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In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
In the gradual progression from glory to glory which Lent is and which
must lead us step by step to face the supreme glory of the Divine Love
crucified, the sacrificial love of the Holy Trinity, we keep today the
memory of Saint Mary of Egypt.
Saint Mary of Egypt was a sinner, someone whose sin was known to
everyone and not to God alone. Perhaps she was the only one who was
least of all aware of it, because sin was her life. And yet, one day,
she wanted to go and venerate an icon of the Mother of God in a church.
The supreme beauty of womanhood in the Mother of God reached her heart,
touched it. But when she came to the gate of this church, a power
prevented her from crossing the threshold. The Publican had been able to
stand there because his heart was broken; Mary of Egypt had no broken
heart, and the entrance of the church was forbidden to her. And she
stood there, aware that what she was, was incompatible with the holiness
of the Presence, the presence of God, the presence of the Mother of God,
the presence of all that is holy on earth and in heaven.
And she was shaken so profoundly by this experience that she left all
that had been her life, retired into the desert, and with a life which
the service books define as ‘extreme’ fought to conquer her flesh, her
soul, her memories - everything that was sin, but also everything that
could lead her away from God. And we know how glorious her life was,
what kind of person she became.
What lesson can we receive from her life? How often is it that we have
knocked at the door of God in the way in which Mary tried to come into
His presence? How often have we tried to pray, to be in His presence in
silence? How often has our longing been to God, and how often have we
felt that between our prayer and Him, between our silence and Him,
between our longing and Him there was a barrier which we could not pass.
We were crying, praying into an empty sky, we were turning towards icons
that were silent; all we could perceive was the Divine absence, and an
absence so frightening, because not only could we not reach Him, but we
perceived that unless we reached Him, our soul was laid waste, there was
within us nothing but emptiness, an emptiness that if it continued, if
it became our definitive condition, would mean more than death, -
ultimate separation. But how often also has God knocked at the door of
our heart. You remember the word of the Book of Revelation: I stand at
Thy door and I knock... How often has God, in the words of the Gospel,
in the events of our life, in the weak promptings of our soul, in a
whispering of the Holy Spirit, in all the ways in which God tries to
reach us – how often has He knocked at this door, and how often have we
made sure that this door does not open. Either didn't we simply care to
open it because we were busy with things that mattered to us at that
moment more than His interrupting, disturbing presence; and how often
did we refuse to open the door because the coming of the Lord to us
would have meant the end of things which were precious to us, which
mattered to us... And the Lord stood knocking, and the door was shut in
His face: exactly in the same way in which every door was shut in the
face of the Mother of God and Joseph on the night of the Nativity.
We may not be aware of it with the intensity which should be ours; and
yet for each of us, simply, the proof of it is that we are here, and
millions of other people at some moment have suddenly perceived the
presence of God, have heard His knocking, have let perhaps the door ajar,
have listened to what He was saying, had a moment of elation, a moment
when suddenly we came to life; and then we shut the door again. We chose
our aloneness, we chose to be without Him, and what we imagined to be
‘free’ from Him: we are never free; we are never free not because He
enslaves us, not because He hunts us down. We are never free because He
is ultimately in the end the only supreme longing of our whole being,
because He is the fullness of life, the glory of life, the exultation of
life for which we long and which we try to glean right and left in vain.
Mary of Egypt confronted with the Divine absence, with God’s refusal to
allow her into His presence, confronted with a shut door within herself,
felt that unless the door opened, everything was vain. And she turned
away from everything that stood between her and God, and life, and
fullness, and exultation.
Isn't she for us an example, a call, an image of what could be the life
of each of us? But we may say, Yes, this applied to her, she was a
prospective saint… Each of us is called to commune with God in such a
way, that God and each of us should become one, that each of us should
become partaker of the Divine nature, a living member, a brother, a
sister, a limb of Christ, a temple of the Holy Spirit, a son and a
daughter of the Living God! This is our vocation; but can that be
achieved by our own strength? No, it cannot! But it can be achieved by
God in us if we only turn to Him with all our mind, all our heart, all
our longing, determinately, yes: it is determination, and it is longing,
a passionate, desperate longing... And then – and then all things become
possible. I have said so often that when Saint Paul asked God for
strength to fulfil his mission, the Lord said to him, My grace
suffitheth unto thee, My power deploys itself in weakness... And at the
end of his life, having fulfilled his vocation, Paul, who knew what he
was saying, said, all things are possible unto me in the power of Christ
Who sustains me... All things are possible, because God does not call us
to more than can be achieved by Him with us and in us.
How much hope, how much inspiration can we find in each of the Saints of
God, as frail as we are, and in whom the power, the glory, the victory,
the life unfolded itself, deployed itself gloriously. Let us once more
receive inspiration from what we hear, receive inspiration from what we
meet face to face in the Gospel, in Holy Communion, in prayer, in the
silence in the presence of God. And let us move one step more forward
towards the vision of the love of God made manifest in Holy Week, in the
last steps of the way of the Cross, in the final victory of crucified
Love, and in the victory of the Resurrection of God. Amen. |
