The Liturgy of the Word
Isaiah 35:1-10; Canticle 15; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11
A Meditation (with apologies for the length)
Nelba Márquez-Greene pretty much had the house ready for the coming of Christmas by the start of the second week of December. It was a good thing, because the wife and mother of two young children who worked outside the home had a lot going on as did just about everyone.
This particular week, on Thursday, she stopped the usual frantic drill and slowed down. Errands and laundry and even cleaning up the mess on the floor could wait. That morning, her 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace, had knocked down the entire nativity set off the piano. Baby Jesus was still in little pieces on the floor when Ana came home from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Ms. Márquez-Greene can't explain it, but something compelled her that evening to just ignore it all and instead corral Ana, son Isaiah and her husband Jimmy into the car.
"And off we went to the Cheesecake Factory," she says, "where we had our final time as a family of four." It was, she says, the greatest gift. "We were sitting there taking goofy pictures, Ana was making faces," she says. "We had second dessert. We had, like, three pasta dishes. I'm so grateful we had that."
After the school shooting the next morning, where Ana and 25 others were killed, her parents wondered how they'd ever feel whole again."
(The above and much of what follows can be found at http://www.npr.org/2013/12/14/250786728/a-grieving-newtown-mothers-motto-love-wins)
The interview describes something of the painful journey that family has taken in the last year. And the journey includes creating a family motto: Love wins. Ms. Marquez-Greene, a mental health therapist, says, "At the end of the day, I don't know why this shooting rampage happened. I didn't get to choose it. But I get to choose my response now. I do get to choose now."
This past Dec. 2, 500 people packed a conference for the Ana Grace Project, aimed at building community, connections and compassion. As Márquez-Greene sees it, these qualities are the antidote is to the kind of isolation that always seems to be the story of deranged mass shooters.
"People say to me, 'I can't believe what that monster did to your baby!' Well, you know, it's true something terrible happened to Ana," Márquez-Greene says. "But if we even use that language, 'monster,' if we talk like that, we already make a separation between us and them. And it doesn't work that way."
Márquez-Greene says her own compassion continues to be tested - like at her conference, when she was setting up a candle for each of the lives lost on Dec. 14. She thought of the shooter, who killed himself, and his mother, who he also killed.
"Do we have a table with 26 candles, or do we have a table with 28?" she says. "We put 28, because at the end of the day, it's a gesture of the compassion to need help us move forward."
Ms. Márquez-Greene says. "Love wins. This is what we taught her: to honor, to praise, to be loving. We want to remember Ana's life twice as loudly as her death."
Echoing the song of Miriam, Mary sings: "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior...He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty...."
The coming of Messiah turns the usual order of things upside down. The landscape changes as dramatically as mountains brought low and valleys filled, and is as puzzling as a lush desert in the midst of summer. Every infirmity - physical, emotional, spiritual - abolished. And all flesh shall witness the salvation, the wholeness, of God's shalom.
God continues to break into our lives with such magnificat power, turning us upside down. Nelba Márquez-Greene's witness gives me great gift in this season, as she, too, sings a magnificat: Love wins. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
