At the Threshold of Hope, Birth
At the time of writing, it is the feast of the Nativity of Mary.
This was one of the seven solemnities concerning the Virgin that form part of the Roman Church’s liturgical calendar, with others being the Feast of Mary the Mother of God (1 January), the Purification of Mary in the Temple (2 February), the Visitation by Mary to Elizabeth (31 May), the Assumption of Mary (15 August) and the Immaculate Conception (8 December).
After a number of years of intentionally celebrating these feasts, one theme that presented itself to me is that of Mary as the embodiment of hope.
The tie between Mary and hope is encapsulated in the title of the document Mary, Grace and Hope in Christ, the 2005 joint statement of the Roman Catholic and Anglican International Commission (a document I recommend reading in full). The liturgy of the hours for the feast of Mary’s Nativity also seem to underscore this theme, with one of the antiphons for the psalms reading
When the sacred Virgin was born, then the world was filled with light. Blessed and holy is the stock which bore such blessed fruit
The Gospel reading for the feast, taken from the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, also underscores the theme of hope, though in a much subtler way. For in celebrating the birth of Mary, the Gospel reading turns our attention to a whole series of other births recorded in the genealogy of Jesus.
When one first comes across the genealogy, the response might be one of bemusement, since the procession of unfamiliar names and revisiting of the phrase “…was the father of…” might make the reading seem repetitious and, more to the point, meaningless.
A Jewish reader of this genealogy, however, would look at this reading rather differently. For to the religious jew, the fulfillment of God’s promise went hand in hand with the birth of a descendant. This pattern was set with God’s promise to Abraham in the book of Genesis. Read against this backdrop, the genealogy is less a record of births, as it is the transmission of God’s promises and his fidelity to those promises as the centuries progressed.
Birth then, is more than the simple beginning of an individual life. It is also a sign of God’s own faithfulness to the promises made to us. It forms a dimension of what Luigi Giussani calls an event, which the Christian tradition holds will find its culmination in the event of Jesus. At the same time however, we do have reason to balk at having the repetitious mention of birth read to us, for this event, whilst extraordinary, is at the same time very ordinary. As Giussani wrote in his Generating Traces in the History of the World:
The Christian event has the form of an encounter, a human encounter in ordinary day-to-day reality. 45 It has the form of a human encounter in which the man called Jesus, that man born in Bethlehem at a precise moment in time, reveals Himself to be meaningful for our lives (17)
We get the sense of the ordinariness in the event of birth. For birth is ordinary, part of the natural cycle of the continuation of the species. At the same time, what is birthed bears very little that cries out the fulfillment of promises. We might see potential, but potential is by definition not fulfillment. And this seeming lack of fulfillment might endure for many years to come.
At the same time, however, this otherwise ordinary thing that is birthed is for Giusanni, also exceptional. Something so completely human, Giussani says:
…carried within them something strange, wholly gratuitous, exceptional, beyond everything they could have foreseen…(19)
The exceptionality of this otherwise ordinary event comes at two levels for Giussani. First, it is exceptional because it is irreducible to any analysis, incapable of capture of explanation. Second, it is exceptional because this otherwise ordinary event leads to a fulfillment of one’s own desire. This encounter of the ordinary-yet-exceptional thing forms the seedbed of what Giussani calls “the Event”, an occasion whereby not only our desires our fulfilled, but the earth also renewed.
In the wake of the event nothing, not even the most ordinary occurrence, falls outside the jurisdiction of this Event. With it nothing, not even the most hope crunching experience, will fall beyond God’s capacity to generate, sustain and fulfil our hope. We may not perceive this fulfillment as an empirical fact - at least not yet - but that should not act as limitor of God’s faithfulness to the promises that he made.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
