Author: Stephen Holmgren

I have been an Episcopal priest for thirty eight years, having served in parishes and in academia. My interests include art and theology, liturgy and spirituality, and I love to go sailing whenever I can.

An ‘Inside’ Passage: Jonathan Raban’s Voyage to Juneau

I find that authors who are effective at reading aloud their own writing offer an extra dimension of insight regarding their work. Jonathan Raban’s recording of A Passage to Juneau, is an example to which I like to return. Being a sailor myself, I find voyages, sailboat cruising, and basic navigation provide more compelling metaphors for how we think of our course through life than the often used one of journeying. Raban’s book about sailing his 35′ Swedish-built ketch from Seattle north to the capital of Alaska recounts so much more than a trip up the Inside Passage through the interior waters of British Columbia. His reflective narrative allows us to witness – through his eyes – how he faces the challenges associated with the death of his father, an English Vicar, as well as the coming apart of his marriage while he remains close to his young daughter.

Jonathan Raban in his boat

Raban includes as a literary companion, on what unfolds as an imaginatively-shared voyage, the technically gifted but personally flawed explorer, George Vancouver, through the latter’s ships logs and historical biography. Raban’s log of his passage in the Penelope is interspersed with perceptive observations about his family off in England and down in Seattle, while also sharing reflective thoughts regarding Vancouver’s own earlier exploration of the same waters. So there are three interwoven strands within the writer’s expressive narrative, Raban’s cruise, his interior journey through memories and toward an uncertain future, and a travel oriented book that shares his evocative impressions of the waters and terrain of Puget Sound and the Straight of Georgia that is mixed with those Vancouver.

The explorer and esteemed navigator, George Vancouver (1757-1798)

Having lived on Vashon Island while commuting to college on the Washington State ferries, I remain drawn to some of the same locations in Puget Sound that play an early role in the book. The immediacy of the author’s description of the area in and around Seattle’s Fishermen’s Terminal where he prepared for setting off, as well as of the beautiful San Juan Islands, provide a very good sense of what he was leaving behind on his travels, while also emotionally carrying aspects associated with those places with him as he ventured into less familiar waters.

A Hallberg-Rassy 35′ ketch much like Raban’s boat, Penelope

Raban was nothing like an enthusiastic newcomer to sailing when embarking upon his “Passage.” His other voyaging books, particularly his account of his circumnavigation of his native United Kingdom (Coasting), as well as his editorship of The Oxford Book of the Sea, attest to his deep knowledge of sailing and all things nautical. His attraction to such voyages is also reflected in his highly readable account of his water journey down the Mississippi (Old Glory), from St Paul to New Orleans, and was the fulfillment of a childhood fascination with the Great River and its history .

The Audible recording of a condensed version of Passage to Juneau nicely captures Raban’s resonant voice and British vocal style. Portions of his recording give a good sense of the author’s subtle humor, accentuated by his sharp eye for memorable detail. Imagining how Vancouver’s voice must have sounded to his shipmates, Raban reads passages from the explorer’s diary with a slightly exaggerated flat nasal intonation, imbuing the historical figure with a fuller sense for us of the 18th century navigator’s complicated humanity. And Raban’s description of his brief interaction with officious Canadian Customs inspectors regarding a suspect American potato, found during a search of his boat, provides a memorable anecdote. Both examples and others like them function, I think, as thoughtful counterpoints to the more difficult aspects of Raban’s ‘interior passage,’ a journey through reflections prompted by the loss of a parent and the diminishment of a marriage.

The Audible version of a cover for Raban’s book, Old Glory

One key to appreciating Jonathan Raban’s, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings, lies in its subtitle. Clearly the author has written something more than an absorbing description of a nautical adventure, though he certainly provides that. The interest of this book for me lies in its implicit invitation to reflect on what draws some of us to the sea, to find our way on waters that may have patterns but no directional lines or unnecessary limits. For the sea is where what is called ‘human geography’ and our created pathways may diverge from the given features of the natural world.

