Weekend Reflections for 1/31/19

Presentations: Mary’s, Jesus’ and Our Own

This weekend we celebrate a feast of presentations in the temple: Mary’s, Jesus’ and our own.

With an echo of the Christmas season we celebrated a few weeks ago, the elder figures Simeon and Anna prophesy about Jesus, and Mary and Joseph stand back in amazement at this fundamental article of faith: Jesus’ life will be given for others.

Mary and Joseph probably realized immediately that Jesus’s pattern of self-emptying will also be their own, unconditionally handing over the child and themselves to the challenges of life and death, in hope of life eternal.

When Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple, from then on this child was set on the path eventually leading back to Jerusalem, showing us the way.  What we can present today is our own open hands to follow him in the path of faith, not running from the word but growing on this journey with the child as he grows into his ministry and our redemption.

Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins compares our own life patterns to those presented in the temple on today’s feast.

Of her flesh he took flesh:

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He does take fresh and fresh,

Though much the mystery how,

Not flesh but spirit now

And makes, O marvellous!

New Nazareths in us,

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Where she shall yet conceive

Him, morning, noon, and eve;

New Bethlems, and he born

There, evening, noon, and morn—

Bethlem or Nazareth,

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Men here may draw like breath

More Christ and baffle death;

Who, born so, comes to be

New self and nobler me

In each one and each one

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More makes, when all is done,

Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

As we make the Spiritual Exercises at White House, we too can grow in our own presentations of the pattern of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, repeated in our daily prayer as well as annual retreats.

-Fr. Ted Arroyo, SJ