Have you ever read a book that left you uninspired, only to pick it up some time later and find that it, or you, had totally changed?
This has happened to me a few times. The first time I read Michael O’Brien’s Strangers and Sojourners … honestly I was a little bored. I finished it, feeling it would be somehow wrong to leave it unread, but I only got through it so I could say I’d read all O’Brien’s fiction.
I picked up the book again more than 15 years later and it was a completely different situation. The story was lovely and inspiring, and I was drawn in by the characters and their lives.
What had happened in those years to make such a difference? I guess life happened. I might have had one small child the first time around. I was still young and not yet grown into motherhood, and I was unaware of a lot of the sad realities of life.
It happened again recently. Scott bought me Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God a year or so ago. It’s considered a spiritual classic, made up of meditations on Our Lady. I started reading it before bed and found myself … falling asleep. With only a chapter or two perused, it made its way onto the shelf.
Last week, I saw a post that recommended the book as good Advent reading. I pulled it from the shelf and gave it a try during morning prayer.
Maybe I’ve changed over the year that’s passed, maybe daytime is better than nighttime, or, more likely, reading the book as prayer instead of information made the difference.
The first chapter is called Emptiness. The idea is that to fully open ourselves to receive and share Christ, we must have emptiness. Not the emptiness that overwhelms so many these days, meaningless wandering with no destination.
It’s an emptiness that’s full of purpose and beauty. Mary’s virginity is considered an emptiness, a welcoming space within her that made the coming of Christ possible. She was open, and waiting for life to fill that virginal emptiness.
Houselander gives a few examples of empty vessels that are full of life-giving purpose and can be used to meditate on Our Lady’s great “Fiat,” thy will be done.
Mary is called a reed, with her only destiny being taking the breath of God the Piper and singing his song. To be made into a whistle, the reed must be cut and hollowed out with a sharp knife. Everything that is unnecessary must be removed. It must be shaped and pierced, to fit to the Piper’s fingers. “It is the narrowest emptiness in the world, but the little reed utters infinite music,” Houselander writes.
Mary is called a cup, a flower-like chalice, which holds and then pours forth the purest water of humanity. It mixes with the wine, “the crimson blood of love,” and becomes the vessel of sacrifice. To become a chalice, the gold is first discovered and dug out of the mud or chiselled out of hard rock. It must be beaten into beauty.
Lastly, Mary is called the nest, hidden in safety, but still vulnerable to predators. She is warm, and she uses her breast to shape the nest to fit the humanity of the divine. The mother bird must travel far to gather her supplies; she must be swift and brave. Her courage comes from the love she gives and is given.
The meditation asks us how God would use us, individually. Would he use us as a pipe, to sing his word and his praises? Does he ask us to show the suffering yet beautiful Christ to the world? Or will he call upon us to bring warmth, courage, and life, to foster the “little unfledged bird in the human heart”?
Advent, like Lent in some ways, is meant to be a time of change. We are called to become vessels for the Christ Child. But our response cannot be a simple word of agreement. To empty ourselves in fullness we must advance in the actual act of emptying.
There is no doubt that we are full. But of what? With what do we fill our minds, hearts, bodies, and time? Emptying can be a painful choice; it can potentially disrupt our entire lives. But that warm, suffering, song of emptiness that remains will be shaped to fit Christ, as he comes to us.
“Why did God make you?” is the question. The answer is, “To know, love and serve him in this world, that I might be happy with him in the next.”
There is no fullness in the knowing, the loving, and the serving of God without emptiness.
As the manger was hollowed to hold Mary’s infant Son, let this Advent be a time of intentionally abandoning those things that leave no space for the Christ Child.
