O God, Master of this passing world, hear the humble voices of your children.
The sea of Galilee obeyed your order and returned to its former quietude; You are still the Master of land and sea.

We live in the shadow of danger over which we have no control; the Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, can awake from its seeming lethargy, overstep its conventional boundaries, invade our land and spread chaos and disaster.

During this hurricane season we turn to You, O loving Father. Spare us from past tragedies whose memories are still so vivid and whose wounds seem to refuse to heal with passing time.

O Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea, Our Beloved Mother, we ask you to plead with your Son in our behalf, so that spared from the calamities common to this area and animated with a true spirit of gratitude, we will walk in the footsteps of your Divine Son to reach the heavenly Jerusalem where a stormless eternity awaits us.
Amen.

Now that I am an adult, it is more often my interior life that gets tied up in knots. So I was intrigued when I ran across a name for Mary the Mother of Jesus that I had never heard before: Mary Undoer of Knots, or Mary Untier of Knots.

According to Wikipedia:

The concept of Mary untying knots is derived from St. Irenaeus of Lyons’ book Adversus haereses (Against Heresies). In Book III, Chapter 22, he explains that “… the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Untier_of_Knots

Eve said no to God. Mary said yes.

The painting is by Johann George Melchior Schmidtner, from around 1700. It shows Mary, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose dove hovers above her, undoing knots — big ones and small ones — in a long cord, aided by angels who hold either end of the cord. Although the painting itself is not a masterpiece, the idea is appealing, especially because of all that is knotted or tangled in human life. This includes sin, of course, but is not limited to sin.

As I tell Sisters Annette and Elizabeth about the painting, Sister Elizabeth stops me. “If the angels are holding both ends of the cord, how does she untie the knots?”

“Good point,” I say.

My first thought is that the artist was not much acquainted with knots. But when I look more closely, I see that the angels are not holding tightly to the cord. I also realize that our human tangles sometimes do get mysteriously untied, even though we ourselves are, figuratively speaking, holding tightly to the ends. (Or perhaps God has gently pried them from our fists.)

So I pray:

O God, who inspired your servant Mary to say yes,
may my heart also be an unreserved yes
at every moment of every day.
May I not withhold from you
even the dark mazes of my mind
or the tangled complexities of my heart.
When I get lost in a web of fears,
pull me out again into the wide spaces of your peace.

Untie the knots and confusion that immobilize me
when I try to sort out the jumble of my motives,
instead of entrusting the unraveling to you.

Preserve me from snarled reasonings
that snag on wrongdoing,
that twist into a mode of violent righteousness,
that keep me from the simple truth of loving you
and my neighbor
and the stranger at my gate.

Mary, undoer of knots, pray for us.

[The following was presented as a talk at Saint Augustine Parish in Gainesville, Florida.  For an abbreviated version, see "Waiting in the Cenacle."]

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After the Ascension and before Pentecost, there is another mystery worthy of honor, but which most of us just pass right over on our way to Pentecost. The Sisters of the Cenacle, however, don’t let it go unnoticed, because it is called the Mystery of the Cenacle and is celebrated as the Feast of Our Lady of the Cenacle. But it is not a mystery just for the Cenacle Sisters. It is a mystery important for the whole Church, because it prepares for the birth of the Church at Pentecost. The feast day of Our Lady of the Cenacle — for Mary was there — is the Saturday after Ascension Thursday.

We read in the book of Acts:

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away; and when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.  (Acts 1:12-14 RSV)

The word Cenacle comes from the Latin word coenaculum, which means the supper room (or in this case the upper room).  Now tradition tells us that this cenacle was the same place where Jesus celebrated the last supper with his apostles and the same place where his friends and family were gathered when the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them at Pentecost.

But what about this in-between feast? What were Mary and the friends of Jesus doing in the Upper Room – in the Cenacle – after Jesus had ascended into heaven? Well, we are told that they were praying.

“Is that all?” we ask.

