This morning’s reading from Luke’s gospel presents Mary, mother of Jesus, joyously proclaiming that her soul “magnifies the Lord”. This is Mary’s song – the Magnificat. At Bible study this past week I learned that this passage represents the longest uninterrupted passage by a woman in the whole Bible. An interesting feature of Luke’s gospel is that Mary sings her chorus after the male voice, represented by John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, has been silenced. You may remember that Zechariah was struck mute because of his unbelief. Contrast this with Mary, who believed that all things were possible with God, and “consented to the presence of God”. This consent took the form of Mary’s willingness to be a vessel for the birth of the Christ.

 

It may be that the Christmas predisposition is distinctively feminine. The masculine impulse to make something happen, to engineer life, to make one’s mark is suspended temporarily to make room for the feminine archetype – in both men and women – to emerge. We move into a receptive mode with Mary – mind you, it’s not passive. It’s actively receptive.

 

Mary is a vessel of God. Vessels are, by definition, empty. The very purpose of jugs, basins, and barrels for example, is to be a holding place. Vessels enjoy a state of emptiness, and it is that very emptiness that makes them functional. Mary’s womb is a symbol of this kind of emptiness. Her empty womb makes space to be filled with the life of God. She exemplifies a fecund – or creative emptiness – a habitat for the incubation of divine creativity – symbolized by the birth of Christ. 

 

In Advent, the season of the church year leading up to Christmas, the challenge is the same – making space, creating emptiness, so that God might be born through us. How are you doing with that project? It’s not easy is it? You come to church and the preacher is encouraging you to empty out to make room for the divine. You leave church and every radio, TV, and newspaper advertisement is screaming at you to fill yourself up. More parties, more presents, more preparations – well, more of just about everything. I remember many Christmas dinners, having to loosen my belt, push back my chair from the table and solemnly declaring that I had no room left for dessert. Is there any room left for the Sacred? Or are our bellies, agendas, and heads already full of just about everything else imaginable?

 

I believe we all have a hollowed space in our soul that is reserved for God, but we tend to confuse busy-ness with significance and end up stuffing ourselves on everything else the world has to offer. The ego’s project is the polar opposite of the Christmas project. The ego – by which I simply mean the unenlightened part of us – exists to get stuffed. It really does. We stuff ourselves on knowledge, wealth, status, expertise, friends, experiences, booze, food, exercise. The ego thinks that the empty place in our soul is supposed to be filled with More: it confuses the state of being crammed full of stuff with significance. By “it”, of course, I mean “we.

 

My own theory about this is that the unhealthy part of us – the alienated ego – is fearful that it is a temporary, transient structure and wants to have a kind of eternal status, like the soul. But it doesn’t really trust that it participates in this eternal status, and so it’s always looking for stuff to bulk up on in an effort to feel more substantial, more lasting, more important.

 

Now, the ego isn’t the metaphysical bad guy here. It’s not necessary to don a white hat and run the ego out of town. Too many expressions of spirituality do exactly this. But just try getting through life without a strong and competent ego. It’s like the closet organizer of our psyche – taking all the various bits of our life and fashioning a tidy sense of self, giving us an identity. You want that identity, friends. The psych wards are filled with poor souls who are lacking a good, solid, functional ego.

 

But it’s the unhealthy ego I’m talking about. Even here, the goal is not to get rid of it, but to help it get with the spiritual program. And the insight of all mystical traditions of every faith is that the way to get with that program is to put it in service of a higher purpose. This is why you see testosterone-filled professional football players go down on one knee and point to the skies after they score a touchdown. They’ve learned that if their ego isn’t serving the team, it can destroy that team. If the ego isn’t serving God or Spirit, or at least some higher purpose, it can wreak havoc in our own lives as well. The economic crisis is directly correlated to our financial institutions being run by egos without the benefit of having a higher purpose. We exist to magnify, like Mary, some higher power – to be able to point beyond ourselves to the greater good that we are dedicated to, with all our heart and soul and mind.

