In this sublime season of the Christian year which indeed stretches across three seasons, Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany the image of Mary and her son Jesus is the focus of how we might understand Wisdom Christianity. Wisdom Christianity is the marriage of contemplation and a commitment to justice for humanity and the earth. It is the term I use to describe the way Episcopalians in the Diocese of California are now, as I am tentatively beginning to experience you, and how we might be, more and more.
My own understanding of Jesus and his mother has been enhanced by life transitions, by standing in the doorway of new places and being allowed to see familiar figures anew.
As many of you know, moving to Alabama introduced me to Jonathan Myrick Daniels, the Episcopal deacon from New Hampshire who was martyred in Hayneville, Alabama, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, in August, 1965. Through participation in the annual pilgrimage that honors Jonathan and all the Alabama Martyrs I learned about his life, about some of his motivations, his character, and commitments.
I learned that after graduation from the Virginia Military Institute he soon enrolled at what was then called Episcopal Theological Seminary (now Episcopal Divinity School, where Bill Rankin was Dean when I met him). There, during Evening Prayer, Jonathan heard with new ears the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), Mary’s great song of hopeful expectation, used during every Evening Prayer service. He heard Mary singing for justice – a song that was fulfilled in her son Jesus.
Jesus himself though, sang for the world to join him in his prayerful confrontation with evil in the world, and his loving embrace of all who were scorned. Jonathan heard the Magnificat as a living call to follow his Savior, and left ETS to go to Selma and join in the work of voter registration.
Before moving to Alabama, I had studied the Magnificat in terms like those that framed Jonathan’s understanding of this hymn, as a song of justice, but this understanding had not penetrated my heart. There, in the Diocese of Alabama, it did. I felt my years of practicing centering prayer connect to a knowledge about the Christian commitment to justice and reconciliation in a new way. At that time, in Alabama, a new understanding of what I call Wisdom Christianity was coming clear to me: the intimate interconnection between contemplation and acting for justice and reconciliation.
Now, here, in this Advent season, in our new home, I have stood in another doorway and seen Mary and Jesus. Last week Sara Miles, founder of the Food Pantry at St. Gregory’s, invited me to come early on the morning of December 12, the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to the Mission to join the throng gathered for the festal celebration.
The feast celebrates the appearance of the Virgin Mary to an indigenous Mexican, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, on a hill in what is now Mexico City in 1531. The significance of the apparition is that Our Lady appears in the Americas, to an indigenous person. She is still the mother teaching her children that God loves the poor and the outcast, and singing her belief that justice and reconciliation will triumph with help.
It was rainy in the Mission before dawn on December 12 this year. We couldn’t find the procession, so we went into the beautiful, dark, St. Peter’s Church on 23rd and Florida. A few people were already there in the chilly space, praying. The priest came to a microphone and announced that the procession was on its way, and that we would wait, praying for them to come before the service would begin.
Soon, larger numbers of people began coming through the doors, carrying bunches of flowers, candles, children holding the hands of their parents, glowing after the loving attention of parents putting ribbons in their hair, scrubbing and making them ready to be in the presence of the loving, validating Mother of the Savior.
The large space was soon crowded, the lights came on, and a mariachi band, superb, led a joyous procession into the church. I looked forward over the huge crowd, all gathered so joyfully in the dawn to remember how God loves them, before they would go out to jobs all over San Francisco. I have to believe that many of those present are immigrants, and many of these illegal. Their jobs that day, I imagined, would be long and hard, and carried out in an atmosphere of insecurity.
But they began that day in hope and in the beauty and strength of prayer. I heard Sara say, later over coffee, “These are your people, Marc.” What I told Sara then was that I had already been at one joyous celebration for the Virgin of Guadalupe, the previous Sunday, at El Buen Pastor. At an afternoon service some 150 people gathered. We celebrated the Eucharist, baptized, confirmed, received people into the Communion, and blessed first Communions. All this was done before the altarcito that held the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Madre Anna told Sheila and me that many of the communicants either walked or took the bus to attend the service.
The Diocese of California has shown me a renewed image of Mary and Jesus, and asked me and us all, in this very season of ardent expectation, to recommit ourselves to prayer and to the justice and reconciliation that flow from our connection to God.
Many beautiful spiritual paths are being walked in our diocese: Cursillo, Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, Taizé services, to name only a few. And the prayerful engagement of justice and reconciliation is as strongly evident here as anywhere I know or can imagine. Perhaps we can work toward understanding the two modes, of contemplation broadly conceived, and action for justice and reconciliation, can be seen as one activity, In this season “The Wisdom from on high has come down to earth.” Let us receive this wisdom in its fullness, and learn how to share it with others.
The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus
Bishop