As is broadly true with much of our life on land, a parallel to navigation over the water exists with how we make our way forward in our decisions and actions, day by day. This is the parallel we can perceive between sailing and what is formally called casuistry in moral theology. All of us, in all circumstances, are challenged to apply universal principles or rules of thumb to the ideosyncracies of everyday situations. Generic and abiding principles (with boats, it is things like Coast Guard rules and the observed behavior of tides), coupled with familiar tools (a compass, wind direction finder, charts, etc.), need to be brought into engagement with particular circumstances (the wind, waves, and tides, as we find them today). Through this process we discern with greater clarity location and direction, especially when our efforts are coupled with a grasp of purpose. Otherwise, and in more ways than one, knowing where we are and where we are headed can be difficult.

The author on the veranda overlook of his Seattle home

An Offering for Sunday, February 1, Epiphany 4 A
James Tissot, Jesus Led from Herod to Pilate

Prior homilies or sermons of mine are occasionally downloaded by readers. Noticing this, I anticipate that some of those preparing to preach (or offer a reading) on an upcoming Sunday might benefit from the perspective I have taken regarding the Lectionary readings for a particular day. I am therefore offering (when I can) a prior text that I have used for the occasion. I will try to do this on Sunday evenings or Mondays believing that there might interest in these texts being made available. When I have one prepared, I will also offer an accompanying handout (in pdf format) in case these may also be helpful.

For this coming Sunday, the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in Lectionary year A, I offer the following.

The link for it is here. The link to the handout may be found further below.

Epiphany 4 A 17_FOR 2026_PDFDownload

Here is the link to the handout.

Handout for Epiphany 4 A – 2026_PDFDownload

Living with God as Thou and I
Martin Buber (1878-1965)

I was in college in the 1970’s. Though at first I was an agnostic art student while attending two Lutheran liberal arts colleges, many of my friends and two housemates were religion majors. This was at a time when the curricula for religion majors still included courses in Bible and in fundamental theology. Paul Tillich’s three Systematics volumes were still much read, as were Bonhoeffer and Barth. And Martin Buber’s once better-known book, I and Thou, was often recommended as a reading for various liberal arts majors.

The significance of Buber’s book was something I only came to realize much later, after grappling with Jean Paul Sartre’s rather dark, or as some would say ‘more realistic,’ view of human relationships. Those familiar with Sartre’s play, No Exit, may recall a phrase penned by Sartre, “Hell is other people.”

As I remember it, Sartre had in mind our experience of ourselves as being regarded by other people as an object. For Sartre, we function primarily, and are aware of ourselves, as subjects – subjects who resist being seen as the objects of other person’s perceptions and especially their judgement. Only later did I perceive the paradoxical affinity between the views of Sartre and Buber. For both were sensitive to the experiential problems that arise when people feel they are regarded as objects rather than as fellow-subjects. It is no coincidence that the lifespans of Buber and Sartre overlapped.

Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

How hard it is for us then, spiritually and in religious terms. to be open to a related idea. For we find it difficult to experience and therefore to accept ourselves as being an object of God’s love. To see ourselves in this way is understandably uncomfortable for us, given how our fundamental way of living and of perceiving ourselves is to function as subjects who regard, come to know, and evaluate everything as an object of our perception – even and more especially, other people. And yet, as one of John’s New Testament Letters teaches us, we were first loved by God… before we were aware of it, much less come to believe this as true or live by it.

In view of these observations, we might want to invert Sartre’s rhetorical phrase regarding how our experience with other people can be ‘hellish.’ We might also say that for religious believers and especially Christians, our fellowship with other people may provide us with real experiential glimpses of what has traditionally been meant by ‘heaven.’

