It's the last Sunday in Advent. Advent is a yearly pilgrimage to what Madeleine L'Engle calls "The Glorious Impossible." Mary, Mother of God, is the image, the icon, the poster-teenager of the glorious impossible.
Einstein had his version of the glorious impossible, too:
"Problems cannot be solved at the level of consciousness that created them."
You know that queasy feeling we get when we have a problem that looms over and in us that really needs to be solved, fixed, dealt with--and yet we can't figure out how to do it?
Einstein suggests those kinds of problems are only solved by growth. By fertile consciousness that knows how to gestate.
Mary, as she hears the angel say, "you will give birth to God," says two things:
First, "How is this possible--I'm a virgin?"
Last, "Let it be with me according to your word."
Our minds and other people often say of working with tough problems, "This just isn't possible!"
Sometimes they're wrong. Gestating with the glorious impossible is the only way to know which is which.
Life always turns out to be more than we can currently envision if we can just remember to modify our 'impossibles' by keeping 'glorious' in front of them
