our world, we are as often cries of anguish, snarls of anger, sobs of pain, and the lies of insecurity and defensiveness which so lead to the falsification of our being.

Ordinarily, of course, the responsive composition we each are is a mixture of true and false, real and unreal, coherent and incoherent, articulate and inarticulate, anguished and joyful. Only in Christ are we rendered more and more the response we are MEANT to be. And yet, deep within us God speaks the Name we are to embody, the vocational summons we are to incarnate in all of its uniqueness AS our own lives in this world. It is an unceasing, unremitting hallowing right at the core of who we are, and when we are truly in touch with this and truly responsive we become the Word event which God wills us to be. If, as Fr Robert Hale, OSB Cam, once remarked, it is true that "God sustains us as a singer sustains a note," then we are each called to become a song, a particular fiat witnessing to the grace (that is, the powerful presence) of God in our lives. God is the breath which sustains us moment by moment, and we are the song which embodies this breath.

The hermit's existence is paradigmatic of this reality. She really is called to be the song at the heart of the church. Birthed in silence and solitude, shaped by obedience to the Word and breath of God, exercised in the singing of psalms daily --the regular chanting or recitation of the divine Office, the reading of scripture both aloud and in silence, held in the heart of God and steeped in the formative rests of contemplative prayer and shaped by the stories of all those persons she holds in her own heart, the hermit moves day by day towards becoming the articulate and coherent expression of God's creative providence we recognize as a magnificat.

Of course, gestation and birth are together demanding, painful, and messy businesses. So is the composition of a truly responsive life. Those cries of anguish, snarls of anger, defensive lies, and sobs of pain we ALSO ARE, don't simply "go away" of themselves without the hard work of recognition and repentance. Healing, sanctification, and verification (making whole and true) is God's work in us, but it requires and involves our active cooperation. It is this dynamic that makes of the eremitical silence, solitude, prayer, and penance a therapeutic crucible or editor's desk where we are --- sometimes ruthlessly --- revised, redacted, and recreated. Evenso, at bottom eremitical life (indeed ALL christian life!) is a joy-filled reality; we incarnate the merciful love of God which heals and sanctifies, enlivens and sustains. We become a coherent articulation or expression of the breath and word of God spoken both in the core of ourselves, and in so many ways in our church and world. We ARE the songs which God sings in the heart of his church, magnificats of God's love and mercy sounding in (and out of) the silence of solitude.

Singing our Magnificats, Looking back and ahead

With our celebration of Jesus' baptism the celebration of the Christmas season draws to an end. In a short two weeks we moved from the nativity of Jesus, through readings which marked his growth in stature and grace, and we now approach the feast of his commissioning by God and Jesus' own acceptance of all it means to be Son. But from the beginning of Advent throughout the Christmas season we heard stories of individuals brought from barrenness, silence, and muteness to fruitfulness and the bold speech the Scriptures calls parrhesia. There was Hanna, a barren Jewish woman, whose faith eventually allowed God to act in her so that she might have a son. She gave birth to Samuel and sang her gratitude for the fruition of God's Word in the "Canticle of Anna". There was Elizabeth, a voiceless woman in Judaism who gave birth to John the Baptist, and who stood up against the religious establishment of her day proclaiming, "No! His name will be John!" and Zecharia who doubted God could bring new life out of barrenness and was made mute, but who eventually affirmed with his wife, "No, his name will be John" and regained a powerful voice in bending to God's will. As a result we have the Canticle of Zechariah, another eloquent symbol of the speech or word event a human being can become.

John the Baptist leaps in response to the Word of God and becomes more than just a Prophet, but also the actual forerunner of God's Christ. His own austere song is the call to repentence and purification! There was, of course, Mary whose own virginity and fiat issued --- through the grace of God --- in the birth of Jesus and the magnificat which, like Hanna's canticle, is emblematic of true obedience and the reversals God effects in our lives and world when God's Word and Spirit are allowed to have their way. There was Simeon who saw Jesus in the Temple and sang his praise as he spoke of his own willingness to die now that the goal of his life had been accomplished.