Most of the other New Testament mysteries are mysteries of presence and of the breaking forth of something obviously new into the world. That is certainly true about the Last Supper and Pentecost. But the mystery of the little group gathered in the Upper Room is, first, an in-between mystery, sandwiched in between more spectacular ones of which it is a part. And secondly it is a mystery of absence: Jesus has departed from them. He has been taken into heaven. And third, it is a mystery where nothing much seems to be happening. What were Jesus’ friends and family doing in the Cenacle? Why were they gathered there?

As yet they had no ministry, strictly speaking. It is possible that Peter went out to fish each day and that others went out to work or carried out tasks in the Cenacle itself. After all, the necessities of life didn’t stop, no matter how timid and uncertain the group was feeling after Jesus had left them. But as far as we know, helping with the work was not the purpose of their being together. They may have sat around telling stories about Jesus, remembering.  But the only thing we know for sure is that they were praying — a useless activity in the pragmatic eyes of the world.

Some of you know that for about three years I have been carrying on an e-mail correspondence with an ex-christian — a former preacher who is now preaching fervently against faith.  One of his latest missives claims that there is no evidence for anything spiritual at all.  And as for prayer, he says, “Believers may talk with their god all they want, but he never responds to them.  And if they say he does, that constitutes a form of mental illness.”

And answered prayer is just an illusion, he writes.  (He has no concept of prayer as relationship or communion, just as asking for things — and not getting them.)  Now most of his rants against religion I ignore, but occasionally I do feel I have to respond.  So I wrote back,

If you write off all communication with God as mental illness, you are doing that by faith alone [i.e., his own materialistic faith]. There is absolutely no evidence that the majority of religious people are mentally ill.  Yes, some are, as are some non-religious people. 

But we Christians can also buy into the idea that prayer is a wasteful way to spend time.  It’s seems better to be accomplishing something.  The sense of absence and lack of purposeful activity in the Upper Room after the Ascension may be one reason this time when Jesus’ friends and family are gathered in prayer is so hard to deal with as an event – or a non-event – and why it seems easier to skip over this mystery and move on to Pentecost.

But I propose to you that something absolutely essential for the church and the world was happening there in the Upper Room. Yes, this is an in-between time: in between the great mysteries of Cross/Resurrection/Ascension and Pentecost. But all gestation periods are in-between times.

In the New Testament we have three times when the Body of Christ is prepared and given.  The first, of course, is the Annunciation and Mary’s time of waiting leading up to the birth of Jesus.

The second takes us to the Cenacle for the Last Supper, followed by the whole of the Paschal mystery of dying and rising — and then the mystery continued and lived after the Resurrection when the followers of Jesus met for what they called the “breaking of the bread” and what we call Eucharist.

The third is this period of waiting between the Ascension and Pentecost; and once again, we will see that, even in the post-Ascension absence, it is the Body of Christ that we are talking about here — even when Jesus seems to be absent to those who love him…

…Because what we have in the first chapter of Acts is a new Annunciation.

Let’s go back for a moment to the Annunciation scene in the first chapter of Luke. It took me a while to notice the similarities between Gabriel’s proclamation to Mary and the words of Jesus to his disciples just before the Ascension. Remember that the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts were both written by Luke. Luke is a careful writer, so it is doubtful that the resemblance is accidental.

In Luke 1, in response to Mary’s question, the angel says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you…”

In Acts 1, right before the Ascension, in response to the questioning of the apostles, Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…”

In both events we hear that the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and there will be an experience of power.  This verbal resemblance is important, because it indicates that what is happening is similar in both cases.

But there is a difference.

One of the major distinctions between the two annunciations is this: at the time of the first Annunciation, the word was spoken to one person, Mary; but the promise on the day of Ascension is made, not to one person, but to the gathered apostles of Jesus. This time, the Spirit is promised to the community. In both events, the power of the Holy Spirit will bring about an embodying, an enfleshing: in the first case, the conception of the infant Jesus; in the second case, the conception of the infant church, the mystical Body of Christ.

