So the world, forced by willful ignorance to drag untold tonnage of hapless memories, called ‘history’, and distracted by its lust to hoard even more, joins the chase for hides of outward glory assisted by hell’s hounds, and misses every worthy event and personage to ever cross its threshold or pitch a tent in its domain. Seeking what cannot be found, the world, and the individual, both forfeit what is theirs.
Today the Church celebrates the birth of an unknown Jewish girl. Unknown, even unnamed by the world of her time, never recognized as anyone, she passed her life in obscurity, except when she was exposed in the close circle of her family and clan as a possible adulteress, a pregnant teenager betrothed to an old man, with nothing to defend herself and her honor but the words of an angel, that she alone saw.
Yet, while the world was looking the other way, making much of the latest royal scandals and divine pronouncements of distant emperors, this young girl went about the business of growing up, serving her aged parents, later only her old mother, until she came of marriageable age, and a different type of history, hidden from the world but hallowed before the ages, began to unfold in the closet of the heart.
Without ever knowing it, of an obscure people that the only God had chosen for her humanity as well as His, she became the last and most faithful among them, without learning having surpassed by her silent surrender to the Divine philanthropy all their most sacrosanct notables, as well as their prophets, priests and kings. Hidden from her by her humility, from the world by its pomp, she was crowned Queen.
The last true Hebrew, and the first hearer of the Good News, she beckons both to her ancestral people, the children of Israel, and to the race of those begotten of her by the Spirit of her Divine Son, the Christians, inviting them and us to the feast prepared before all worlds, to that banquet for which she was born, and for which we too, through her, are both born and made welcome, all first-borns.
The world has missed her birth, her life, her falling asleep, her leave-taking, just as it missed the man-coming of her Divine Son, His crowning with thorns, His enthronement on the Cross, His hell-harrowing rest, His abundant rising from the tomb, and His man-taking into the Divine Nature. But we need not follow in its wake. Our Lady Theotokos, Mary of Nazareth, the unwedded Bride, is in our eyes.
NOTE
With a few minor alterations to the text, and presented in verse format, this essay has also been published here in my poetry blog, Gift of Tears.
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