Treasure Your Story
Mary treasured all these words in her heart (Lk. 2:19).
Perhaps you too have had occasion to treasure in your heart mysterious words you heard, events that were not very clear, unforgettable encounters, or else vibrant memories that yielded new meaning, gave rise to a fresh way of seeing things and prompted you to take unprecedented steps. Weaving together various snippets of life with the thread of memory means allowing Mystery to reveal the meaning and direction of our journey.
As we begin a new year, life offers us its best wishes and also a joyous adventure! But it doesn’t leave us on our own. It gives us a traveling companion: Mary of Nazareth. The evangelist Luke presents her as a teacher of listening and of how to preserve memories, not allowing time to fall into the “waste-basket” of oblivion. Mary was a woman who, through constant meditation on the Sacred Scriptures, was able to treasure every fragment of her personal life story and see in it the ways of God. Precisely because of this contemplative activity (cf. Lk. 2:29, 51), she takes on a new name: the symballousa. The verb symballo means “to put together; converge; unite disparate elements; fit together different pieces.” Mary, therefore, helps us to unify the slivers of our experience–things that are very different from one another–and teaches us that in order to understand our identity and vocation, it is indispensable to “store up” the opposites of life and connect them together in the fire of the Word. Contradictions take on meaning only in the light of the Word, meditated on and preserved in the heart. So what are we waiting for?
Let us plunge into the depths of our heart, without fear. Mary will take us by the hand, as she did with Jesus long ago, and gradually lead us into the silence of prayer, so as to listen to the voice of the Scrip-tures and unify around the Word all the fragments of our life scattered over time, threading them to-gether like precious pearls into a unique necklace!
Echoes of the Psalms
I remembered my song
in the night
and meditated
on it in my heart.
(Psalm 77:6).