Here we can employ another often superficially-used phrase about certain experiences as being moments of ‘heaven on earth.’ With that phrase, we may need to expand our perception of ourselves in this way: Consciously and intentionally we want to live as an object of God’s love, of God’s enduringly positive regard and embrace, within God’s shared Trinitarian-fellowship. To see ourselves and others, as well as then to live, in this way, may require us to cease to think in terms of subject and object in a binary, either/or way. We learn from Buber that with one another we can be “I and Thou.” And each day, when first emerging from sleep, we can begin our morning with prayerfully re-orienting words like these: “Regardless of what I may have dreamed, Thou art, and as a result, I am.”

For as Jesus promised, saying, “Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” (John 14:19-20). Every day can be, and is, that day.

Our Baptism recalls Jesus’ Baptism, for both function – in part – as moments of designation. For us, it is the sacramental act when we are told that we have been included among God’s own children, made a part of Christ’s Body, and named for the community by the celebrant. In all these ways, we are the objects of God’s redemptive work through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit, by means of the Church. God chooses us before we are ever aware of our choice to respond.

“I recognize Thou, who first knew me before I ever became conscious of myself. Thou first loved me before I ever felt a challenge to love myself.”

An Offering for Sunday, January 25, Epiphany 3 A
John Entwistle, Night View from Cypress Mountain

I observe that prior homilies or sermons of mine occasionally have been downloaded by readers. I anticipate that some of those preparing to preach (or offer a reading) on an upcoming Sunday might benefit from the perspective I have taken regarding the Lectionary readings for a particular day. I am therefore offering (when I can) a prior text that I have used for the occasion. I will try to do this on Sunday evenings or Mondays believing that there might interest in these texts being made available. When I have one prepared, I will also offer an accompanying handout (in pdf format) in case these may also be helpful.

For this coming Sunday, the third Sunday after the Epiphany in Lectionary year A, I offer the following.

The link for it is here. The link to the handout may be found further below.

Epiphany 3 A 17_for 2026_PDFDownload

Here is the link to the handout.

Epiphany 3 A 17 Handout_PDFDownload

Walter Inglis Anderson and the Experience of Loving What God Loves
A beach on Horn Island, Mississippi Gulf Coast

We are created in God’s image and likeness. We often assume that this is reflected in the way that we think, in our capacity for reason and in our desire for wisdom. But we also reflect our creation in God’s image and likeness in our desire to love. We all want to love, and receive love. Sometimes, especially in this fallen world, we love in ways that are disordered. We love the right things in the wrong way, and we love the wrong things in what we deceive ourselves into thinking may be a good or right way.

And yet, we still love, whether it is ourselves that we love to the point of it being at the expense of loving others and the world around us, or it may be that we love others and the world at the expense of rightly loving ourselves.

The Holy Scriptures remind us that God is love. And that God first loved us before we knew it. And that God so loved the world that he gifted himself in the form of the Word made flesh, who came among us, full of the grace and truth that he has so generously shared with us. “I am who I am” (what God spoke to Moses from the burning bush) becomes the source of “we are who we are,” especially when we become aware of and live into the fullness of who we really are.

And so, to love what God loves is to share in the experience of God’s love. Awareness of this leads us to become more aware of the way we are called to share in God’s own way of loving. To do so actually comes to us naturally, even though we in our fallen state are impaired in our ability fully to live into this reality, and believe we are capable of it.

In my prior post, I reflected on how some of this capacity to love what God loves may be revealed in the life and work of Walter Inglis Anderson, who himself may not have been aware of the fact, nor may have had the conscious ability to believe it. In this respect, Anderson, followed in the spiritual footsteps of John Muir, whose earlier example may help us appreciate this dimension of the Mississippi painter’s relationship with nature. For Muir, through his childhood formation in orthodox Reformed Christian beliefs, came to believe he was loving Creation as God loves it, however much Muir’s vision expanded and broadened over the years so as to appear that he had moved beyond the bounds of traditional faith.

