Ave Maria Meditations
God’s plan for the infant Christ was not Our Lady’s plan for Him. What good and lovely things she had to give up in order that His will should be done in her, not hers in Him in order that what she gave to Him should be herself. She had made the home in Nazareth ready for Him. In her mind for the nine long months of Advent, it had been His home.
Joseph had made the wooden cradle and had arranged sufficient work for the lovely months ahead. Mary had woven the blankets for the cradle and clothes for the Child. The lamp that was to burn in the darkness to light the Light of the World was set in its place. Everything in the plan was good and must surely be pleasing to God.
Yet God altered everything!
They were not to go back to Nazareth until the Child had outgrown His cradle and His first clothes. They were not to enjoy the privacy of four walls of their own; they were not to be restricted to the society of the few neighbors in the hamlet them; they were not to have the security of Joseph’s steady trade. From the stable in Bethlehem they were to fly into the desert and into Egypt, there to live as foreigners and exiles among the people who were strange to them, and to whom they were strange.
This happens so often, too, to those who foster the infant Christ in their souls. We like to plan the life that we shall offer to God and just the way that seems good and pleasing to us, to achieve holiness between four walls, with every modern convenience, undisturbed sessions of solitude, work, and prayer, and a selected number of friends on whom to exercise our charity, and with we live, reasonably, easily, at peace.
Yet God changes everything!
He sends us to where He wants to be, among those whom He wishes to be among, to do that which He wishes to do in our lives. He brings to the Bethlehem of our lives, those people to whom He wishes to show the infant Christ in us, those who are to give us something for Him, just as he brought who he would Bethlehem, the animals, angels, shepherds, and kings, all unlikely people, which proves that, although there are distinctions between different kinds of men in the world, when they come into Christ’s presence, there is to be no distinction, no selection. The rich and the poor, the ignorant and the learned, the laborer and the king must kneel together before the infant Christ.
+Caryll Houselander from Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross
