One
of the things I enjoy most about working in a parish is the chance to
be able to talk to the young children who are preparing for their
first Holy Communion and Confirmation. What I enjoy especially is
their openness and simplicity. They accept things that they do not
understand and that is called faith. Their simplicity is
refreshing, although they are well able to ask difficult questions
which I often have no answers for!
Perhaps
one of the most difficult aspects of our faith, or of any faith, is
that we are constantly dealing with ideas that do not make sense to
our way of thinking. They are beyond our understanding, and
even if they were explained to us we still would not be able to grasp
them. The simplest example is the idea of our own spirit or
soul: it is not visible to the human eye, it doesn’t take up space
and it weighs nothing. To human thinking that just sounds like
‘nothing’, but it is very real. The time when it is most
obvious just how real it is, is when someone dies. One moment
you have a living breathing person, with a personality and the
ability to love. The next moment there is just a dead body and
somehow you know that this is not the person that you knew; and
indeed it isn’t, it is just their body. Their spirit has gone
to a different world. It is very simple yet it is also beyond
our understanding.
So
much of what we believe is like this. We don’t understand it,
but we accept it because God has told us that it is true and we
believe that God only speaks truth. Sometimes I think that the
most educated people can be at a disadvantage when it comes to faith,
because they are tempted to want everything explained to them
completely, or else they won’t believe it. A few years ago I
did the wedding of a friend of mine I grew with, who is a now a
pathologist. Before the wedding he was saying that he could not
accept the resurrection from a scientific point of view, because to
him that was impossible. I admired him for his honestly. In a way you
could say that his education was an obstacle to him in the ways of
faith, though of course that is not always the case. There are so
many aspects of our faith that we which we cannot explain.
However, that does not mean that they are not real.
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| The Annunciation by Fra Angelico |
Today’s Gospel passage which describes the angel Gabriel presenting
Mary with something that she did not understand is more of what we
are talking about. Mary questioned the angel because what the
angel said made no sense to her from a human point of view. It
seems that Mary didn’t intend to have children, otherwise why would
she have questioned the angel? Since she was already legally
married, it would have been the most natural thing in the world to
have children, but this doesn’t seem to have been part of her plan
and that is why she questioned the angel. What the angel
Gabriel told her was that this would essentially be an act of God,
and not a human act. ‘The Holy Spirit will cover you with its
shadow… and so the child will be called holy.’ And the
proof that he offered her was the miracle that God had already worked
for Elizabeth who was now six months pregnant, even though she was
old, and had never been able to have children, ‘…because nothing
is impossible to God.’
The
lovely thing is that Mary didn’t go on arguing about how this was
impossible, but she accepted it. Mary was open to God’s
action, to God’s plans. God also asks us to be open to his
work, because He is all the time at work in our lives, only most of
the time we don’t recognise it, or it doesn’t make sense to us,
so we think it couldn’t be God at work. Children also have
this kind of openness and God invites us to have the same kind of
openness. There is so much that is beyond our understanding,
but God just asks us to believe, and accept the fact that even if it
was explained to us, we still wouldn’t understand.
The virgin will give
birth to a child.
God will become man.
The death of a man
on a cross will be a sign of God’s power.
The eternal God
becomes present in bread and wine.
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