The painter and solitary, Walter Inglis Anderson, portraying himself rowing out to Horn Island

To experience joy when we encounter and perceive the beauty we find in the world – even in ourselves – is to experience God’s love for the world. Beauty in the world is a manifestation of God’s self-giving, and of a love that is self-giving, even to the point where we are capable of bringing harm to it or rejecting it. The same is true for God’s love for us, and for those with whom we have been given the opportunity for fellowship and community. For God’s love is not for us solely, as individuals, but is present in fellowship and in community, especially in communities founded upon this great gift of divine love.

Anderson’s son, John, retracing some of his father’s footsteps

Here, we can come to appreciate another insight we can gain from learning about Walter Inglis Anderson. Like the earlier Muir, Anderson came to perceive – or perhaps always intuitively knew – that to see, to really see what is in and around us, is enabled by ‘getting out of the way.’ When I, as one who sees, am conscious and then distracted by my awareness of my process of seeing and perceiving, I become absorbed with my own subjectivity, at the expense of more fully becoming focused upon the objects of my perception. In seeking to love you, or things in the world around us, my focus upon my process of loving or seeking to love impedes my actual participation in really loving you, you who are a fellow subject of loving and not simply an object of my love.

A Horn Island painting by Walter Inglis Anderson

I think that Anderson was enabled to arrive at such an awareness by enacting his desire to be among and really see the plants, birds, animals, the seashore, and the changing weather conditions, while on his solitary sojourns to Horn Island. Therein lies the paradox. God’s love for the divine beauty reflected in the world that he has made was at the heart of Anderson’s love for the beauty that we find in nature. And in sharing in that same love of beauty, he came to perceive how he was actually not alone, even in his periodic states of hermitage under the shelter of his upturned dinghy.

Awareness of this is one doorway into perceiving and then enjoying what Jesus spoke of when he said, “Wherever two or three of you are gathered, I am there.” The great “I am” is with us, now to behold and embrace, Spirit in Flesh, Word made human, not only in ourselves and in the things around us, but also between us at the heart of our fellowship.

An Offering for Sunday, January 18, Epiphany 2 A
St John the Baptizer, Netherlandish, ca 1500

I observe that from time to time prior homilies or sermons of mine have been downloaded by readers. I anticipate that some of those preparing to preach (or offer a reading) on an upcoming Sunday might benefit from the perspective I have taken regarding the Lectionary readings for a particular day. I therefore plan to offer when I can a prior text that I have used for the occasion. I will try to do this on Sunday evenings or Mondays believing that there might interest in these texts being made available. When I have one prepared, I will also offer an accompanying handout (in pdf format) in case these may also be helpful.

For this coming Sunday, the second Sunday after the Epiphany in Lectionary year A, I offer the following. As with last week’s offering, this one is from 2017, as well.

The link for it is here. The link to the handout may be found further below.

Epiphany 2 A 17 copy for 2025_PDFDownload

Here is the link to the handout.

Epiphany 2 A 17 Possible Handout_PDFDownload

Walter Inglis Anderson and the Beauty of Humanity
Walter Inglis Anderson, Self-Portrait from above

Perhaps like Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, a gifted painter named Walter Inglis Anderson came to discern some things of great significance within the visible beauty latent in nature. Like his venturesome forbears, he did this by seeking out an area of wilderness. It became his habit to row out the ten or so miles to Horn Island in the Mississippi Sound, where he slept on the sand using his upturned dinghy as his hermitage. Out there amidst the shifting dunes, with only the shell of his boat for cover against storms, Walter Anderson perceived more of who he was as he experienced harmony with what was around him. In time, compelling objects of his attention became for him fellow-subjects apprehending the splendor of Creation.

