The wonder of my being

Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”

Today Danni and I went on a retreat called 'An Advent Journey with Mary', given by an elderly Carmelite friar from Ireland. Mary is Danni's focus for Awake the Dawn, not mine, so I am entering her territory in writing about the retreat. (This is rarely a sensible move to make - the last time such a thing happened, as I was finning through a coral lagoon twenty-eight metres down in the Red Sea, an indignant moray eel shot out of its hole to register a pointed complaint.) What I want to write about here is self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge that Mary possessed so absolutely.

St Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite reformer and mystic, realised that when she was at her closest to God she was at her closest to Teresa. We are accustomed to seeing God as a separate entity, the Almighty enthroned in the sky. If we could only understand that "this God is not 'out there', but intimately present to me, in the blood pulse of my life," as the Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows puts it in her book To Believe in Jesus, sinful behaviour would no longer seem so attractive. We would recognise it for what it is - self-strangulation. Anything that cuts you off from God cuts you off from yourself. You go against who you are, and that's the pain of it.

This was a kind of pain that Mary never experienced, as God preserved her from sin from the moment of her conception. The freedom and self-knowledge that resulted from this gift of God is made clear in the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a saint who has special meaning for Pebles as she almost certainly had autism. Among other things, Bernadette struggled notably with speech and language. When told by a teacher that she was too stupid to learn anything, Bernadette replied, "I know how to love God." Yet it's unlikely that this French peasant child from a desperately poor family, who grew up gnawing on candlewax to satisfy her hunger pangs and was practically illiterate, would ever have been recognised for her God-love if she hadn't received visions of the Virgin Mary in the filthy grotto of Massabielle. She was fourteen years old at the time.

Mary (or Aquero, as Bernadette called her) made no prophecies. She didn't make a bare rosebush flower when the bishop asked for this to happen as proof of the visions' authenticity. She spoke very little during the apparitions themselves. She did, however, reveal her identity to Bernadette in the child's own dialect: "Que seroy era Immaculada Concepciou."

I am the Immaculate Conception. I am the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette ran to the house of the local priest who had demanded to know the apparition's name, repeating the unfamiliar phrase under her breath to prevent herself from forgetting it. At the presbytery, the priest tried to adjust the odd phraseology. Surely the woman had said "I am Mary Immaculate" or something along those lines? But Bernadette remained firm. I am the Immaculate Conception. This was what she had heard, and this was what she maintained.

Mary's words to St Bernadette Soubirous, the girl to whom Pebles refers as 'the one everybody thought was stupid', are pregnant with knowledge of God and knowledge of the self. This is why the apparitions of Lourdes resonate with me in a way that the apparitions of Fatima cannot. Mary's simple statement of being, given in reply to the priest's demand for her name, reminds me of God's answer to Moses in similar circumstances: "I am."

This intensely personal knowledge of yourself, this assurance of your place in the universe, grows deeper as you grow closer to God. This is why the psalmist was able to write, "I praise You for the wonder of my being." But how many of us view our being as something wondrous? How many of us can sing those words from the psalm and really mean the song?

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars -
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
- St Augustine

If we really want to prepare a place for God in our lives, we must not pass ourselves by. We must remember God's reply to Moses, making it the basis of our preparation and our understanding - an understanding that was personified by Mary.

Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”