Opinion | What Mary can teach us about the joy and pain of life-The New York Times

2021-12-13 22:04:50 By : Mr. Dekai Huang

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Two years ago, my husband started painting icons, which is an ancient and strict art form of piety. In his first portrait course, he drew an icon depicting Mary holding a baby Jesus. It sits on our mantelpiece, and I look at it every day. It exudes the tenderness and love between Jesus and his mother. He leaned against her and turned slightly to her face. His hands were tightly on her neck. Maybe as a tired mother, I was just projecting, but I was always attracted by her eyes, which made me feel deeply tired and kind, with a hint of sadness.

As we approached Christmas, the church turned our attention to Mary's story. In the Bible, we first found Mary as a teenager in a relatively backward town. She is a virgin and is engaged. Then, she met an angel, and her world had changed drastically. "You will conceive and have a son, and you will call him Jesus," the angel said. "He will be great and be called the son of the Most High."

For me, Mary embodies an idea in the Orthodox tradition: "bright sadness". This sentence describes how difficult it is to separate happiness and sadness, and how we can taste desire and joy at the same time in every moment of life.

The Catholic theologian Aidan Nichols believes that in the Catholic Bible, the typical translation of the angel’s greetings to Mary, "Have a fortune, full of grace" (the famous "Have Mary" prayer and the football pass of the same name Inspiration), better translated as "joy" or "great joy", because the word usually "refers to people's joy." Then, the first word the angel spoke to Mary was a clear call for joy.

How did Mary respond to this call from heaven? She is "upset" or "very troubled". She was told to be happy, but she was shaking with fear. Soon, she responded to the angel: "Follow me as you say." Soon, she will be ecstatic. Soon, she will sing her famous Magnificat, which begins with: "My soul is the Lord, and my spirit takes pleasure in God and my Savior, because he has seen the humble inheritance of his servant. Because look! From now on, all generations will call me blessed; because he has done great things for me, and his name is holy."

But first, she was troubled. She is in a state of tension-when God is working but the pain is right in front of us, we are all in a state of tension.

In the story of the birth of Jesus, we see the danger, chaos and poverty that Mary entered with her son. She heard the cosmic message from the shepherd about the signs of God's peace. Then, shortly after Jesus was born, while undergoing circumcision, she was told that "a sword will pierce" her own soul. She cannot fully know what this ominous prophecy might mean, or one day she will see her adult son being tortured and dying in pain, crucified with two criminals.

However, as the gospel story continues to run through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we find in Mary's story that joy and pain are constantly intertwined. Her heart is full of unimaginable memories, and her soul is waiting to be pierced. Her life story bears witness to the extreme vulnerability of mothers in a world where deep love cannot give us the ability to protect our children from all violence or pain.

Mary was called by God, and her life reminded me that the vocation God calls us inevitably involves joy and pain. "Love and loss are the double helix on this side of heaven," I wrote in my book "Night Prayer". "You can't have one without the other. God's call to our lives will inevitably require us to take risks at the same time. In the most meaningful part of our lives, we all know this mottled reality: in marriage or singleness and celibacy. Struggling, in loving and raising children, in our work, in serving the church, and in our closest friendship.

Poet and songwriter Rich Mullins asked: "How do you know God is calling you?"

He continued: "Listening to God's call means accepting some of the emptiness in our lives, instead of always trying to drown out that sense of emptiness, we let it be a door through which we can see God."

At this time of the year, people are very concerned about emptiness and filling. In her Magnificat, Mary sang that God "fills the hungry with good things, and he lets the rich go away empty-handed." In the Christmas story, the empty womb is filled. The empty sky was suddenly filled with angels. The empty manger is filled with the light of the world. But first, when we prepare for Christmas, we will remember that we cannot escape the emptiness in life. We wait for it to be filled in the right way at the right time.

When I feel lonely, lost, and the emptiness that exists even in my good life, I am eager to fill it. The wind of emptiness echoed in the emptiness of my day, and I was distracted. I use busyness, social media, arguments, work and consumption to fill my waking moments. These can be cheap attempts at pleasure, or at least numb any sense of sadness.

But Mary’s story recalled that happiness cannot be obtained cheaply. The suffering of the world cannot be concealed by the sentimental performance of the tamed little angel and the cute and chubby baby Jesus. The emptiness in the world and our own lives cannot be filled with enough haste or purchasing power or likes or reposts. We wait for the birth of Jesus, who is called Immanuel, and God is with us. We and Mary waited for our hunger to be filled.

Any feedback? Send a note to HarrisonWarren-newsletter@nytimes.com.

Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a pastor of the North American Anglican Church and the author of "Night Prayer: For Those Who Work, Watch, or Weep."