A shoreline inhabitant whose common name (‘hermit’ crab) was often derisively applied to Walter Anderson

Paradoxically, by his solitary coastal journeys, a man who had suffered bouts of mental illness became aware of an elusive but precious quality that he shared with those from whom he was isolated. His transient island resting places, where he spent weeks at a time over the course of twenty years, provided him with fleeting glimpses of what it might mean to be more fully human. There, away from others, he experienced moments when he felt he had become who he was meant to be.

As one writer has put it, “Anderson’s isolation from humanity convinced him, in the end, of humanity’s beauty… [He] believed that if we re-established our primal relationship with nature, we would regain our beauty.” Walter’s youngest son, John, summed it up succinctly: “Solitude was a tool that helped him to find unity with all people and all creatures.”

Anderson’s portrayal of himself rowing out to the island

Walter Anderson expressed the point compactly in one of his Horn Island logbooks: “In order to realize the beauty of man, we must realize our relation to nature.” His son, John, later explained what his father had meant by this. “I think that in those twenty years that he was living in solitude on the wilderness island, he was attempting to realize his relation to nature so that he could realize the beauty of humanity.”

Underlying these words, and the perception they express, may be a nature-mysticism of the kind often associated with Thoreau and Muir. I also find an affinity here with the spirituality we can discern in traditions as widely different as Zen Buddhism and the writings of Christian monastic solitaries.

Eugene Peterson’s rendering of Jesus’ words in John 12:25 (in context), captures a similar perception: “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”

To this mystical vision of the world I think we can also connect an insight attributable to St. Augustine of Hippo, regarding what we love, and how we love. If we love ourselves and our lives, or the world around us, for our own sake, we belong to the ‘city of the world,’ and we live turned away from God. Yet, if we love these same things for God’s sake, we belong to the City of God, and live in a God-ward way. Here it is important to remember that to love in the latter way that Augustine commended may not necessarily be an activity that we undertake with conscious awareness.

Self-Portrait by Anderson

It is actually possible to love God without ever consciously intending to do so. I believe this was the case in the adult life of Walter Anderson. It happens when we love what God dearly loves. And such true love can be expressed unconsciously, in ways that may be apparent to others while not to ourselves.

This truth connects the experience of the non-religious nature mystic with that of the religious contemplative, as both in various ways are focussed upon the Beauty inherent in Creation and within our human experience of Nature. This brings joy to the Author of Creation, who so loves the world that he has brought us into the new life that – through the Word made flesh – he now shares with us.

Emphasis has been added to the Eugene Peterson quote above. In a later post I will offer further reflection on Walter Anderson’s life and work, including his wondrous artistic creations, among which are paintings and drawings, as well as ceramics, linoleum prints and patterns for fabrics.

A New Periodic Addition to this Website
The Baptism of Christ, Chartres Cathedral, 12th century

I observe that from time to time prior homilies or sermons of mine have been downloaded by readers. I anticipate that some of those preparing to preach (or offer a reading) on an upcoming Sunday might benefit from the perspective I have taken regarding the Lectionary readings for a particular day. I therefore plan to offer when I can a prior text that I have used for the occasion. I will try to do this on Sunday evenings or Mondays believing that there might interest in these texts being made available. When I have one prepared, I will also offer an accompanying handout (in pdf format) in case these may also be helpful.

For this coming Sunday, the first Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of Our Lord, I offer the following.

The link for it is here. The link to the handout may be found further below.

Epiphany 1 A 17 Baptism of Christ_PDFDownload

Here is the link to the handout.

Baptism of Christ A 2017_Handout_Pages_PDFDownload

The Gift of Joy and Wonder

I have long been captivated by some words offered in our Prayer Book for the newly baptized, that they might receive the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works. These 12 Days of Christmas are surely the time of the year when hopes for joy and wonder are most honored by people all over the world.

