As preached by Brother Luke
Holy Wisdom Church
Glory
be to Jesus Christ!
I can remember seeing, years ago, a group
of nuns in full habit climb up our back stairs and proceed into our cloister!
Surprise! "Who are you?" I asked, plus some other questions like,
"what are you doing here?" "Visitors, just looking around,"
they said! Well, I escorted them out of the cloister.
I would guess we can all remember
occasions when we bumped into people in unexpected places and asked the
question, "Who are you?" What would we say if someone asked us that
question? Of course, our answer would depend, in part, on the circumstances. No
surprise then, that at the Annunciation the Virgin Mary in seeing the angel
would wonder: "who are you?" And then after hearing his message,
would ponder: "Who am I?"
The feast we celebrate today gives us a
wonderful example of how icons can symbolize visually what would require many
paragraphs of text to accomplish. Just a glance at the icon, not to mention a
time of meditation, clearly shows what lies in the center of Mary's life:
Jesus.
"Who are you?" is the question
we wrestle with throughout our lives. Most often people answer this question by
identifying the work they do, or the activities they enjoy, or the groups they
belong to, or the place they come from, or the family tree they inhabit, but
seldom do they consider deep down who are they when they take off all these
wrappings and look to the core reality of their person.
What did Joseph hear from the angel in
his dream? "Don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife. What is in her is
of the Holy Spirit." [Mt 1:20] What is in us is of the Holy Spirit! What
is in us is nothing less than God.
What did we hear in the Letter to the
Hebrews? "Christ has already come as the High Priest of the good things
that are already here." [Heb 9:11] "The good things that are already
here!" And these good things are to be found within us, but we have to
strip away what is overing them up. We have to shed that false image of
ourselves. Christ's language is that we have to die to ourselves in order to
live in Christ. Thomas Merton would say we have to let go of our false self in
order to find our True Self.
Richard Rohr captured the essence of this
idea when he said "What really has to die is our false self, created by our own
mind, ego, and culture. It is a pretense, ... that gets in the way of who we
are and always were--in God." [Yes and ... ,p. 254] Or as St.
Paul says in the Letter to the Colossians, [3:3-4] "you have died, and your life is hidden
with Christ in God. Your real life is Christ." The false self, we create, the true self, God
creates. Since God creates all things, God is in all things, including us.
Finding our true self, created and inhabited by God, is true freedom, a freedom
that is joyful, as the celebrated Romanian monk, Nicolae Steinhardt proclaims
in his Journal of Joy [p. 532].
All of this brings us back to the image
we are celebrating today. When we are finally able to rest calmly in the
reality that Christ is at the center of our lives, this recognition makes us
free, because anxieties evaporate since we do not have to prove anything to
anyone, especially ourselves. Then the expression we use in greeting each other
in the Divine Liturgy carries even more meaning.
Christ is in our midst!
