Advent challenges

I was praying by the light of the wreath this morning, observing the transferred feast (moved because the second Sunday of Advent took precedence) of Mary's Immaculate Conception by the grace of her Son. We too often get hung up on the time constraints of this article of faith as we perceive them and as God is not bound by them. I was taking encouragement from today's psalms and readings as I soaked in them. Then, in the middle of the the second passage in the Office of Readings, from St. Anselm, there arose my nemeses again:

My skepticism and the limits of my imagination. I suppose the two are one.

When studying theater and film, we discuss the willing suspension of disbelief. There are some stories in which we share that do not require it at all, beyond believing that anything outside of our self is real, for they are so rooted in this world that confirms itself to us day in and day out. Other stories we know cannot be real but they are fun for us to pretend that they could be, so we set aside our qualms for the purpose of our play.

This idea that the Creator of the universe has entered it in the form of one of us lies unreachably beyond us. How could it be?

We reject it because it is impossible to fathom the depths of love without limit, so strong that it refuses to force itself on us, in the hands of One who then uses his limitless power to invite us into himself by doing the most intrusive thing possible that still respects the integrity of our will.

God wants us to allow him to give us a priceless gift: not for us to suspend our disbelief, but to hand it over to him that he might transcend it and transform it as we yield it to him in honest humility. "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" If we will just acknowledge our limits and give them over to him, we consent to allow him to bring his gift to the world into focus for us, however briefly, in this moment. For we can only enter into one moment, and as we do we find, as Mary did, that the one moment of humble faith and trust leads us to the next one. And the more deeply and consistently that we humbly set aside the limits of our own mind to accept that God is greater than our limited minds can grasp - that all things are indeed possible with him, even those we cannot conceive (to borrow from the word of the day), even the honoring of our flawed will - the more our lives are transformed in him.

There is much more to be said, but I must be about this day in him. May the gift of faith be yours today, and mine.