Two summers ago, I had the opportunity to hike some of the beautiful hills and dales of the Welsh countryside. Far from cities, towns, and villages, I was in the wilds, traipsing along ancient paths that led me through woods, fields, and along high peaks. I recall one particular moment when, walking through an otherwise unremarkable field, I came across a solitary and very colorful flower. It gave me a brief moment of simple joy, perhaps brought on by the peace and quiet and the surprise of such color amongst the green background. C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, wrote a book with the title, ‘Surprised by Joy’. In this autobiographical work Lewis describes his life, from his childhood years in Ireland, to his atheist years at Oxford University, where he first began to desire more than the material world could ever offer to him. His joy would come, not in a sudden moment but, as he describes, with his long path of conversion to Christianity. The joy was a surprise since the journey had led him by way of, doubt, discovery, intellectual and personal challenges, to his eventual surrender to God.
Joy and happiness, sometimes so fleeting yet so deeply entrenched in our hearts as goals in our lives. In our Gospel we look in and see the joy shared by Mary, Elizabeth, and John the Baptist. Elizabeth filled with the Holy Spirit would recognize who Mary now was; the mother of the promised messiah. And because of Mary’s surrender to the will of God, she would be called blessed and blessed would be the fruit of her womb, Jesus.
Mary’s blessing, her joy, was her surrender, her fiat, “I am the handmaid of the Lord; I will do the will of God.” You and I are similarly blessed when we do the will of God in our lives. Nowadays it rains on the just and the unjust, but we heard in today’s responsorial psalm the voice of those who were chosen by God yet were now lamenting because they were threatened with destruction and exile for failure to obey the law of the Sinai covenant. The old law demanded blood sacrifice for the atonement of sin, but in Christ that demand for blood sacrifice was met once and for all. Today, rather than blood sacrifice, we are to be repentant of sin and walk in holiness and faith, and a deepening desire to seek, know, and do the will of God. As we read in the letter to the Hebrews, you and I, and all people are to do the will of God.
On hearing that, some, no doubt, are immediately reactive since this can appear to be an imposition on my life and how I want to life it. The church with its rules and requirements, with its smells and bells, with its do’s and its don’ts. I don't need the church’s rules because I am free – right? Yes, we are free and God will not trespass on that freedom. But freedom does not mean I can do anything I want, whenever I want to do it. It is clear that exercising freedom in certain ways only leads to mental and spiritual enslavement, and the loss of real joy, which is replaced by a fake, or plastic, pretend joy. This is the power of sin. The lure of something that ultimately entraps and fails to deliver what it deceptively appears to promise. This is a failure in the wise use of freedom, for freedom has a real purpose and a proper use. The Catechism teaches that freedom, ‘attains its perfection when it is directed toward God, the ultimate good’ (CCC 1733).
Mary shows us how to live in true freedom. We, like our heavenly mother, are blessed when we do the will of God and welcome the Holy Spirit. To do the will of God comes moment by moment, but, as C.S. Lewis teaches us, it is also a life journey. Lewis’s atheism was pierced through by the surprise of joy found in the truth of the Christian faith. There is joy to be found in the surrender to God’s will. Sometimes, that joy is to remind us that we are on the right path. Sometimes that joy is found in the strangest places, even in a forgotten field in the Welsh countryside. But always that joy comes with the growing realization that Jesus has you in his infinite and eternal grasp of love. This is the truth that repels all other falsehoods. The truth that illuminates all things. The light that comes to you and me, and to all the world, as a little baby.
Deacon Peter Bujwid, Saint Agnes
Arlington, MA.
Sunday 22nd December 2024
