Mary on Getting to “Yes”
O Lover,
For us of the Jesus tradition both courage and wisdom are required as we approach the cultural phenomenon called “Christmas.” Why? More than any other, this feast is an amalgam of accretions both ancient and modern, some of which have little or nothing to do with the Christ event. In our time consumerism, ubiquitous and mindless, is arguably the most deadly of the barnacles encrusting the season. Another distortion is a drift into sentimentality regarding the gospels’ birth narratives which only reinforces infantile rather than adult spirituality. Relatedly, there is fixation on the diminutive charm of the creche at the expense of the cosmic scale of engendering event, particularly as glimpsed in the Pauline letters. In addition, a holiday season idealizing a feel-good take on the baby’s birth provides little solace for those wounded in memory, relationships, or meaning. In short, the “Christmas” phenomenon is complicated and, for me, calls for preparative deconstruction which we neglect to our own peril.
All of which begs the question as to what the Feast of the Nativity is really all about. In this recent Advent I have been drawn into responding to that question via the Lucan narrative of the annunciation of Mary (1:26-38). The author, an outsider keen on including other outsiders, has Your messenger greeting her honorifically and delivering Your blessing. She—young, female, common—is perplexed, concussed (29). Your messenger only further discombobulates her by employing astonishing words: “son of the most high,” “throne of his father David,” “forever,” Your “kingdom” (30-33). Yet amid her pondering and perplexity she courageously generates the quintessential human query: “How can this be, . . ?” (34) With the axis of the kosmos in the balance this probably illiterate maiden asserts her agency refusing to play easy. All in Your heílsgeschichte procession, both past and future, wait for her decision. And You, O Wait-er, You wait as well. Your messenger seeks to assist Mary employing more words both baffling but now seemingly also illuminative: “overshadow you,” “Son of God,” ”Elizabeth,” “nothing will be impossible with God” (35-37). Still You wait. And only then does Mary finally get to her “yes”—“may it be done to me according to Your word” (38; fíat míhí secundum verbum tuum in the Vulgate)—a seismic “yes” which for many will distinguish chrónos fore and aft.
But here is the kicker: more than merely recording an event, the entire annunciation text is a paradigm, The Paradigm, for Your relationship with us creatures, I certainly not excepted. You come, often mediated via this or that, offering glimpses of Your very Self. I am both drawn and fearful in the face of fleeting moments of Your Self-disclosure. Mary’s fulcrumed query “How can this be?” is most familiar territory for me, this because my contrived self is being placed in jeopardy and/or as a harbinger of a “yes” yet to be born. O Lover, well You know that the question “how?” has been my companion throughout my life. And as I weigh pros and cons You, intrinsically nonviolatory, wait . . . for my “yes.” It is as if I were singing In Trutína (“In the Balance”) from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Having long since made my peace that I desire to embody my “yes” to You, I am poised regarding its actualization.
Ergo, I too am Mary of Nazareth; I too am favored and invited to embrace courageously the unspeakable; my free assent too is patiently solicited; my complex reticence too is respected and waited out by You; I too am “overshadowed” by You and invited to embrace the role of theotókos (“God-bearer”/ “Mother of God”); I too have the agency to envision my very being, together with Your entire cosmos, as an incremental unfolding of “yes” to You. Indeed, all of us are Mary: agencied participants in Your relentless and encompassing Self-enfleshment.
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
