A Time to Savour our Gifts

Feast of the Mother of God 2011

Most of the time the exchange of gifts at Christmas works very well. We open our gifts and immediately experience and express feelings of delight, gratitude. The gift is not just offered, it is also accepted. The generosity of the giver who took the trouble to search out the right gift for us is matched by our pleasure in receiving it.

But on occasion things do not work that way. The gift is offered, then opened, but really not accepted. The usual words of surprise and thanks might be on our lips but not in our hearts. The expression on our faces tells the story. This is not what we expected. Our forced smile covers up our disappointment, and we think to ourselves using words like: “I’ve already got two of these in my closet,” or “I bet you this is a re-gift,” or “I’ll give it to uncle Humphrey for his birthday.”

Once in a while we have this negative experience of receiving a gift that we do not really appreciate. Of course we make allowances for this and overcome our disappointment: “he did his best but had no way of knowing, ”; “his intention is what counts,” and so on. So Christmas continues to be a highly appreciated time together for us in spite of occasional moments of awkwardness. But if most of the gifts offered at Christmas were not really wanted, people would enter into this celebration with some reluctance, because it would be an occasion for formal politeness rather than for the creation of tighter and warmer family bonds. We want to give and receive gifts that are deeply appreciated.

In sum for gift exchange to really take place and we want it to, not only must the gift be offered from our heart, it must also be received within our heart.

All of this will help us understand the second reading of today’s Eucharist, from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. God offers us an inestimable gift when he sends his son into the world for our redemption. But unless we really want to receive that gift, the offer is in vain. That is why God gives us a second Gift, a quiet and invisible one, that of the Spirit sent into our hearts. Because of that second Gift we are able to recognize and accept God’s offer of becoming adopted sons and daughters within His family. This new status which God offers us is not just a legal formality, something we know as a cold, cerebral fact, but something which needs to reverberate in our hearts. It is the Spirit whose gift sets our hearts on fire with acceptance of the Son, enables us to have the felt experience of being sons and daughters of God, to address God not as a distant patriarchal figure but as “Abba”, a word which means father but which is used within the bosom of family in actually addressing, with confidence and affection, the one who is our father.

So God’s gift is not just sending his Son into the world, offering us salvation, but also sending His Spirit into the hearts of each one of us, making it possible for us to accept the gift of salvation, to treasure it, to delight in it, and to allow it to transform our lives.

As we begin our New Year we celebrate the motherhood of God. As we see from today’s gospel text, Mary did not just hear the words which told her about the Son which she brought into the world. She pondered over these words, treasured them in her heart, allowed them to deepen the relationship she had with her extraordinary child. Is this not what mothers normally do with their children? Motherhood is not just a biological process with nine months of gestation, birth, and a period of time where the offspring needs to be fed and cared for. It is also a psychic process in which the mother’s extraordinary closeness to her child helps her discern his or her unique gifts, to treasure them, to foster their development.

Physical gestation takes place over a period of nine months and then the child leaves the womb. Psychic gestation continues long after the child’s birth. The child continues to live within the mother’s heart, and she develops an intuitive understanding and appreciation of the child, which offers the child the support he or she needs to grow to full human maturity. And this continues until the mother departs from this world.

So for Mary to be the mother of God is not just a biological process of giving birth to Jesus but also the psychic process of carrying him in her heart during his entire life. She knew him through and through, yet he continued to be a mystery to her much as our own children are a mystery to us, to be savoured, treasured, but never totally comprehended. The mystery deepened as she and he lived their lives, came to a moment at the foot of the cross where all seemed to fall apart, but found unexpected joy and fulfilment when he rose from the dead.

The invitation is for us to be like Mary and to treasure the gift of God in our hearts, to ponder it, to reflect on it. And we can respond to this invitation because the Holy Spirit in our hearts gives us the power to do so. Another word for this treasuring and pondering is prayer. To pray is to deepen our relationship with God, to allow him to become for us not a distant patriarchal father but the father of a beloved family to which we belong and in which we feel very much at home.

May we remain at home within the family of God throughout 2011, and may that family Spirit profoundly transform our relationships, making of us agents of peace in every facet of our lives.