One of my favorite books about the Blessed Virgin Mary is A Woman Wrapped in Silence by John Lynch. A narrative poem of Mary’s life, this spiritual classic captures the humility, beauty, and contemplative nature of the Mother of God.
It is impossible for us to comprehend the overwhelming divine immediacy of bearing, birthing, and daily living with Jesus Christ, every experience, moment, conversation, and thought containing universal and infinite significance.
Perfect Advent figure
Like any good poem, this book both illuminates and veils the mystery of the subject.
As we live these beautiful days of Advent, the Scripture readings and the liturgy present Mary to us in all of her spiritual power and meaning.
The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the lectionary proclamation of the Infancy narratives all lead us to the Virgin. She is the perfect Advent figure for us, as we await the coming of the Lord and seek for Him to be born anew in our hearts and lives.
The Savior of the world was conceived and grew in the womb of the Blessed Mother, in a secret, hidden place of holiness, silence, and prayer.
Imagine her thoughts and the subject of her prayerful meditations in those sacred nine months, as God Himself had quietly and unobtrusively entered into His own creation.
The saints teach us that the Blessed Virgin Mary is like a new Garden of Eden, where the new Adam is conceived in a holy place of virginal innocence.
Just as God sought a sacred portal by which His Son could enter into His own creation, and thus sent Gabriel to Nazareth, so too today, the Lord still is searching out hearts through which He can live, move, and act in this world, to continue the mission of salvation.
Our entire spiritual life of receiving the sacraments with frequency and devotion, wrapping ourselves in a life of prayer, immersing our hearts in the love story of the Bible, practicing virtue, and loving our neighbor is our humble way of letting God enter in and reign in our souls.
Like Mary, we seek to give our entire “YES” to the will of the Father and so become “mothers to Jesus Christ,” as St. Augustine puts it.
Seeking to live within us
St. Teresa of Avila reminds us that the Lord seeks to live within us and to reign on the throne of our hearts.
For this divine advent to occur within me, how much interior clutter, superficial activity, raucous noise, and destructive sinfulness needs to be cleaned out of my life!
Advent is an opportune moment to seek the Lord anew, to refresh my prayer life, to confess my sins, to quiet the loud voice of my false, demanding self, and to be emptied out, so the Lord will find the throne room of my heart swept clean, radiant with light and quietly peaceful.
This spiritual house cleaning requires silence. As the name of the book mentioned suggests, silence was both the sacred response of Mary to the all-encompassing presence of God in her life and the needed environment in which the Lord of Life grew in wisdom, knowledge, and stature throughout His childhood and adolescence.
As Cardinal Sarah reflects so wisely in his book, The Power of Silence, both interior and exterior silence is needed in order for us to hear God’s voice in our lives and respond with faith and love.
Important and needed words in a culture whose ephemeral noise, constant activity, loud anger, and spiritually bankrupt values fuel a selfish din, in which the gentle yet urgent voice of the Lord can barely be heard.
When he visited Nazareth in 1964, St. Paul VI offered this reflection, “First, we learn from (Nazareth’s) silence.
If only once again we could appreciate its great value. We need this wonderful state of mind, beset as we are by the cacophony of strident protests and conflicting claims so characteristic of these turbulent times.
The silence of Nazareth should teach us how to meditate in peace and quiet, to reflect on the deeply spiritual, and to be open to the voice of God’s inner wisdom and the counsel of his true teachers.
Nazareth can teach us the value of study and preparation, of meditation, of a well-ordered personal spiritual life, and of silent prayer that is only known to God.”
In this busy and noisy life, especially in these days leading up to Christmas, take time for prayer and silence, study and quiet, the service of the poor and the sick, meditation and reflection on the Scriptures.
Let the Lord reign on the throne of your heart in beauty, light, and peace.