The most incredible thing about miracles, according to GK Chesterton, is that they happen.
And if we are reminded of the miracle of our mere existence at any particular points throughout the year, those are during the seasons of Advent and Lent.
Both are the manifestations of God’s dramatic interruption of the human experience, of the ways of men who regard themselves as inhabitants of a universe that is only ever accidental and material in its nature.
We know however, that God has given to us a life of two realms, the spiritual and the physical. And that to see ourselves as residing within both is to be reminded that it is from Him we come at birth and to Him we go at death.
In Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, divinity was where it was least expected to have been found.
Amidst a world that had known cruelty and violence all too well, the most powerful of all made Himself the most helpless of all.
In J.R.R Tolkien’s poem Noel, there is the reminder that Mary’s response to the Annunciation is one wherein she rejoices. To rejoice is the appropriate response to any miracle.
Glad is the world and fair this night
With stars about its head,
And the hall is filled with laughter and light,
And fires are burning red.
The bells of Paradise now ring
With bells of Christendom,
And Gloria, Gloria we will sing
That God on earth is come.
Our Lady’s response is that seen only by those who open their hearts to the Lord, one of understanding and of peace.
When God asks of us something which requires change and sacrifice, we must not respond with mourning for that which we have to lose.
To do that would to be to imitate the hypothetical jaded magus in TS Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi.
In that poem, one of the three Magi laments the loss of his world of prestige amid superstition and paganism as he ponders his mortality from the position of his elderly years.
Were we led all that way
For Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen Birth and Death,
But had thought they were different, this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms.
But no longer at ease here in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching to their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The miraculous is always romantic. Always transcendent. And yet…always a matter of fact.
For miracles to happen, to be seen, we must always say yes to seeing God’s ways rather than ours.
If we are reminded of any one thing at Christmas time it is that miracles do happen and do so out of God’s love being deep enough for Him to interrupt the dirge of everyday human life.
Say yes to the Lord and say yes to the miraculous.
Wonders are never lacking, but our wonder too often is.
If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask whatever you will, and it shall be done unto you.