We Magnify What We Worship

Joy comes from attaining the good we desire. When we finally receive what we've longed for, something in us settles: I have gained my beloved, now I can rest. But that raises a harder question: what actually fulfills us? Whatever the answer is, that is what we worship. And whatever we worship, we magnify, we make it larger in our lives.

This is the logic behind Mary's words in the Magnificat, "my soul magnifies the Lord." The question worth sitting with is what we are magnifying instead, and why? We magnify things constantly.  We magnify fear and anxiety when we chase money, success, and reputation, chasing what is by nature unstable. And more subtly, we magnify what is already small in us: our bitterness, pride, anger, resentment, judgment, comparisons, and the quiet lies we keep repeating to ourselves. We magnify fear and anxiety when we chase money, success, and reputation, chasing what is by nature unstable. And more subtly, we magnify what is already small in us: our bitterness, pride, anger, resentment, judgment, comparisons, and the quiet lies we keep repeating to ourselves.  All these expectations pile up and slowly consume the heart, until what we magnify is despair. So much energy goes into managing what other people think of us, curating how perfect we appear, rather than simply loving them and allowing ourselves to be loved. How can a soul magnify God while it stays insecure and wounded every time someone withholds approval, shuts down, gets defensive at correction, or needs constant affirmation? How can we make God look larger in our lives if we've become the reason someone else fails to experience his mercy?

Mary could receive everything from God because she had emptied herself first. She wasn't afraid to stand unguarded before a Father who loved her, stripped of the lies and expectations the world sets. That's the paradox at the center of the Magnificat: we magnify God not by acquiring more but by choosing to lose. It takes courage to lower ourselves on purpose, to say plainly, I opt out, I will not play this game. When smallness creeps in, the urge to judge, compare, resent, replay old pain, real strength is the ability to say, "I choose to lose this one." I choose to magnify the mercy of God rather than the misery of my own ego.

There's a genuine joy available in being forgotten, disregarded, overlooked, because once you're anchored and rejoicing there, what can anyone do to you? This is the real courage of Mary: to rejoice in uncertainty, to move toward Christ while still standing in the middle of her own suffering.  A soul magnifies the Lord when it becomes a source of light while still walking through its own darkness. When we choose to love though we don't feel loved. To listen though we aren't heard. To stay present though we feel unseen.

Mary emptied herself of every fear and expectation, and in that emptiness she remembered God's mercy rather than her own merit. Jesus makes himself small at every Mass, so that we might experience his love in a form we can actually receive. Perhaps that's the invitation, to make ourselves small, so that others might receive that same joy and mercy through us.

Real freedom is living in truth and trusting God more than we trust ourselves. That, and only that, is proper worship: to magnify God, to make him the center of our lives, not our egos, and not our endless needs.