The other day, The Magnificat, or the Song of Mary, came alive for me in a whole new way. I realized I had been missing a very important part of her story. Yes, I had always seen that this was a song of praise about the wonderful God who will bring justice to earth. But it had always been a rather abstract song for me. I was reading it in my head, but the other day I had a heart reading: the words I had read before were about her, but when she cries out, My soul exults in the Lord and my Spirit magnifies my Lord, I experienced something of her love for God and I realised that what makes her faith and trust in the overthrowing of injustice was her true love of God and her experience of the presence of God. It was the experience of the presence of God that makes her soul burst with joy.

Mary, I believe, experiences the presence of God and that is what makes her sing that her soul is bursting with joy.

It seems to me that Christians spend a lot of time talking about God, but I believe God wants to communicate directly with us as people. We can know a lot about a person, but it is only when we are in an actual relationship of shared love that we feel we truly ‘know’ someone. Love is always a reaching beyond ourselves into the life of another. God wants us to experience Him in relationship, and when we do that, then we know and experience something that is so glorious, so beautiful that it made Mary shout out to Elizabeth in joy: My soul magnifies the Lord!

Her very soul was bursting forth in a song of joy. And that joy, I think, was because of her experience of who God really is: the power of life creating goodness, that force that seeks for equality and justice for all, that brings life out of dead seeds, that had powered through time in the lives of Abraham and all her ancestors and is still powering through her life, her body and the life and body of Elizabeth.

This experience of God is not a mental agreement that goodness and kindness are decent principles to live by. Mary is human, and humans experience bodily and in our spirits. We are given a spirit from God to reflect God, and Mary is not only reflecting him but magnifying him. As she recognizes his presence, who he really is, her soul sings and she has to share this joy with another.

Because Mary is sensing the true presence of God, she is able to truly feel the exhilarating joy of what life looks like with him. She sees a changed world, no longer driven by human violence and power games and greed, but a place where all can flourish. For that moment at least she is actually living in the divine world, and she knows, truly knows, the wonder and glory of that reality.

Mary is seeing what the world is like when the presence of God fills her senses. There is no final death, no hurt no tears. There is justice and peace for all. The birth of Christ is God entering the human world, (Emmanuel, God with us). And when God enters our lives, then we become fully human.

St Irenaeus says that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. I think this is what Mary experiences when she sings the Magnificat. I think that is what Stan Moses understood when he made this mosaic for the church of All Saints.

Mary’s story is not just about Mary, but about God’s relationship to humanity. That is, God’s relationship to each one of us and what he wants for each of us: our ascension to be with him forever.

Each of us has an eternal spirit inside us, and it is sensitive to God because it is made by God to connect to Him. However, I don’t think many pay much attention to their spirit, especially in western Christianity. I didn’t either, until God showed me the folly of my ways!

This spirit experience is not something coming from New Age Spirituality, it is as ancient as Christianity, known by all the great writers of Scripture, ancient theologians and saints of every age.

Jesus talks about it when the disciples ask him how to pray. He says in Matthew 6 .6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

The inner room is not a place, of course, but our inner being, our spirit place.  And that is the place where we meet God or, rather, where God meets us, for he is always there. Our spirit is born of his Spirit.

And when we are sensitive to his Spirit moving in us, then there is a joy and peace ‘that passes all understanding’. It passes understanding because our Spirit ‘hears’ and ‘sees’ and ‘feels’  in another way, not in the human rational part of our self (which is good and God-given so that we can learn and responds to the world) but in a way that nevertheless fills our body and senses so we do know.

This week: Can you spend some time with the Magnificat, or with the Stan Moses mosaic. What is God saying to you about who he is, and what he wants for you?