Time to say yes

… many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God!  Not one heroic action is attributed to her, only trust itself.  Pure being and not doing…  Mary is the Great Yes that humanity forever needs for Christ to be born into the world…  In Mary we see that God must never be forced on us, and God never comes uninvited.

                               Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ  p. 127

 

If you want the Virgin will come walking down the street

pregnant

with Light and

sing

                     St John of the Cross

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most of us want a better world

 

it is the rare person who loves chaos and worships violence

very few of us really, if we thought about it

are ready to embrace hate and fear

 

(although there are those souls)

 

most of us want a world

where natural beauty abounds

 

we want that peaceable kingdom

where “the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together”

 

we want peace

and we want love

above all we want love

 

but we struggle

we struggle because we seem to have weird ideas about how to get there

something the pathway involves power

the use of power

even the abuse of power

 

and so they attempt to implement their vision for the world

through coercion, through force

but using that every popular “power over” approach

 

others think it has to do with accumulation and consumption

and so gathering wealth

and using resources

become the keys to happiness

 

but sadly those approaches don’t work

they do

not

work

 

Indeed those approaches have proven

Time and time and time again

to be counter productive

 

and those approaches are not inclusive

not everyone has the power, some do some don’t

not everyone has the wealth, some do some don’t

some are included

some are excluded

some are empowered

some are oppressed

 

and we end up with have’s and have not’s

and we end up with

hate and violence

anger and fear

 

There is only one way to the Kingdom

and that is “yes”

 

that yes that is more about accepting and recieiving

than striving

that yes that makes room for God to be present in us

as God was present in Mary

 

that yes that fills us

makes us pregnant with love

 

that yes that allows us to give birth to love

that empowers us to pass on

Sacred Presence

 

to all we meet

 

the way to the Kingdom is to

receive what God is doing (loving)

and to hand it on to others

 

it is time for us to say our “yes” to God

“a yes that cannot be undone

 A corporate yes that overrides our many noes” (Rohr, p. 128)

 

how on this day

how in the days to come

will we say yes?