Since this is so, the womb is to be prepared this time, not in the body of Mary, but in the body of the community. Gathered there, supporting each other, forgiving each other — and they did have some forgiving to do, didn’t they, for the miserable and cowardly way most of them had acted after Jesus was arrested — assembled in the Cenacle, a hollowing-out is taking place, an emptying, a making room or preparing a womb for the Spirit of Jesus. In fact, there are paintings of Pentecost in which Mary, gathered with the others and representing the church and Mother of the Church, is depicted as pregnant.

The presence of Mary the Mother of Jesus is indispensable to this little community, for Mary is the only person in the world who already knows what it is like to be emptied in such a way as to receive the mystery of Christ within herself.

So is this a time when nothing is happening?

The group gathered in the Upper Room needs this time of prayer where nothing seems to be taking place. The friends and family of Jesus no longer have his physical presence, and what they are left with, for better or for worse, is each other. They must receive the mystery of Christ into themselves; they must be prepared to incarnate the presence of Christ for each other and for the world. Because of this wondrous process, Paul can later say:

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27).

It would seem that not even Pentecost can happen without this strange mystery of waiting and being with and for each other in the Upper Room.  It is only when the presence of Christ is growing (you notice that I do not say “finished”) and nurtured in this little community that they can be entrusted with ministry, because only then can they be the presence of Christ in the world.

Isn’t our own call similar to theirs? These first Christians needed each other.  They couldn’t go it alone as Christians, and neither can we.  Like them, when we pray, we wait — if not in an actual Cenacle, in the Cenacle of our hearts — and often we feel as if little or nothing is being accomplished. However, along with the whole communion of saints, those still living (including the motley crew of sinners that we are here tonight) and those who have gone before us, we wait and pray, allowing God to pour out love on us (whether or not we are even aware of it) and to begin transforming us into the loving presence of Christ for each other and for the whole world.

When they had entered [Jerusalem], they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James.
All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
(Acts 1:13-14 RSV)

What were Mary and the friends of Jesus doing in the Upper Room – in the Cenacle – after Jesus had ascended into heaven? We are told that they were praying.

“Is that all?” we ask.

Most of the other New Testament mysteries are mysteries of presence and of the breaking forth of something obviously new into the world. But here nothing much seems to be happening. Perhaps this is one reason the time in the Upper Room is so hard to deal with as an event – or a non-event – and why it seems easier to skip over this mystery and move on to Pentecost.

But I propose to you that something absolutely essential for the church and the world was happening there in the Upper Room. Yes, this is an in-between time: in between the great mysteries of Cross/Resurrection/Ascension and Pentecost. But all gestation periods are in-between times.

A new Annunciation

Let’s go back for a moment to the Annunciation scene in the first chapter of Luke. It took me a while to notice the similarities between Gabriel’s proclamation to Mary and the words of Jesus to his disciples just before the Ascension. Remember that the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts were both written by Luke. Luke is a careful writer, so it is doubtful that the resemblance is accidental.

In Luke 1, in response to Mary’s question, the angel says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you…”

In Acts 1, in response to the questioning of the apostles, Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…”

This verbal resemblance is important, because it indicates that what is happening is similar in both cases.

But there is a difference.

One of the major distinctions between the two annunciations is this: at the time of the Annunciation, the word was spoken to one person, Mary; but the promise on the day of Ascension is made, not to one person, but to the assembled disciples of Jesus. This time, the Spirit is promised to the community. In both events, the power of the Holy Spirit will bring about an embodying, an enfleshing: in the first case, the conception of the infant Jesus; in the second case, the conception of the infant church, the mystical Body of Christ.

Since this is so, the womb is to be prepared this time, not in the body of Mary, but in the body of the community. Gathered there, supporting each other, forgiving each other, a hollowing-out is taking place, an emptying, a making room or preparing a womb for the Spirit of Jesus. (Notice the two portrayals of Pentecost shown in this post, from the 15th and 14th centuries, in both of which Mary, representing the church, is depicted as pregnant.)

