Over the Christmas period we have been reflecting on choices that people have made. Mary, Joseph, Zachariah, Elizabeth, and King Herod all made choices.
Mary had a clarity of choosing to do God’s will. She could not understand how what God said was going to happen regarding the birth of Jesus. Yet she trusted, she was not ‘yes’ and ‘no’, she was a definite ‘yes’.
Joseph completely mystified by what happened, being a man of honour was prepared to divorce Mary informally. He knew that the child Mary was carrying was not his. However, when God send a message to him that Mary was pregnant by the Holy Spirit, he accepted God’s word and took Mary home as his wife.
Zacharia doubted what the angel told him regarding the birth of John the Baptist. He is in sharp contrast from Mary and Joseph.
Elizabeth reacts with spontaneous faith when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, comes to see her.
We can get complicated; we can cling to what we can understand fully and what we can control.
Mary and Joseph allowed themselves to freely hand over control to God.
Authentic spirituality is about letting go.
Jesus is the par excellence example of this when he lets go in Gethsemane. “Not My will but Yours be done. Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
We can have an exaggerated sense of our own self-importance.
It is about becoming freer of our cherished self-identity, wants, demands, and ego struggles; it is about truly living fully.
Letting go is about moving from ‘crucifixion’ to ‘resurrection’.
If we do not do this, we hand over our pain to those around us, including our families.
God constantly invites us to let go. We are invited to trust.
The freer we become, the more it is that Christ lives in me and I know the joy of the Holy Spirit like Elizabeth and Mary.
