In our eyes

The world is a macrocosm of the man,
and the man, a microcosm of the world.
What is true of one is true of the other.
Our lives are formed in the main
by the flow of missed opportunities,
our action/reaction selves
skewed by our mistakes,
as all the while we fume and foment
never noticing success is not happiness,
nor seeing salvation and joy lie before us
in plain sight.

So the world, forced by willful ignorance
to drag untold tonnage of hapless memories,
called ‘history’,
and distracted by its lust to hoard even more,
joins the chase for hides of outward glory
assisted by hell’s hounds,
and misses every worthy event and personage
ever to cross its threshold
or pitch a tent in its domain.
Seeking what cannot be found,
the world, and the man,
both forfeit what is theirs.

Today the Church sings
the birth of an unknown Jewish girl.
Unknown, even unnamed by the world of her time,
never recognized as anyone,
she passed her life in obscurity,
except when she was exposed
in the circle of her family and clan
as a possible adulteress,
a pregnant maiden betrothed to an old man,
with nothing to defend herself and her honor
but the words of an angel,
that she alone saw.

Yet, while the world was looking the other way,
making much of the latest royal scandals
and divine pronouncements of distant emperors,
this virgin went about growing up,
serving her aged parents,
later only her widowed mother,
until she came of marriageable age,
and a different type of history,
hidden from the world but hallowed before the ages,
began to unfold in the closet of her heart.

Without ever knowing it,
of an obscure people that the only God had chosen
for her humanity as well as His,
she became the last and most faithful among them,
without learning
having surpassed by her silent surrender
to the Divine philanthropy
all their most sacrosanct notables,
as well as their prophets, priests and kings.
Hidden from her by her humility,
from the world by its pomp,
she was crowned Queen.

The last true Hebrew,
and the first hearer of the Good News,
she beckons both to her ancestral people,
the children of Israel,
and to the race of those begotten of her
by the Spirit of her Divine Son, the Christians,
inviting them and us
to the feast prepared before all worlds,
to that banquet for which she was born,
and for which we too, through her, are both born
and made welcome, all first-borns.

The world has missed her birth, her life,
her falling asleep, her leave-taking,
just as it missed the man-coming of her Divine Son,
His crowning with thorns,
His enthronement on the Cross,
His hell-harrowing rest,
His abundant rising from the tomb,
and His man-taking into the Divine Nature.

But we need not follow in its wake.
Our Lady Theotokos, Mary of Nazareth,
the unwedded Bride,
is in our eyes.
xx