The presence of Mary the Mother of Jesus is indispensable to this little community, for Mary is the only person in the world who already knows what it is like to be emptied in such a way as to receive the mystery of Christ within herself.

A time when nothing is happening.

The group gathered in the Upper Room needs this time of prayer where nothing seems to be taking place. The friends and family of Jesus no longer have his physical presence, and what they are left with, for better or for worse, is each other. They must receive the mystery of Christ into themselves; they must be prepared to incarnate the presence of Christ for each other and for the world. Because of this wondrous process, Paul can later say:

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27).

Isn’t this our own call when we pray? We wait — if not in an actual Cenacle, in the Cenacle of our hearts — and often we feel as if little or nothing is being accomplished. However, along with the whole communion of saints, those still living and those who have gone before us, we wait and pray, allowing God to pour out love on us (whether or not we are aware of it) and to begin transforming us into the loving presence of Christ for each other and for the whole world.

_____

Pentecost scenes: 1. from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry; 2. from l’Eglise de Palau de Cerdagne

Lord Jesus, I unite myself to your perpetual, unceasing, universal sacrifice. I offer myself to you every day of my life and every moment of every day, according to your most holy and adorable will.
You have been the victim of my salvation, I wish to be the victim of your love.
Accept my desire, take my offering, graciously hear my prayer: let me live by love, let me die of love, and let my last heartbeat be an act of the most perfect love.
- Saint Therese Couderc

The following reflection on St Therese Couderc’s “Act of Oblation” is by Sister Elizabeth Hillmann.

I unite myself – to this sacrifice…
What is this sacrifice?
Humanity, not God, is responsible for the crucifixion. Crucifixion was an evil deed, a form of torture.

As Augustine says, it is not the physical suffering of Jesus that we love. It is the reality that he overcomes evil by love. “Having loved his own…he loved them to the end” (John 13:1). It is the returning of love for evil that overcomes the wickedness of all of us. And the Resurrection confirmed this. All is healed by the Resurrection of Jesus, which is central to the Christian. If Christ be not risen from the dead, Paul says, we are of all people the most foolish (1 Corinthians 15).

Paul also writes these mysterious and yet wonderful words:

“The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18 ).

So what in the world do we mean when we say, I unite myself to the sacrifice of Jesus?
I unite myself to the only real power: the power of love. Love is so easy to ignore, seemingly fragile, and indeed is fragile: yet in this fragile, disarmed self is the true power and the true glory of the world.

Some questions:
- Does uniting myself with this sacrifice mean I am willing to go on loving and trying to be loving and pure of heart even if it looks totally unimportant in the great events of world history? Do I realize that the simplest acts of loving and kindness are greater that all the magnificent works of construction, of art, of music, of science, of bombs?

- Does it mean I am willing to live in the mystery of human existence with trust in God my only support?

- Does it mean that I am willing to accept what seems to be my total unimportance in the greater scheme of things, just another of the 6 billion people around?
(This does not mean giving up excellence; it does mean giving up one-upmanship. In the pursuit of excellence, we seek to do our own best, not to win over someone else.)

- Does it mean that I can live without anxiety in the midst of the demands of life?

- Could it also mean that I live more aware that I am intimately connected to other humans and am willing to feel my own connection to those who suffer? That whatever they suffer, I stand with them as Mary stood at the foot of the cross?

Does it mean standing with the homeless, the persecuted people of Darfur , the innocent victims of war – and also the people who make war and persecute others, the peaceful and the enraged as well?

Mary was there standing with Jesus but standing in the midst of the people who did the crime of killing Him. We are the Body of Christ. We have an intimate connection to the suffering of others – as if it were our own. “By what boundless mercy, my Savior, have you allowed me to become a member of your body?” asks St. Symeon.*

I am reminded of the two saints writing to each other. One said she had a sore toe. The other wrote back that her toe hurt him. Are we to feel the pain and suffering of others as our own because we are all one body?

