I have dreams for what I want in this life, like anybody. Sometimes they overwhelm me with longing, sometimes I cling to them much more than I ought, and sometimes I get stubborn. I know too well the way a dream from the Father of Lights can dim and cloud from my greedy hands. But by some grace I also know how one breath from him can restore it.
I have been undone lately by the way I have to open my hands to receive my Savior’s body and blood at the altar. I cannot receive him with clenched fists. My husband accepts the Eucharist on his tongue– his hands don’t even enter into it– that mirrors a heart posture I’m not sure I’m ready for yet. But then there is a voice inside me that urges– maybe that’s all the more reason to do it, to trick my heart into deeper devotion through my body, just like kneeling. Who am I to think God needs my hands to give himself to me, to give me his will and all its beauties?
This weekend I heard our priest say something that truly just stunned my mind and shifted my vision.
When Mary said “Be it unto me as you will,” at that very moment, Christ came to dwell inside her. A baby is one with his mother. Jesus was one with Mary. And when we say Mary’s words to God “Be it unto me as you will,” he comes to dwell inside of us too. He becomes one with us. We all become like little Marys. When we receive Christ in the Eucharist and in the heart posture that says “Be it unto me as you will,” that is incarnation, that is God entering into us. Just as a priest is in the person of Christ to us, his congregation, we become in the person of Christ to the world.
I cannot get over the thought that there is nothing in the whole world we can do to thwart God’s plan for us. He orchestrates everything we do to the symphony that he is making of our life. The dissonance comes when we try to compose it ourselves, but even that he somehow makes beautiful. Fiat voluntas tua, let it be unto me as you will.
“We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.”
“Thy will be done. I yield up everything.
“The life is more than meat”—then more than health;
“The body more than raiment”—then than wealth;
The hairs I made not, thou art numbering.
Thou art my life—I the brook, thou the spring.
Because thine eyes are open, I can see;
Because thou art thyself, ’tis therefore I am me.”
–George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul, January 16th