It's a sunny September morning in Birmingham, Alabama, and I'm sitting at my desk amid signs of Advent. The weather outside hasn't yet progressed to Advent temperatures, but the interior landscape has taken on Advent colors.
On the floor in the living room is today's paper, with a front-page picture of Arafat and Rabin shaking hands. Scattered on my desk are minutes from a series of parish council meetings at which our little community tried to deal with the abrupt removal of our pastor. The coffee table is burdened with magazines and books about politics and faith, and on top of it all are mementos from my husband Jim's eight-day trip to Sarajevo, city of beauty and tragedy. Advent.
Several years ago my confessor told me to meditate on the Magnificat, especially the first line, which he translated, "My being magnifies the Lord...." MY being? My BEING? I've been mulling that one over (as instructed) and trying to understand how my being, full of faults and mistakes and misperceptions, can magnify the Lord. Mind you, not how I can praise God, but how what I am in myself magnifies God.
How can that be? How can Arafat and Rabin make peace? How can our little parish be community with all our strife and backbiting? How can beauty be present in Sarajevo? How can my being magnify the Lord?
James writes, "To listen to the word and not obey is like looking at your own features in a mirror, and then after a quick look, going off and immediately forgetting what you look like" (James 1:23-24). What I see and love when I read the gospel is that being deep within me who magnifies the Lord.
Amazing. It seems that the hard teachings of Jesus, the ones I struggle over and feel judged by, are a reflection of who I already am, in the deepest part of me. I have a hidden face that awaits my consent to be revealed. My consent, like Mary's "fiat," is to allow God's will to be done. God's will is the love that glows through the scriptures: the reflection of my true face. Augustine said, "Love God and do as you will," knowing that someone who really loves God will act according to those same gospel attitudes and thoughts.
The news that the gospel reflects my true face is disturbing to me, as the news of Jesus' presence in her life was to Mary. That presence disrupts and calls constantly, making the old ways of doing things impossible. It demands that I grow to be my deepest self. How can I look in that mirror and then remember who I am? How can I be true to a person I have not yet become?
I HAVE A DEEP faith that God works to bring good in our lives even through all the hardest times of struggle and injustice. Struggling to live faithfully during those painful times reveals our true faces, sometimes to our own surprise--just as fighting for their own people brought Arafat and Rabin to shake hands. For just a moment our deep selves are revealed. Though they may be covered over again, we do not totally forget them. For the past few weeks I've watched and prayed as a good man struggled to forgive unjust accusers and leave a community stronger than he found it. It was like watching a flower bloom into abrupt beauty. I've watched as a tiny and precarious community put aside concern for its own future to demand justice for him--and in the process united. In a similar way, Jim saw and felt a strong interfaith community growing and sustaining itself in Sarajevo, right under the guns trying to exterminate it.
Most amazing of all, once in a while I think how much my perspective has changed, and realize that in small ways God really has transformed my life so that I do resemble more closely that gospel-true face. It's a hard claim to make because I'm still so far away, but I think that some of the time I can actually remember a bit about who I really am, deep down.
Advent: the waiting and hoping time, when we see God's face in our own imperfect mirrors, and pray to see more clearly.
Shelley Douglass was a Sojourners contributing editor and was involved in nonviolent organizing in Birmingham, Alabama, when this article appeared.
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