Other possibilities:

- Does it mean forgiving from the cross, as Jesus did? As Augustine reminds us, “If, therefore you have learned to pray for your enemy, you are walking in the way of the Lord” (Sermon on I John 1:9).

- Does it mean that I have faith that God is with me when I am suffering, whatever that suffering might be?

- Is this what it means to unite oneself to the sacrifice of Christ: to give witness to God’s great love by our own forgiveness, our own compassion, our own kindness, our own simple care of another’s needs?

- Does it mean that I have no other desire except to do the will of God?
This is what St. Therese asks of God in her “Act of Oblation” – to live by love, to die of love. What a mysterious and wonderful gift – to live by love night and day. St Ignatius says to ask for what we want. (You know: like what do you want for Christmas.) Why not beg for this gift, to live by love, to die of love? This is greater than a want. It is the need of our hearts. Our hearts are restless till they rest in God.

What more could we ask for?
__________
* The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul’s Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives, trans. John Anthony McGuckin.

Of course, the symbolism of the dream didn’t escape me even then. Where was the Holy? How often do we find ourselves searching for the holy without seeming to find it? How often do we fail to see that the holy — as well as the Holy One — has been right there all along, around us and in us? The reign of God is very near — even “within you,” as Luke shows Jesus saying.

These days, when I pray the Hail Mary, I am aware, if only in a confused, foggy way, of the importance and the possibility of being able to recognize the holy. With the greeting, “Hail, Mary, full of grace,” I find myself somehow joining with the angel Gabriel — the first to speak these words — as he sees and welcomes the holy in an obscure town called Nazareth. It is mysteriously essential for me to be able to distinguish, with God’s angelic messenger, the locus of grace and to be led in this way to Jesus.

But this is not all. Gabriel’s brief salutation also calls me to be aware of the holy in my own life. For after all, each of us is also the locus of the holy, and surprisingly enough the holy dwells in situations and in people where we would least expect it — and sometimes where we least desire to acknowledge it. Therefore we greet the holy not only in Nazareth but right here, and with Gabriel we bow reverently as we welcome Jesus, the Holy One of God, into our world.

‘Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ (Exodus 3:5b)

The angel said to [Mary],
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)

In the Eastern Church, Mary the mother of Jesus is honored by the Greek word Theotokos, which means “God-bearer.” The word comes down to us in large part through the Council of Ephesus (held in the year 431), which had been struggling with the theology of Nestorius.

Nestorius was the devout, though doctrinally challenged, patriarch of Constantinople. He did not believe in the total union of the divine and human natures of Christ and insisted that Mary was the mother only of the human nature of Jesus. He is reported to have said, “I can never allow that a child of three months old was God.”

In response, the Council emphasized that there could be no division in Christ, and that Mary was the mother of Emmanuel (which means “God with us”). By using the term Theotokos, they were pointing out that the child which Mary had borne in her womb was indeed God. The following wonderful but mind-boggling thought comes from a letter Cyril of Alexandria wrote to Nestorius:

For although visible and a child in swaddling clothes, and even in the bosom of his Virgin Mother, he filled all creation as God, and was a fellow-ruler with him who begat him, for the Godhead is without quantity and dimension, and cannot have limits.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/ephesus.html

What does all this ancient history have to do with us?
Besides the doctrinal issue, there is an important sense in which we are called to be God-bearers, too — though of course in a different way from that of Mary. Baptized into Christ, we dwell in him and carry the presence of God with us always, that same God who is “without quantity and dimension, and cannot have limits.” We are to be so totally turned toward God that our lives, radiating mercy and compassion, may bring forth Christ for a world desperately in need of hope.

As Meister Eckhart said, “The seed of God is in us… Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God” — assuming, of course, that we cooperate with the Spirit of God as Mary did.

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord;
let it be with me according to your word.”
(Luke 1:38)