Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes

Lectionary: 330

“Can it indeed be that God dwells on earth? If the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain you,

how much less this temple which I have built!

Look kindly on the prayer and petition of your servant, O LORD, my God, and listen to the cry of supplication which I, your servant, utter before you this day.

The English Episcopal priest, John Donne, echoed Solomon’s sentiment in the second sonnet of La Corona.

Annunciation

Salvation to all that will is nigh; 

That All, which always is all everywhere,

Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,   

Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,

Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie 

In prison, in thy womb; and though He there 

Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He’ll wear,  

Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try. 

Ere by the spheres time was created thou           

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;

Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now   

Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother.   

Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room            

Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb.             

We should reflect upon the immensity of God often. During these winter months we might resign ourselves to confinement. Or, to use Donne’s terms:  prison, shutt’st in little room, and cloistered. We might not see the stars during February, or notice the crescent moon​ is waning.

But God’s immensity remains out there beyond our experience, and beyond our imagination. And that’s only the visible universe of space/time!

And then there is immensity of God’s mercy. How do we begin to appreciate that? Do I begin with the enormity of my sins forgiven? Or the scope of the Father’s sacrifice, who gave us his only begotten Son? Or the generosity of Jesus’s surrender to death for our salvation? Or the Blessedness given to Mary the Mother of God and our Mother.

Or we might take up the contemplation of sin in our world, among the billions of people. How we are trapped by the institutions we have created, and often turn violently upon each other.  As I drive the highway or observe thousands of people in a sports arena, I sometimes think, “The Lord died to save us from our sin.” And does!

We remember the astonishment of Saint John the Baptist, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

And then, sufficiently overwhelmed, we read Donne's poem again, and hear Solomon's prayer, "

Can it indeed be that God dwells on earth?

If the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain you,

how much less this temple which I have built!

The world is full of rational skeptics who challenge this assertion. They consider the Earth with all its creatures a speck in the universe, a nanosecond in endless time. Can there be a God of such vastness who bothers with this poor, bare, forked animal with its wars, disease, and waste of our Earthly home?

But our faith assures us. The Lord God of All Creation has chosen to live among us, in our little corner of the Universe. And we rejoice in the mystery revealed to merest children.