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Fourth Week of Advent - Wednesday
December 22, 2004
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
Luke 1: 46
Magnificat
The opening lines of Mary's beautiful Magnificat express as succinctly as any the essence of faith. In Mary's case, the words express the pure and simple faith that filled her entire life, because she was given the grace to be free of original sin and completely open to God. For the rest of us, it is not so simple.
Faith does not profess just that God is, but that God is everything. God is not a being alongside other beings, but the ground of all being, the creator without whom nothing is. Everything in creation, including man, is completely dependent on God. Faith acknowledges the divine truth of the greatness of God and the smallness of everything else. But if this is faith, most of us do not have much of it.
If we stay on this earth long enough, life will teach us how small we are. Most of us come of age thinking we are the center of the universe. We set out filled with dreams and aspirations. We think we can do anything we want. But over time we see that some of our goals are not attainable, and those within our reach are not worth all that much. We begin to see that we are fragile and finite. We see that unless we can cling to something far greater than ourselves, we will slowly dissolve into nothingness.
Faith is a lifelong journey of deepening understanding of the greatness of God and the lowliness of ourselves. In earthly life faith always takes the form of repentance, of turning back again and again from the illusion of our self-sufficiency to the truth of our utter dependence on God. Faith keeps telling us to let go, to let God be God, the Lord of our life, so that we can say with Mary, "The Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name."
The highest act of man is worship, and it is also the hardest. To worship we must be God-centered, something that earthly man will always resist. This resistance is man's original sin, and it is in all of us. But we are slowly being released from its bondage, and we can hope for the day when we will experience the joyful freedom of our salvation, where we will forever praise the greatness of our God. May it be soon.
O Antiphon
Come,
King of all nations,
Source of your Church's unity and faith,
Save all mankind, your own creation.
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