While we focus on the gift of the long-promised Prince of Peace, and Wonderful Counselor, we also engage in what we might think of as a widespread indulgence in sentimentality. Our celebration of the Promised One can become overwhelmed by the secular accoutrements of ‘the season,’ with various permutations of the legacy of St Nicholas of Myra morphed into an attractive mythic figure we call Santa Claus, or Father Christmas as folks in the U.K. like to call him. His popular name in America, diminutively reduced to Santa or Saint Nick, masks the religious history of his churchly origins as a figure numbered among those on the Calendar and in the Lectionary. Elves in Santa’s fabled workshop take the place of saints and un-named believers whose works of faith are not remembered with specifics, while the lore of the mythic figure who comes to visit children’s’ homes with gifts occupies public attention.

We love reminders like this of the joy to be found at Christmas

Among others who have led parish church congregations, I have done my share of encouraging observance of a traditional Advent, stressing the significance of St Nicholas’ feast day (December 6), and urging retention of Advent hymns and restraint in home and church decorations characteristic of our culture’s ways of anticipating Christmas. For me and others, the 12 Days of Christmas would be our time of celebrating our Lord’s Nativity by lighting trees, sharing gifts, and treating ourselves to special foods, right through the feast days of St Stephen, St. John, Holy Innocents, and The Holy Name, to Twelfth Night and a proper regard for the Magi’s visit on the Epiphany, January 6. Preferring such an emphasis has caused some of us to appear to be in quiet conflict with the patterns of our wider culture. For the world around us has more and more begun its anticipation of Christmas by playing ‘music of the season’ early in November, long before Thanksgiving, while also decorating homes and public spaces with Christmas-related lights, poinsettia, and objects related to our enjoyment of gift-giving and receiving. At the heart of all these outward signs of anticipation is our longing for a recovery and enjoyment of what we celebrate as ‘the most wonderful time of the year.’

My adult children like to gently rib me that I have ‘gone soft’ on Advent. And that I have slowly succumbed to the influence of ‘secular culture’ upon what I think should properly be seen as a religious holiday – as if the two emphases are in some way counterposed, and in tension. With my predilection for retaining our Anglican heritage’s rightly attributed but oft-caricatured principle of taking a “both-and” approach to many aspects of our faith and beliefs, I prefer to think that I have broadened my outlook in my search for forms of a deeper synthesis that lies within ‘reality.’ Perhaps these changes in me are due to having grandchildren who live nearby. Yet, as I remember Oliver O’Donovan encouraging us to perceive, compromise is not always ‘of the Truth,’ but can also be ‘in relation to the Truth.’

Hence, my continued fascination with joy and wonder. Joy and wonder might be two of the best words to describe what we think of, and may remember as, a child’s view of what Christmas is all about. And if there is any substance to the perception that our transition from childhood through adolescence to adulthood is often marked by our loss of genuine engagement in imagination, fantasy, and therefore with wonder, it is surely reflected in our thinking that Christmas is primarily significant for children. And therefore something that we enjoy cheerfully when we participate in social occasions where we temporarily suspend our disbelief in fantasy for the sake of the merriment we can enjoy with others.

Christmas inspires us to seek stories of places filled with wonder

All this has deeper significance. What if the world we live in is truly animated by the Holy Spirit, thoroughly infused with divine Grace and Wisdom, and permeated by a wellspring of joy that is godly? What if our culture’s pattern of anticipating and celebrating Christmas is an example of what Jesus had in mind when he encouraged his adult listeners to become like the children he embraced and held up as an example of Kingdom-participation and life?

As when he placed a child in the midst of them, and said, “Truly, … unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Has it occurred to us that he may have been speaking first about himself (He who humbled himself to become an infant and then a child)?

Childish and child-like are, of course, not necessarily the same. And by distinguishing the terms, we may begin to recover something. That we don’t necessarily need to pare down features of our cultural approach to Christmas to get our celebration back to being something Jesus might want us to enjoy. But that we could also see our patterns of Christmas celebration as involving the kinds of gatherings and events at which he would have enjoyed himself, identifying with our delight in such moments, and where he would encourage us to embody his spirit of discernment of how God is present and at work in all that is around us.

