Rector’s Epiphany Blessings and a Very Happy New Year from our home to yours!

A reflection on “Magnificat”
My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath magnified me : and holy is his Name. And his mercy is on them that fear him : throughout all generations

Maud Lewis (1903-1970) “Sleighing into town” (image in newsletter)
Maritime folk artist Maud Lewis from Digby County, Nova Scotia met her husband Everett, by responding to his ad for a housekeeper, not a wife. However husband and wife is what they became. Everett’s tiny one room house with a small sleeping loft, became their home. The 12 feet by 13 feet matchbox house was without the benefit of electricity or indoor plumbing and the smoke from the wood stove in these cramped quarters, gradually led to Maude’s pulmonary lung disease. From a chair by the window in that small house, Maud, who was riddled with painful rheumatoid arthritis and challenged with multiple birth defects, affecting both her arms and hands as a result of childhood polio, painted for pure joy, with no experience or exposure to art, out of her soul and paint brush grasped in twisted hands, she magnified the Lord from sunrise to sunset. Her simple pictures of birds, animals and scenes radiate great joy and delight. Clearly living in abject poverty with a man who became more and more stingy and severe, yet she was unstoppable in her passion. While her physical suffering increased her life was marked with a rich outpouring of hundreds of bright happy paintings on any square inch of surface around her, so pots and pans, bottoms of pie plates, cookie sheets, kettles and desks, walls, doors and windows, inside and out, became her canvas,. If you lived near Marshaltown, you would have seen a tiny quiet woman with a delightful smile bundled up accompanying her husband on his daily rounds peddling fish. They would try and sell her hand painted cards for 25 cents.

Most days for Maud were spent sitting on a chair by the front window, with its good natural light for painting. Maud didn’t have a television, a small radio was her cherished means of connecting with the outside world and its news. Her husband more and more often in a miserly spirit, would hide her profits under floor boards or in jars buried in the garden. He would take the batteries out of the radio to conserve power, rather than have Maud waste it on listening to music. But sing Maude would, and dance she did, not necessarily with voice or body, although I suspect she did, but always with her paint brush.

At the age of 67, Maud - who developed a pulmonary lung disease due to constant exposure to wood smoke and inexpensive paints of all kinds - contracted pneumonia and died in hospital. She was buried in a child’s coffin and laid to rest in a pauper’s grave. Maud lived a life that few would envy yet she is another Mary, she is God?s favored one, blessed among woman, and her life encourages us to appreciate that to be blessed by God looks very different from the way the world understands blessing. Mary said to the angel Gabriel: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.” With this answer, all the heavens rejoice, and the plan is set in motion that would cause a new light to shine in the darkness, and Mary glorified God, she sang a magnificat all her life, quietly, loudly, deeply, courageously, joyfully... We want, with Mary, in a broken and fearful world, to be not be afraid to magnify the Lord, to know our Magnificat. . We want to face whatever pain we face, whatever emptiness or disappointment, with faith in what is in us to bring to life and to our Lord.

We have the same choice Mary did and Maud did, to step away or step toward our Magnificat, If we say yes to God, we open ourselves up to the grace-full work of God. It is easy to puzzle at the inner brightness of Maud being at odds with a harsh life few would call blessed - and yet she sang the Magnifcat, it came out of every pore of her body
What magnificat do you sing?