God's own story was rehearsed twice for us during this season in the prologue to John's Gospel, first on Christmas day, and again last Friday. It is the story of a move from the "aloneness" of the Communion we call God through the Word's sounding in the silence and emptiness of chaos to the resultant coming to be of a creation on its way to being the articulate expression of God's glory. It is a story, and in fact a song, which comes to a particular climax in the nativity and life of Christ as the Word is enfleshed to dwell amongst us. In every case, and in the stories of so many more individuals in the Scriptures --- prophets, judges, etc --- we have God bringing, summoning, to fruition and articulation his own Word --- always out of silence, chaos, barrenness, etc. And now, we approach the feast of the Baptism which marks Jesus' own adult acceptance of divine Sonship, his own commissioning to move out of the silence and privacy of familial obscurity into the public ministry which is his to claim. He will be THE Word of Power for the world and we will be told, "This is my beloved Son. Listen (hearken) to him!"

Theologians use the term "the Christ Event" to refer to Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and ascension. But, because of what happens to the world in these events, the term refers to more than this single life. It refers as well to those who come to participate in Jesus' life and share it, to those who accept their own calls to articulate the Word of God in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, to those who literally become part of the body of Christ and share in the dynamic spoken of in Ephesians, "Christ brought to full stature." Each of us have a place in continuing and extending the range and scope of the Christ Event. Each of us can allow or prevent the Word from coming to greater or fuller articulation in our world. Each of us may come to be an exhaustive articulation of the Glory of God, or not.

We are at the beginning of the Church year still, but this weekend's feast challenges us to accept the commissioning which accompanies Jesus' own. With Hanna, Elizabeth, Zechariah, John the Baptist, Mary, Simeon, et al, we are to become expressions of the Word of God within us and reveal the glory of God with our lives. The reversals spoken of by Hanna and Mary, the reversals proclaimed and embodied by Christ are to become the melody of our lives as each one becomes a canticle, psalm, or magnificat of God's power, and no other. My prayer is that each of us will find and assume our place and our voice in the Christ Event and sing those magnificats until every person has joined in the song, indeed until the whole of creation is one full-throated hymn of revelation and praise to God.

"Magnificat of Acceptance," and "Magnificat of Friendship," by Ann Johnson

As this month of Mary continues, and also because today is the 40th anniversary of my baptism, I thought I would put up a couple more Magnificats written by contemporary women. Two or three pieces of Ann Johnson's poetry in particular are especially lovely. They are taken from Miryam of Nazareth, Woman of Strength and Wisdom, Ave Maria Press, 1984. The first is called the "Magnificat of Acceptance." (My apologies that the original formatting does not come through when the poem is published here.)


My soul trembles in the presence of the loving Creator
and my spirit prepares itself to walk hand in hand
with the God who saves Israel
because I have been accepted by God
as a simple helpmate.

Yes, forever in the life of humankind
people will sing of this loving encounter;
through remembering this moment, the faithful
will know that all things are possible in God.

Holy is the place within me where God lives.

God's tender fingers reach out from age to age
to touch and soften the inner spaces of those
who open their souls in hope.

I have experienced the creative power of God's embracing arms
and I know the cleansing fire of unconditional love.
I am freed from all earthly authority
and know my bonding to the Author of all earthly things.
I am filled with the news of good things:
my favor with God,
faithful trust in the gentle shadow of the Most High,
the mystery of my son, Jesus,
the gift of companionship with my beloved kinswoman,
Elizabeth, who believes as I believe.

The place in my heart I had filled
with thoughts of fear and inadequacy
has been emptied and I am quiet within.

God comes to save Israel, our holy family,
remembering that we are the ones who remember
. . . according to the kinship we have known. . .
remembering that we are the ones who remember
and that where God and people trust each other
there is home.


The second Magnificat is called, the "Magnificat of Friendship" and calls to mind not only my own journey, but those who have made it with me, and especially those women who have assisted and accompanied me, whether in religious or consecrated (eremitical) life, medicine, ministry, etc. I am excited about continuing this journey into ever fuller and more abundant life, and I can't say how grateful I am to God for these women.

My soul flowers in the light of your love, my God
and my spirit sings Alleluia in the reality of your joyful presence,
because you have chosen my kinswoman and me with the
summons of your eyes.

Yes, we are known now and for all time. We are known as women,
blessed.
Holy is your name.
The tenderness of your hand rests on us as we journey in your way.
Your power in my life has led me into the embrace of loving arms.
You have exposed my lonely pride that I might turn my head to your
nurturing breast.

