Magnificent Magnification

How does your soul magnify the Lord's presence in it?

I hardly remember anything from high school biology class. Perhaps this is due to the horror of dissecting frogs and the smell of formaldehyde that stuck with me for weeks, but I do recall enjoying using microscopes. On several occasions we had the task of identifying different parts of simple cells that had been placed on glass slides that we would put underneath the lens of the basic scope. With great pleasure I would shift the splices around until I could see the membrane walls, nucleus, cytoplasm, mitochondria, and of course the Golgi apparatus. Do not ask me what any of these parts are, as I really could not tell you, but I loved searching for them in ninth grade.

Oftentimes though as I was attempting to identify these particular parts of a basic cell I would move the slide such that it went beyond the sight of the microscope. Starring through the lenses I felt some disappointment as my eyes strained to see nothing there. A microscope serves no purpose at all if there is nothing to magnify.

A few years ago I was given a t-shirt that belonged to my grandfather. On one of his birthdays his family gave him this shirt, which features a picture of him on the front of it. In the picture he is holding up a magnifying glass to his teeth so that his smile appears much larger than usual. I can recall playing with that magnifying glass and doing the same trick he was doing in that picture. I also remember that if there was nothing at which to look the magnifying glass was pointless. Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” However, without God the story of Mary’s life and her soul appears blurry and without purpose, just like our own lives.

Most of the time I cannot begin to comprehend the Virgin Birth. It makes absolutely no sense from a reasoned, logical point of view. From the little I remember in biology class this is simply not how the birthing process happens. Part of me wants to say, “Other religions did this fantastic birth narrative thing, so Christians just wanted to do something similar.” And yet, if Mary’s ministry as the God-bearer happened without God, then her soul’s magnification would have been out of focus. We would not even remember her witness if it did not produce abundantly.

Mary’s life though was not just about the nine months in which she was the Theotokos (that is God bearer in Greek, and it is how the Greek Church refers to Mary). The earthly caretaker of Jesus the Christ walked alongside her son every step of his life. She cared for him when a child, she raised him up within her Faith Tradition, she pushed him to strive for greatness performing his first miracle at Cana, she did not rebuke him when Jesus said his disciples were his true family, and even when her own magnifying soul was pierced at Jesus’ death she remained faithful. I look at all of this and marvel. I also feel a little deflated, as though there is nothing in my own soul to be magnified. This is precisely the point though.

Our lives are not about what we accomplish. They are not about what we do or do not do on our own. They are not about the greatness that exists within our hearts (as all the Olympic commercials want to tell us), but rather as followers of Jesus our existence is about something else entirely. We, like Mary, are given the gift of magnification. What we magnify though is not something of our own creation alone, but instead what God creates with us within our souls.

There are countless ways to be microscopes and magnifying glasses for what God is doing within us. And, Mary shows us with her witness that it is not just about a fantastic moment when God comes to speak with us. Rather, to magnify we must do what Mary did “Ponder all these things in [our] hearts” (Luke 2:19). To amplify how God exists in our souls we must first be present enough within our own beings that we meet God in the home that is our hearts.