During this Season, between Christmas and Epiphany, we reflect on the celebration of Jesus's birth into our world. Let us consider, What does it mean to be a favored one, and that God is with US?

The angel tells Mary not to be afraid, for she has found favor with God. Mary, a young unmarried girl was chosen by God to bear a child who was to be Emmanuel. God is with us. God’s son – with US? How is it that we are also chosen as favored, that God is with us?

 

One day when I was getting a massage, Paul, the massage therapist, and I were talking about God. The question came up: Why does God choose some people to be close followers while leaving others faith-less? While neither Paul nor I claimed to really know what’s in God’s mind, Paul said, “I think maybe God looks down from heaven and sees into people’s hearts. God says, ‘Yes! I can work with that one. This one is too busy to pay attention to me. That one has an open heart!’”

How does one have an empty enough heart so as to receive God within? –unlike Mary, but within our spiritual being? British author Caryll Houselander uses the symbols of the reed, the chalice, and the bird’s nest to convey Mary’s emptiness. Each requires some preparation for its useful emptiness.

The reed that grows by the river needs to be cut, hollowed, and pierced to utter a shepherd’s song. Material must be gathered and hewn from a rock, then shaped into a useful cup. Twigs and down are brought from a distance by a mother bird to prepare a soothing nest for her eggs. Each of the symbols has a singular purpose: to experience a transformation into something with emptiness, fit for receiving. 

Let us ask: During this Christmas Season (Advent through the Epiphany of the Lord) how might I meet Jesus whom we celebrated Christmas morning -- Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace? How might I prepare my heart for Jesus to dwell within?

I share a greeting sent to us this Christmas: We send many good wishes your way, even while praying that God’s mercy and goodness will guide all of us in the new year—

“Nothing will be impossible with God.” So the angel said to Mary, in the Bible, long ago.

You and I may have a hard time believing that. Mary did, as well. “How can this be?” she protested to the angelic messenger.

You see, it’s not hard to believe that God can do impossible things … somewhere, at some other time and place. But to believe that God can do wonderful things through us? That is much harder for many of us to believe.

Which is why I am drawn to Sandro Botticelli’s “Cestello Annunciation,” shown here. Unlike many paintings of the annunciation, which show Mary with her head bowed, hands meekly crossed upon her chest, Botticelli depicts her initial shock, shrinking away from the angel, hands held up in a vain attempt to deflect his message: “You – yes, you – are the favored one, selected by God to bring God’s love into the world.” Like many of us, she had a hard time believing that.

As poet Nikki Grimes points out, “… Gabriel / called her favored twice / lest anyone forget.” Then Grimes goes on to ask, “What made Mary favored / in the first place?” We do not know. But Grimes offers a provocative guess:

Was it perhaps that she was ready

to bear the impossible

to carry the Christ inside her

no matter the cost?

And are we ready to do the same?

If so, by God’s grace

we each wear this soul’s tattoo:

Favored one.

And we get to carry

the Christmas gift

of the Lord’s Light

wherever there is sunrise.*

*Nikki Grimes, “Favored One,” in Glory in the Margins: Sunday Poems (Paraclete Press, 2021), pp. 153-154.

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