 

This capacity to Magnify God by giving ourselves to a transcendent project enables us to identify with Mary. We have an animal nature and we have a spiritual nature, both of which are necessary and good. But what the metaphor of the virgin birth is about – and it is metaphor, not history – is an affirmation that there is a sacred space within us reserved for Spirit. No thing and nobody else can fill it. It is pure and chaste, in the sense that it remains untouched by adventures and appetites of our wayward egos. 

 

We are all virgins in the sense that the touch that stirs us most deeply – that which brings forth our unique human potential to be vessels of divine creativity – is the touch of Sacred Mystery. It is the seduction of Spirit that causes us to realize our higher purpose of giving birth to the sacred. When we consent to the touch of God and agree to be vessels for the birth of Christ, we know something of what it means to be the virgin Mary.

 

Kenotic Spirituality

 

Mary enjoys what scholars refer to as a “kenotic” spirituality. Kenosis means to empty oneself, to give of oneself, to pour oneself out. It is the opposite of storing up and filling up. In the Magnificat and in response to the angel who announces her pregnancy, Mary creates space for God. “Let it be to me according to your word”, she responds to the angel’s invitation to be the mother of God. The divine fills her up in this Christmas drama, literally and metaphorically, and then she delivers the divine in the baby Jesus. This is the kenotic pattern. We don’t seek out experiences of God in order to feel more substantial or more holy or more enlightened. Rather, God bubbles up from within and fills the vessel that is our soul and then we pour the divine back out into the world. “Filling up and spilling over – it’s an endless waterfall”, is how singer-songwriter Chris Williamson puts it.

 

Some of you may remember the film Babette’s Feast. It’s a very simple, beautiful story about a celebrated chef in Paris during the riots of 1871. She loses everything – her restaurant, her money, and her family. She takes refuge in a very austere religious community in Denmark. This community is on the verge of collapsing: its remaining members are very old and very cranky. Out of the blue she receives a package informing her that she has won the lottery. She makes a decision right then and there that what she is going to do is to use to create a feast like this religious community had never seen. She orders in all the gourmet food, the cutlery, the finest French wine, and the linen. The day of the banquet arrives and they all sit down for the meal – with very stern and disapproving faces at the extravagance. It takes times, but slowly as one course after the other is presented, and the fine wine is consumed, the faces of the Christians begin to soften; one of them accidentally smiles before he can catch himself. Eventually, the joy begins to spread around the table, and they are sure that they are experiencing a foretaste of heaven’s banquet.

 

When it is over, one of them asks Babette if she will be returning to Paris soon, now that she has acquired a fortune. “What fortune?” she responds. “I spent all 3 million francs on the banquet.” Filling up and spilling over”. She delivered the divine. She sung her Magnificat. Her soul glorified the Lord.

 

We sing the Magnificat by pouring ourselves out for the betterment of the world. “For God so loved the world”, writes the author of John’s gospel, “that He gave…” This self-emptying, I hope you have gathered by now, is different than obligatory sacrifice. Rather, it is an outpouring of love. Love in – love out. Space created. Love rushes in – love pours out. This is just the nature of God, and we are made in that very image. It’s the secret of knowing joy as well. The unhealthy ego gets in the way of this cycle of filling up and spilling over. Much of the spiritual journey is simply about finding out how one’s unhealthy ego has inserted itself – like a dam – in this eternal flow - and then removing the obstacles. Easier said than done, I know, but not impossible. As Mary says, with God all things are possible.

 

I’ll end with an observation about the Magnificat. I never liked the line in the song that sends the rich away empty. The poor are filled with good things, but the rich get their comeuppance. This is how I had always interpreted the passage – a kind of reversal of the social order. I probably didn’t like it because I identified with the rich who were sent away from the table in shame. But, through this kenotic lens – the rich actually receive a blessing. They are sent “empty” away. The came to the table stuffed full of all the things the world has to offer. But there is no room for Spirit. At Christ’s table they receive the grace to release their attachment to all this stuff, and to recover the gift of holy emptiness – through which all blessings flow and Christ is born.

 

They are sent as we are sent, not in shame, but full of joy proclaiming with Mary that we’ve been given the opportunity to magnify our God by the way we live! God’s own virgins – seduced by Spirit’s persuasive caress – to give birth to the Christ.