You have revealed the hollowness of achievements and have opened in
my heart a space filled with simple, loving moments.
My hunger you have satisfied,
my excess you have ignored.

You are my help as I remember your tender love for me,
. . .for we have touched each other you and I
and we have made promises. . .

I remember your tenderness for all that you have begun in me
and in those with whom I walk
and I respond with all that I am becoming
in this hour and in all times to come.

Magnificat: On the song Which IS the Hermit

Theologians often think of the human being as a "word event," that is, we are responses to the words and being of others, crafted and shaped by those words and persons and creating ourselves (or being created) in response to reality around us. We can wander lost through the world, unformed and unknown, we can even impinge on others' lives without the dynamic of dialogue, or address and response, but it is only in response to another person's address that we actually have a personal place to stand, or that we come to be the persons we CAN be. More fundamentally, theologians recognize that we are each the answer or response to a divine word of address and summons spoken in the very core of our being. We speak of this reality variously: "God calls us by name to be"; "we have a vocation or call to authentic humanity"; "the human heart is, by definition, a theological reality and the place where God is active and effectively present in the core of our being", etc.

Of course, the definitive image of authentic humanity is Christ, Divine Word-made-flesh. Theologians reflect that each of us are called to be "Word made flesh" --- though not as definitively as that incarnation accomplished in the Christ Event, still with coherence and cogency, articulateness, truth, and power. Throughout our lives the incarnational word we are is shaped and formed, redacted and composed, in response to the Name or summons God speaks in the core of our being, and which ALSO comes to us (or is sympathetically sounded in us) in a variety of forms and intensities from without in the Scriptures, Sacraments, other people, nature, etc. And of course, it is also distorted and falsified by our own sinfulness, and by our defensive responses to the sinfulness and influence of others in our lives. While we are called to be joyful and coherent embodiments of the Word of God incarnated in our world, we are as often cries of anguish, snarls of anger, sobs of pain, and the lies of insecurity and defensiveness which so lead to the falsification of our being.

Ordinarily, of course, the responsive composition we each are is a mixture of true and false, real and unreal, coherent and incoherent, articulate and inarticulate, anguished and joyful. Only in Christ are we rendered more and more the response we are MEANT to be. And yet, deep within us God speaks the Name we are to embody, the vocational summons we are to incarnate in all of its uniqueness AS our own lives in this world. It is an unceasing, unremitting hallowing right at the core of who we are, and when we are truly in touch with this and truly responsive we become the Word event which God wills us to be. If, as Fr Robert Hale, OSB Cam, once remarked, it is true that "God sustains us as a singer sustains a note," then we are each called to become a song, a particular fiat witnessing to the grace (that is, the powerful presence) of God in our lives. God is the breath which sustains us moment by moment, and we are the song which embodies this breath.

The hermit's existence is paradigmatic of this reality. She really is called to be the song at the heart of the church. Birthed in silence and solitude, shaped by obedience to the Word and breath of God, exercised in the singing of psalms daily --the regular chanting or recitation of the divine Office, the reading of scripture both aloud and in silence, held in the heart of God and steeped in the formative rests of contemplative prayer and shaped by the stories of all those persons she holds in her own heart, the hermit moves day by day towards becoming the articulate and coherent expression of God's creative providence we recognize as a magnificat.

Of course, gestation and birth are both (or together) demanding, painful, and messy businesses. So is the composition of a truly responsive life. Those cries of anguish, snarls of anger, defensive lies, and sobs of pain we ALSO ARE, don't simply "go away" of themselves without the hard work of recognition and repentance. Healing, sanctification, and verification (making whole and true) is God's work in us, but it requires and involves our active cooperation. It is this dynamic that makes of the eremitical silence, solitude, prayer, and penance a therapeutic crucible or editor's desk where we are --- sometimes ruthlessly --- revised, redacted, and recreated. Evenso, at bottom eremitic life (indeed ALL christian life!) is a joy-filled reality; we incarnate the merciful love of God which heals and sanctifies, enlivens and sustains. We become a coherent articulation or expression of the breath and word of God spoken both in the core of ourselves, and in so many ways in our church and world. We ARE the songs which God sings in the heart of his church, magnificats of God's love and mercy sounding in (and out of) the silence of solitude.