A Thought on Sunday

Mary Ponders in Her Heart

From the desk of Fr.Ignatius Waters CP

Sunday  December  18 , 2011

I agree with those who say there’s no deep thinking without deep feeling.  Even when we think we’re thinking rationally, how can we be sure that we are?  We regard our ability to reason as our glory but we are more than our minds.  We are body, mind and spirit and when we think, we are thinking with the whole of ourselves.  We think with our minds, yes, but also with our feelings, with our whole history and all our experiences.  When the scriptures talk about our hearts – that’s what is meant.  They are not referring to the heart, that marvellous little engine that keeps pumping the blood round our bodies for a whole lifetime!  They refer to our whole being, the depths of our being.  Jesus talked about people thinking in their hearts.  “What are these thoughts you have in your hearts?” he said to the Pharisees.  Thoughts in your hearts!  And that is what is meant when Luke’s gospel says Mary pondered all these things “in her heart.” ( 2:20).  She pondered (I love the word ‘ponder’) in her heart all that was happening in her life and all around her.

We talk about people who live in their heads.  They are almost afraid to be in their bodies; they’re afraid of their feelings; they’re afraid of what they cannot understand or control.  Mary wasn’t like that.  She was certainly afraid and she pondered in her mind and heart what it would mean to accept the invitation to carry in her womb the baby who would be God and man.  She pondered what it would mean for her; how Joseph would take it, how it would affect their relationship; how all her relatives and friends would take it; how impossible it would be to explain it to them.  She must have gone through real anguish in coming to a decision.  The process, I’m sure, took longer than appears from the simple story in today’s gospel before she was able to say, “Yes, Lord, be it done unto me according to your word.”  And did you ever think, if we didn’t have Mary’s ‘yes’, we wouldn’t have Christmas, we wouldn’t have Easter, and we wouldn’t have Jesus! What a mystery that is!

Of course, God’s Spirit was instructing Mary’s heart every step of the way.  You know how we’ve always prayed, “Come Holy Spirit, instruct the hearts of thy faithful.”   The great thing is that God’s Spirit is working in and instructing every human mind and heart.  Not just Catholic hearts or Christian hearts!  We are specially blessed in that we have more possibility of recognising what is going on.  But God’s Spirit is at work in those who have never heard of the gospel or Jesus and even more in the hearts of those who, for whatever reason, have stopped practising their Christian faith.  And those are many.  So lets pray today this lovely prayer from the Vatican Council:

“May Mary continue to intercede for us till all the peoples of the human family, whether honoured with the name of Christian or whether they still do not know their Saviour, are happily gathered into the one people of God.”   (Constitution on the Church)

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