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When we know we’re not really transforming culture, we’re not really changing the world, we’re not really having a great deal of influence at the higher levels, we move to the level of micromanagement. We find some little tiny world where we can be in control and right, where we can be pure and clean. We might as well be saying, “I can’t clean up the world, so at least I’m going to clean up my living room,” or “I cannot really change and influence people, so I am going to demand total conformity from the pulpit.” Many of us act out some version of this. I empty all my wastebaskets.

The gospel is not about winners over losers; the gospel really is about win/win—but very few get the message! I have to admit, ashamedly, that some people in the business and education worlds are better at this than some people in the church. They are beginning to understand that life cannot simply continue to be posited in terms of winners and losers. There has to be a way that we both can advance together. Mothers tend to have a head start in understanding this as a result of negotiating and compromising with their own children—whom they want to love equally and fully.

Vengeance seems so logical, but it doesn’t really work: It doesn’t advance human history. The wonder of the resurrection stories in the Gospels is that Jesus has no punitive attitude toward the authorities or his cowardly followers, and that the followers themselves never call for any kind of holy war against those who killed their leader. Something new has clearly transpired in history. This is not the common and expected story line. All Jesus does is breathe forgiveness.

Faith builds on a totally positive place within, however small. It needs an interior “Yes” to begin, just as the “Yes” of Mary began the entire process of salvation. God needs just a mustard seed-sized place that is in love, that is open to grace, that is thrilled, that has found something wonderful. We’ve got to go back and build from that “Yes” place—or faith is not faith. That’s why real faith is always rare. But God uses all of us, with our mixed motives. We have been given, not only the conclusion, but also the way to get there.

Living in a transitional age is scary: It’s falling apart, it’s unknowable, it doesn’t cohere, it doesn’t make sense, it’s all mystery again, and we can’t put order in it. Yet there is little in the biblical revelation that ever promised us an ordered universe. The whole Bible is about meeting God in the actual, in the incarnate moment, in the scandal of particularity, and not in educated theories—so much so that it is rather amazing that we ever tried to codify and control the whole thing.

No dream is perfect, no way the only way, no direction irreversible by God, whose way is the way of reversal, as Mary’s son soon will make clear when he leaves her and Joseph in the lurch at the age of twelve and does not accompany them home to Nazareth from Jerusalem. So Mary makes her way back to Jerusalem, where she and Joseph search anxiously among the crowds there for Passover, looking for their lost son. However, as they soon discover, he is not lost. He has, at twelve years of age, found himself. They find him in the temple teaching.

One misconception about the mystics is that they are singularly holy people, set apart from us ordinary Christians by their holiness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mystics are singular and different because of their mystical experiences, their visions, not their holiness. Holiness is about living in the grace of God, about virtue, especially the virtue of charity, which is available to all; it is not about visions. Holiness is about faith, not knowledge. Holiness is about abiding in faith, hope and charity. And such is available to everyone open to the Holy Spirit.

It is in work that we find the test of our relationship to the creation because work is the question of how we will use the creation. For Wendell Berry, work done well brings us into a wholeness and cooperation with the creation in which we can find health. Bad work destroys the connections that make life possible. For Berry good work is like a prayer—it is an act of both gratitude and return. Good work accepts the gifts of creation and uses those gifts to further their givenness. There are seeds that lie for decades in the soil, waiting for the right conditions before springing to life.

None of us humans, not even Mary, can hold onto glory. The ordinary passages through life and death continue as they did for Mary after meeting her son as the Risen Lord following the Resurrection. The mystic, however, has indeed seen the vision, has heard God’s voice. Those of us who have not are encouraged by their visions and voices to believe more firmly that beneath the appearances of our ordinary lives God’s glory lies hidden. It flares out from time to time and is seen by those to whom God chooses to reveal this parallel world we believe in but do not see.

As with every true prayer, the Magnificat does just that: it magnifies the Lord, focuses on the Almighty, who does great things among us, the One whose name is holy. We begin to change when our own plans scatter us, bring us down; God’s plans replace them—God’s plans, in the case of the mystic, are revealed in a vision or a voice speaking to the soul.