Our Mission
We are a center for experiential education, rooted in the Gospels, encouraging the transformation of human consciousness through contemplation, and equipping people to be instruments of peaceful change in the world.
June 1, 2011
The Annunciation (detail), Henry Ossawa Tanner, Paris, France 1898,
The Philadelphia Museum of Art. http://www.philamuseum.org
Mary, Icon of Receptivity
The unusual numbers of barren women in the Old Testament are clever symbols of “I can’t do it, but God can!” This is also personified in the virginity of Mary, but it is still the same Jewish symbol. In Mary, and in us, we see our incapacity to make it happen by our own devices, by our own cleverness and by our own sexuality, but we can also “let it be” and let God see in us what we cannot see in ourselves.
God “regards” (regardez, French: “to look at”) us, and thus gives us our identity. We must allow ourselves to receive and rest in the divine gaze. This is exactly what Mary says in her Magnificat: “he has looked upon me in my lowliness” (Luke 1:48). All holiness is the result of a deep mirroring experience from God.
We all stand before God just as we are: naked, exposed, with no worthiness or even unworthiness to claim as an identity. It is just such emptiness or “lowliness” that God can fully “lift up” (Luke 1:52). This is surely not what any of us expected.
Adapted from an unpublished talk given in Tucson, Arizona
Starter Prayer:
Here I am Lord;
I come to do your will.
If you are inspired by Fr. Richard's Daily Meditations,
please consider receiving both
Radical Grace, the publication of the CAC
and visiting the CAC Mustard Seed Resource Center!