It is all about him. And he is all about us.

Note: the quoted words of Jesus, above, are from Matthew 18:2-4. Christmas Story (filmed in Finland/Lapland, and A Boy Called Christmas are movies currently streaming.

Mary’s Joy-Filled Acceptance

 

Picture the scene: About 750 years before Jesus, at the Lord’s bidding the prophet Isaiah goes out to the south side of Jerusalem near the aquaduct. He has been asked to do a difficult thing, to meet the fearful and apprehensive Ahaz, king of Judah. This happens at the moment when God’s people are threatened by Tiglath-pileser, king of the Assyrians. Making a bad situation worse, the Assyrians have been joined by armed forces from the separated northern kingdom of Israel, who have already been brought under subjection by the threatening foreign power. Ahaz does not respond as God would like. When he demurs from asking God for a sign of assurance, Isaiah confronts him with the Lord’s Word:

“… Listen to this, government of David! It’s bad enough that you make people tired with your pious, timid hypocrisies, but now you’re making God tired. So the Master is going to give you a sign anyway. Watch for this: A girl who is presently a virgin will get pregnant. She’ll bear a son and name him Immanuel (God-With-Us). By the time the child is twelve years old, able to make moral decisions, the threat of war will be over. Relax, those two kings that have you so worried will be out of the picture. But also be warned: God will bring on you and your people and your government a judgment worse than anything since the time the kingdom split, when Ephraim (northern Israel) left Judah. The king of Assyria is coming!”

What a strange promise! How could the promised birth of a child be a gift for a troubled world?

This is the kind of promise that Mary later received through the Angel Gabriel. We all receive a similar promise when we are called to acknowledge and accept that same Gift-Child that Mary received.

During Advent this year we have reflected on how there can be several aspects of our response to God’s call, and to the promises latent within God’s Gift to us. Fear is often our first reaction, followed then by wonder and uncertainty about the fit between God’s promise and our own suitability for receiving it. By attentiveness to God’s Grace, our uncertainty can be transformed into a humility ~ a humility that is willing to accept the Word of Promise and the Call to receive it. And if we come that far, if we are willing to believe and remain attentive, we may experience a wonderful moment. We find it in a fourth aspect of Mary’s response to God’s Word of Call. It is quite simply, Joy! There is no other word for it. Both Mary and Joseph, each in their own way, accept God’s unlikely and unexpected Word of promise. By accepting and receiving God’s will for what it is, they find a beautiful joy.

Over the course of Advent, I shared with you three images portraying aspects of the Angel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary of the promised gift of a child ~ a child who would be God with us. In the image above, El Greco beautifully captures the sublime quality of the moment. Having accepted God’s Word in humility, Mary’s eyes and her whole being are uplifted to receive the message. Her up-turned hand says it all! The gilded and hovering angel points upward, in the direction where all this is supposed to go, into the realm of Spirit. This is where the Lord will ascend through his Resurrection, taking us and our humanity with him into the very being of God.

Joy may not be the defining feature of our lives today. Yet, we can find the fullness of joy in the beautiful Gift we celebrate this week. For we receive a gift whose meaning and value we can never fully anticipate in advance.

To this gift, Mary says “Yes!” And, with her, we can say, “yes,” as well. Yes to God’s Word that comes to us as both promise and call – a promise that he will be with us always, as we accept him for who He really is. And, a call for us to become new persons in him. For in him we find a spiritual maturity that this world can never give.

In raising our hearts in assent to God’s promises, and by receiving God’s call to be transformed by the Spirit, we grow. We grow into that quiet joy which was Mary’s, instilled by the Angel’s visit. Behold – a virgin has conceived, and has borne a Son, and we call his name Immanuel – for God is with us!

The image above is of El Greco’s Annunciation (1600). The biblical quotes from Isaiah are based on Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message. This post is based on my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2019, which can be accessed by clicking here.