Parish of Llandudno North Wales, Rector's letter

August 2013

I’ve been called all sorts of funny things in my time - complementary and otherwise – but at Walsingham last month I was called something very odd indeed: I was told that I was a ‘little container’!

And it wasn’t just me. In fact all the pilgrims present at the main Pilgrimage Eucharist in the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham that day were branded as ‘little containers’ during the sermon by Bishop Lindsey Urwin, the Administrator of the Shrine. What on earth did he mean by this? Should we have been deeply offended or very excited?

It all stemmed from a trip Bishop Lindsey had recently made to South Africa. There in the townships he had seen many large shipping containers used as shops or workshops or even homes. These containers, which had been made to transport goods all over the world, were now being used for very different purposes indeed.

Seeing these containers brought to Bishop Lindsey’s mind some words from an ancient Christian prayer directed to Mary, the Mother of the Lord, which spoke of her as ‘containing the uncontainable’. When Mary was pregnant she contained within the confines of her womb something which filled the whole universe – the divine Son of God. Within this tiny space was the Lord of all things. So, from ancient times Mary was called by Christians the ‘God-bearer’.

At the Annunciation, when Gabriel came to tell Mary she had been chosen to be the mother of the Lord, God was dependent on her for the fulfilment of his plans to redeem the human race. He needed his divine Son to be conceived and grow in the womb of a human mother. He could simply have used Mary as a kind of surrogate just to carry the divine child, to be merely the instrument of his will. But he didn’t. God never forces his will on anybody – even in a matter so vital as this. So he wanted Mary to give her heartfelt consent to his plan; needed her to choose to offer humanity to God And as we know she did just that: her reply to Gabriel was ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ From that moment on her womb ‘contained the uncontainable’ and the stage was set for the coming into the world of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

This month we celebrate the feast of Mary, the Mother of the Lord, an opportunity to thank God for this woman from an obscure village in Palestine whose love for Him was so great that she was willing to give herself body and soul to the divine will. As the hymn puts it: ‘She gave her body for God’s shrine, her heart to piercing pain, and knew the cost of love divine, when Jesus Christ was slain'.

But what about the business of calling us ‘little containers’? In his sermon Bishop Lindsey went on to remind the pilgrims that, like Mary, Christians are called to be ‘containers of the uncontainable’. Although Mary had a special vocation as the Mother of the Lord to contain Christ in her womb, all Christians are indeed bearers of Christ in their own way. We have all been Christened – made Christ’s – he dwells within us through baptism and faith. We carry him wherever we go. Our vocation therefore is to make him known to everyone we meet by allowing him to shine out of us. So to be called a ‘little container’ is indeed to be given a title of great honour and dignity. What a wonderful vocation, what an awesome responsibility!

Now shipping containers can be bashed around a lot as they travel around the world. No doubt those in South Africa which Bishop Lindsey saw being used as businesses or shops etc. had been ‘retired’ because they had been damaged over the years. Well, we too have been bashed around a bit in our lives too. We’ve often not made a very good job of being containers of the Lord. And yet, like the sedentary containers in South Africa we still have a job to do and a vocation to fulfil. As we celebrate the feast of Mary and give honour to the greatest of all the saints, let’s resolve like her to be containers of the uncontainable that all the world might come to know and love her Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Fr. John

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