Allow me to share a little indirect “patrimony” with you in the form of a collect that many of us former Anglicans, in this country, at least, used to hear on this final Sunday of Advent. Maybe you’ll recognize it:
Purify our consciences by thy daily visitation, that when thy Son our Lord cometh he may find in us a mansion prepared for himself.
This is an old prayer that dates at least to the eighth century (both in the Gelasian Sacramentary and the Missale Gallicanum vetus, if you want to know). It didn’t make the cut when the Roman Missal of 1570 was promulgated, so for the last five centuries, most Catholic heard what we heard (in the Divine Worship Missal) today: “RAISE up . . . O Lord, thy power, and come among us.” (In the post-1970 missals, the collect today is identical to the collect for the Angelus.)
In any case, I’ve always loved this old prayer about preparing a mansion for the Lord. I’ve often used that prayer as a personal devotion before Mass. It is what Advent is all about: preparing the way for the Lord.
Yet before we can understand how we must prepare ourselves, Holy Church sees fit to show us how Mary was prepared. The old prayers also speak of God preparing the body and soul of the Virgin Mary to be a “meet dwelling” for his Son. After all, Mary’s womb, not a manger, was the first dwelling place of the incarnate Son, and it is not at all surprising that Christians began early on suggesting the ways that God prepared Mary in advance for what was to happen. The angel’s description of Mary as “favored,” or “full of grace,” has long been interpreted as a sign not of Mary’s own personal merit, or even of her crazy good luck, but of the fact that she had already received in a sense the benefits of what she was about to do. Hence the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which we celebrated just a couple of weeks ago. Mary is, in fact, the fulfillment of the strange promise and prophecy that we hear this morning in 2 Samuel. David wants to build God a house—a beautiful, permanent temple to replace the roaming tabernacle that Israel had brought out of the wilderness. But God tells him, no, I will “make you a house. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me.” And so David, in the Virgin Mary his descendent, becomes the house of God.
When we pray that the Lord will “find in us a mansion prepared for himself,” we do not imagine that Christ will find in us a literal mansion as he did with Mary. Jesus is not literally born anew every Christmas from our bodies. But there is all the same something Marian about that prayer, even if we take it in a spiritual rather than a physical sense.
You see, it is easy for us to think that preparation for Christmas, or for meeting God, is a kind of work that we need to do. In a sense, we are a lot like David, and we long for a concrete way to move forward: make a plan, order the materials, hire craftsmen, build the house. But it turns out that God’s first interest, before any of that, is in David himself. And so it is with us: before we can do anything for God, God wants to do something with us.
Long before Mary received the message from an angel, God had prepared her. This preparation was God’s doing, not hers. Critics of traditional Catholic Mariology tend to think that a focus on Mary’s unique place in salvation history elevates her higher than she really deserves. But that is exactly the point: she didn’t raise herself to this high status, where God looked down and said, “There is a someone who deserves to do this great thing.” God prepared her from the moment of her conception for this mission. And what is so amazing about her is not, well, her, but her gracious ability to welcome the work of grace in her life, her willingness to stand to the side and say, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” That’s the beauty of Mary: the more we look to her, the more she points us to Jesus; the more we entrust ourselves to her, the more she carries us to Jesus.
How, then, can we prepare for Christmas? How can we prepare our hearts to be “a mansion fit” for the Lord? The short answer is that we can’t, but God can. God may indeed call us to build a temple, to construct some great work, as David longed to do. But in all of us the first step is much simpler and much less glamorous: to submit our will to God’s and allow him to prepare us for his Spirit.
We come to Christmas through Advent year after year not because Jesus is born again year after year, but because Jesus’ physical conception and birth of Mary is the model for the whole work of grace. God wants to be with us. God wants to have his Spirit dwell in us—for our salvation, for the consecration of the world, for the healing of humanity’s pain and alienation. But God does not and will not accomplish these ends by force, as much as we might want him to. God is amazingly, frustratingly patient. He waits, at every place and every time, to hear Mary’s response from us: “Be it unto me according to thy word.”
God wants to form us into our truest selves; God wants to make us shine with the light of his glory; God can prepare us as a mansion for his presence. But we hold the keys to that mansion, and all its doors and wings—however long they have been locked or closed up or hidden from view.
As we approach another Christmas, our task is the simplest and hardest thing in the world: let Jesus in. Open the doors, unlock the secret rooms, the darkened rooms of memory or of pain or fear; let him fill the whole house. Take him to those places that you thought he could never go. He has been there, and worse. And no matter the darkness or decay or clutter, he loves the house—he loves these souls of ours, because he made them, he made us, and we were made to receive him.
We beseech thee, Almighty God, to purify our consciences by thy daily visitation, that when thy Son our Lord cometh he may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.