Irma Dillard rwcj
Mary
From the Gospel
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. He went in and said to her, ‘Rejoice, so highly favoured! The Lord is with you!’ She was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what this greeting could mean, but the angel said to her, ‘Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God’s favour. Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the House of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘But how can this come about, since I am a virgin?’ ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you,’ the angel answered, ‘and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. Know this too: your kinswoman Elizabeth has, in her old age, herself conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible to God.’ ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord,’ said Mary, ‘let what you have said be done to me.’ And the angel left her.
From the gospel of St. Luke, 1:26:38
From a letter of Helen McLaughlin (Superior General, Society of the Sacred Heart 1982 – 1994)
To become Emmanuel, ‘God-with-us’, the Word of God made a choice, ‘Mary, you have been chosen from among all women’. Through the intermediary of an angel God asked Mary, ‘Will you be the Mother of the Son of God?’ He offered her the divine maternity and asked her to accept this gift of God. Mary was troubled, for how could such a happening take place in her? She felt a call to live her faith profoundly. And she, who wished only to carry out the Will of God, relying on the fragility of an interior voice – as Abraham did long ago – pronounced her FIAT. Mary welcomed the Word, her YES was a deliberate, free YES – was not the message of the Angel at one and the same time an offering and a request?
It was by this YES of Mary, full of confidence and of love, that the WORD was made flesh. It is by her faith, by her free acceptance, that the fullness of time has come. Let us celebrate and rejoice with this simple daughter of Israel, Mary, ‘woman of faith among the people of God’.
Advent 1987
From the Constitutions of the Society of the Sacred Heart
Mary, woman of faith among the People of God, lives close to us, as she does to everything that radiates the life of her Son. Our Society entrust itself in a special way to her whose heart is united and conformed to that of Jesus, so that she may lead us to Him. (#9)
Joseph
From the Gospel
This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a man of honour and wanting to spare her publicly, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’ Now all this took place to fulfill the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel’, a name which means ‘God-is-with-us’. When Joseph woke up he did what the angel of the Lord had told him to do: he took his wife to his home and, though he had not had intercourse with her, she gave birth to son; and he named him Jesus.
From the gospel of St. Matthew, 1:18:25
From the letter of Helen Mc Laughlin
But the story does not finish there. Mary was promised to Joseph as his wife. Joseph also discerns. He is the faithful advocate of Mary’s cause. He must have passed many sleepless nights when he realized that she was pregnant. What should be done? Send her home? Act according to the law? In that case he should treat her as an adulterous woman: he should send her away.
Joseph, hearing what was told to him ‘from on high’, acted otherwise. The decision that he took was certainly not according to the letter of the law or tradition; it was rather an expression of the law of love. In his doubt, in his moment of darkness, he opened himself to God; and God sent an angel and showed him a new way. He, Joseph, was invited by heaven to share the life of Mary. ‘Take Mary to yourself’ to be a husband to her, and a father to the Child. This will be his mission, because Heaven in confiding Mary to him also confided to him the Son of God. Henceforward Jesus will be his adopted Son.
Joseph, the just man, faithful to the Law, in his discernment went beyond the justice of the Scribes and Pharisees. ‘He cracked open his strongest convictions’, Father Kolvenbach, S.J., says, ‘in order to be submissive to the Holy Spirit’.
From the Constitutions of the Society of the Sacred Heart
Aware that it is always the Spirit who transforms us, we take seriously the responsibility of collaborating with the work of God throughout our lives. (#73)
RSCJ
From Helen McLaughlin’s letter, Advent 1987
The Constitutions ask us to become women of discernment; would we ever be able to be that without humility, without love, without audacity? This is the road that Mary and Joseph are encouraging us to follow today. Is not their faith one that is humble and audacious at the same time? Is not their reply a YES full of love of the mysterious will of God? Let us ask them, especially during this time of Advent and of Christmas, to make us grow in these attitudes so that the Word, the Life takes flesh in us.
My wish, my prayer, is that each one of us receive and hear the word, the always overwhelming word that God wishes to be born, to be born ever more fully into our lives. Is this total gift so impossible? A gift without calculation, unconditional? God calls us to enter more deeply into the way of the impossible.
From the Constitutions of the Society of the Sacred Heart
The way of obedience is a way of discernment intimately linked to our call to contemplation. We live attuned to the Spirit, and together we seek to have a contemplative outlook on all reality, in order to discover the will of God and make it our own. (#48)
From St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (Eph 3:14-21)
This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name:
Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God. Glory be to him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine; glory be to him from generation to generation in the Church and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.
Katie Mifsud rscj
District of Malta
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