Mary’s Sheen of Authenticity
O Lover,
In an earlier post I wrote that all prayer is somehow response to what I called Your “seizing.” Variously exemplified, this dynamic also occurs in liturgy. More than in timeless themes of the Mass, sometimes seemingly static, I find myself suddenly being drawn by You far beyond my familiarity zone, beyond knowledge or doubt, into the illimitability of Your Mystérium. For me this most frequently involves the biblical readings where, suddenly, I am being skewered, a character or situation becoming me. A word descriptive of this experience of being hooked is “authenticity.”
Such an experience unfolded yet again in the recent Mass of the 4th Sunday of Advent in the Annunciation text (Lk 1:26-38). I was seized by the paradoxical tension underlying the account, one with which I immediately identified and labeled as “authentic,” as self-evidently ringing true to my experience of being human.
The first component of this tension is Mary’s state of being severely shaken (29). Occasioning this response was the message of Gabriel in the previous verse: “Greetings, grace-filled one! The Lord is with you.” Indeed, Mary is both “perplexed” regarding the greeting hailing her favored status and “greatly troubled” by the news that You are inexplicably and unprecedentedly with her. As Gabriel elaborates upon Your proposal her astonishment and uneasiness only expand: “How can this be . . . ?“ (34) Your overture could not have been more intimidating, but this pubescent was anything but an easy sell.
O Lover, I find this hyper-wary response of Mary to be both believable and authentic. I have struggled with issues of worth and feelings of inundation, had too many of my self-delusions laid bare, been too long a card-carrying member of Imposters Anonymous, to accept casually a greeting of Your special favor. And then there is the harder part: the news that You, the Lord of the Universe, are with me in a way beyond my wildest dreams. OK, you crafted me, are sustaining and directing me, all reasonably safe categories, but Luke’s “with us” message, augmented by Matthew’s Immánuel (“God with us” [1:23]) and the Fourth Gospel’s “enfleshment” and “ta bernacling” (1:14), points to a level of identification and solidarity, immanence and unítas, well beyond mainstream religiosity. How often have I sought to retreat safely into created images of You as lap-god, domesticated, or distant. Yes, Your seizings are indeed intimidating and burdensome, my initial responses characterized by troubledness, perplexity, and hesitancy. There is simply too much of You, O Oceanic One, for my frail barque. Luke’s text rings true: I am wary Mary of Nazareth.
But . . . then there is the other side of the tension: Mary’s “Yes” (1:38): pithy, oxymoronic, counterintuitive. Somehow this adolescent—woman-child, daughter of patriarchy, probable illiterate, one both leery and discombobulated—comes upon the courage, imagination and vision to generate a “Yes” to Your proposition, this sans asterisk, qualifier, or conditionality. Breathlessly awaited by pagan sibyls and Hebrew prophets alike, indeed by the kósmos itself in “groaning expectation” (Rom 8:19-22), this “Yes” inexplicably becomes the hinge of time and space and everything betwixt. From what deep center within this maid was generated this inexplicable pivot? And how is it that that “Yes,” rather than assuaging the troubledness or resolving the perplexity, goes straight through it all, holding the entire tension together?
O Lover, the authenticity of that second side of Mary’s tension is also present in my awareness. And I have experienced the identity of her “deep center” from which my modest yeses too spring, for at Mary’s Depth, as in Eckhart’s Grúnt (“Ground”) or Abyss, are You: ever was, is, and shall be; ever aborning throughout us finite beloveds. Deep in the center of Mary’s “Yes” to the “impossible” (37), while You too awaited her response, was the scarcely believable truth that You had never been, nor would ever be, other than inextricably and irrevocably “with us.” Not unlike her wariness, I experience Mary’s paradigmatic “Yes” to be authentic. Again, Luke’s text rings true: I am participant in Mary of Nazareth’s cosmic pivot.
And so, Mary’s authenticity delivers the hook. And like her “Yes,” my own, yet unfolding, is You, O Lover, Your infinite “Yes” in concert with Your “Yes” in the depth of my being.
