Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 330

Solomon prayed, “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 Episcopal priest and second-only-to-Shakespeare poet John Donne, reflecting upon the humble birth of Jesus, wrote:

Seest thou my soul with thy faith’s eye how he / Which fills all place yet none holds him doth lie? / Was’t not his pity toward thee wondrous high / That would have need to be pitied by thee? / Kiss him, and with him into Egypt go / With his kind mother who partakes thy woe.

The poet echoes Solomon’s wonder upon God’s taking possession of the temple in Jerusalem. Though it was far larger and more beautiful than the stable and its manger, it could not compare to the majesty of God.

A few years later, in that same temple, the prophet Isaiah would have an ecstatic vision of God. Overwhelmed, he cried out, “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

Isaiah’s awe would influence the Gospel portraits of Jesus and, 13 centuries later, at a time when the Roman Catholic Church could build the largest, grandest, most expensive churches in the world, Saint Francis would again be swept away by Isaiah, the Gospels and his faith-vision of God.

Another English poet, Kathleen Raine, wrote

Oh how can virgin fingers weave / A covering for the void, / How can my fearful heart conceive / Gigantic solitude? / How can a house so small contain / A company so great? / Let in the dark, / Let in the dead, / Let in your love tonight.

 
The Franciscan theologian Bill Short wonders why God would repair the tragedy of human sin, which amounts to nothing more than a pothole in the universe, with a Taj Mahal! The Lord God of the ever-expanding universe with its billions of galaxies, stars and planets might easily have dismissed the Earth and its inhabitants as a failed experiment. The story of Noah and the Flood indicates that he considered it. Short concludes the Lord intended to be born in our universe, on our Earth, of a humble woman since the beginning. 

Christians are duty-bound to contemplate these mysteries -- as we do with our daily rosary. Without these soul-satisfying contemplations our souls dry up and we lose the joy which makes life meaningful.