Magnificat

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord” (Lk 1:46). Following the original Greek text, we should actually translate it, “My soul makes God great.” What this means is that I do not wish to place myself alongside God, to compete with God, as it were, but to make God great, so that he may become visible in the world, so that he may be present in all his greatness. Not to make myself great, but to let him be great.

When the great Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was writing under the Brezhnev regime, he insisted that the word GOD be written in capital letters in his books, and he was unable to get these books published because the regime insisted that God be written in lower-case letters. This was to ensure that God would remain small and not appear great, for only in that way did they believe they could exist. They were afraid of what would happen if GOD were allowed to be great. [...]

To make God great means to believe. To believe means precisely this: that we accept God as reality, that we rely on him, that we listen to him, that we trust in him, that we shape our lives around him, thus making room for him in the world and in ourselves, that we do not fear he might compete with us and take something away from our lives, but recognize that it is precisely by letting him be great and by holding on to him that our own life is set aright.