Nurturing the Beloved Child
1).
I want to cast a scene for you.
Picture a mother nursing a baby boy
in a rocking chair. It’s evening,
a lamp dimly lights the room, the boy is dressed in a one-piece sleeper, the
mother in a simple cotton nightgown.
You hear the creak of the rocker, the gentle suckle, and a whispered
soprano:
Safe am I, safe am I in the hollow of God’s hand. Sheltered o’er, sheltered o’er in God’s
love forevermore. No ill can harm
me, no foe alarm me, for God keeps both day and night. Safe am I, safe am I in the hollow of
God’s hand.
Every night it’s the same scene:
the baby is held close, feels the warm, sweet milk fill his belly, hears the
creaking of the chair and this song.
And the boy drifts off to sleep with the words, “Safe am I, safe am I,”
still kissing his ears.
There is a kind of knowing taking
place here by this baby boy before language has any meaning for him. This is the knowledge of belovedness,
what developmental experts call attachment. You can screw up a lot as a parent, but as long as you succeed
in planting this knowledge deep within your child, 99% of your God-given work
is done.
When the angel Gabriel was sent to
a town in Galilee called Nazareth with a message for a frightened young girl,
he told her that she had found favor with God. What did this favor entail? Could it be that God believed he could trust St. Mary with
the sacred vocation of planting the essential knowledge of belovedness deep within
his own Son, out of whom that knowledge would be emptied when he would be born
in human likeness and nursed at her breast?
And could it be this sacred
vocation that St. Mary accepted with her words, “Here am I, the servant of the
Lord, let it be with me according to your word”?
2).
God does not call us to trifling
vocations in which God has little vested interest. There are no inconsequential Divine intentions upon our
lives. Through the Annunciation of
our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary we see that when God calls a faithful
servant, God goes all in—God risks everything.
And when we respond to God’s call
with the openness of will, the faithfulness, the obedience of St. Mary at the
Annunciation, we offer ourselves to channel the unimaginable designs of God
into the world.
As Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.
put it so well:
Wild air, world-mothering air . . .
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now,
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve,
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn-
Amen.
Br. Chad 2013
* A different version of this homily was published here in March 2012 as "Reclaiming the Beloved Child."
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