A worm has been on my mind. It's been crawling around in my head. I can't get it out of my head. We speak of earworms, songs that get stuck in your head. In a similar sense, this worm has been on my mind, so perhaps it's a mindworm.
Earlier this year I read about how scientists had determined that all animal life there has ever been on earth has been suspected to have been evolved from a certain species of worm that lived 555 million years ago. Once I heard of this worm, it has seemed that the knowledge of this worm has been echoing, over hundreds of millions of years, after burrowing down into the earth, bringing forth to light the truth that much comes what seems to be so little.
I imagine God saying to this worm, "I have great plans for you. From you are going to come fish and lizards and elephants and giraffes and apes and all kinds of creatures that creep and crawl and swarm all over the earth."
Of course the worm was not able to think as we think. But if it could, and if this conversation were to occur, I would expect it would respond something like, "But I am nothing. I am a nobody. I can do next to nothing."
In this littleness, in this next-to-nothingness, in this humility there is wisdom. The worm would see itself as it is.
The worm was also exactly what God called it to be. It wasn't trying to be something else. The worm was embracing what God made it to be. When we are who and what God makes us to be, we give praise to God.
In the question the worm would ask, there would be openness. When we ask, we invite an answer. When we ask, we are interested in finding out what we do not know, what we cannot see or find out on our own.
An angel told Our Blessed Mother Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. Our Blessed Mother Mary asked how this could be so, since she had not had relations with a man. God, through the angel, told her what she could not know on her own, that the Holy Spirit would come upon her.*
Having asked what we could not know through our own efforts, having been answered and empowered with the knowledge of who we can become, we are then faced with the choice of who we decide to become. God invites us to become so much more than we have been. God asks us if we would like Him to perform miracles through us. For miracles, we need faith.
Our Blessed Mother Mary embraced the message of the angel by going forward in faith. She responded to the angel, "You see before you the handmaid of the Lord: let it be done to me according to Your Word."**
And so a peasant girl, obscure, unknown, passed over, ignored by many around her, became much more. In her lowliness, she was lifted up. Having gone forward in faith, now hundreds of millions of people beseech her, that she may pray for them, and through her, God works countless miracles.
God wants to work through us for the good of us, for those around us. God invites us into much more than what we have seen. We can be much more than we have been. We are so much more than what our current circumstances show us.
We are trudging along in what seems to us like drudgery. In these days of the coronavirus which might seem to be moving along so slowly, we may feel like we are crawling through something like mud, through a murky, filthy slime, the challenging morass of a virus which seems to disable us in so many ways.
In what seems meaningless, we might be situated very well to become so much more than we have been. Rather than mislead ourselves into believing that we are doing nothing of much worth, instead if we ask and pray and remain open, God might work wonders through us, miracles that we never would have imagined, if we merely go forward in faith in Him.
* Luke 1:31-35
** Luke 1:38
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