Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
The Feast of The Annunciation, March 25, 2025
Until this moment comes, most of us have a rather tame idea of God. We have an image—positive or negative or somewhere in between—based on our childhood experiences of family and church and the world. We are running from or toward or even just ignoring this God. Beautiful or horrible as these images may be for us, they remain flat, pasted on the page of some imagined reality that, ultimately, we can control and shape according to our fantasies and illusions.
If our faith is ever to mature, we eventually have to face the reality of this unknown God who comes to us, asking us to bear him into a life we cannot even imagine. We stand on the edge of an abyss—a darkness that cannot be plumbed, a relationship than cannot be fathomed, an invitation to a death that will lead to a life beyond anything we can conceive. The cloud parts, beckoning us inward to overshadow us, and we must step forward willingly into the real God.
Such is the stark reality of the Annunciation, dressed up as we often find it with lilies and silent poses of patient waiting. Mary, admittedly less flustered than I would be if an angel suddenly appeared to me, asks Gabriel a simple question: “How can this be?” To which the angel replies “The power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
It is a response ripe with symbolism and scriptural resonance. Mary’s body is the deep darkness at the beginning of creation over which the Holy Spirit hovers. She is Mount Sinai, bathed in cloud, as God conveys the Law to Moses or Mount Tabor bearing the enclouded glory of Jesus’ Transfiguration. Her womb—filled now with God’s Word becoming Flesh—is also the Cross heavy with the fruit of salvation and the Empty Tomb from which Jesus rises to new life.
In 2016 Good Friday fell, as it does occasionally, on March 25th, this Feast of the Annunciation. This won’t happen again until 2157, long after we’re all gone, God willing. This concurrence is not accidental. In patristic and medieval tradition, March 25th was thought to be the date of Jesus’ Crucifixion. Jesus was conceived and died on the same day, 33 years apart, a perfect circle joining life and death. Or, as John Donne puts it, today we see “The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one / Of the Angel’s Ave and Consummatum est.”
Many medieval images twine these two observances together, showing Mary as the fruitful vine that becomes the Cross of Christ flowering into new life. The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” links the two images with the tree in the Garden of Eden:
The fruit which gives lifeHangs, as we believe,Upon the Virgin's breast,And again upon the crossBetween two thieves.Here, the child-bearing Virgin,Here, the saving cross;Both are mystic trees.[The cross], the humble hyssop,She, the noble cedar,And both life-giving.
Her consent to birth and his to death finally made as one—the full circle of salvation written in the flesh of this day.
Mary could not have known, of course, where her “be it unto me according to thy word,” would take her and this life burgeoning inside her. I wonder if standing at the foot of the Cross, she heard the rustle of a wing and thought “Oh, this is the cost I agreed to all those years ago. Now, the bill is due.” I wonder if, hearing her son cry out, something inside her dropped, some long-held breath released in grief and recognition and—finally, all those years later—a surrender fully consummated.
God desires nothing less of us than everything we are or ever will be. In the first flush of infatuation, it’s easy enough to say yes, to give away our whole lives to this God who desires us and whom we desire. As the years draw on, though, the cost of our consent becomes clearer. And though we thought we knew what it meant to give our whole selves in love, we may come to see how little we understood in all our youthful bluster.
There comes a point—and likely a few such points throughout our lives—when, standing at the edge the abyss, we come face to cloudy face with this unknown and unknowable God who has been pursuing us our whole lives. We feel within the pit of ourselves the gravitational pull toward surrender. Like Mary, we consent to the overshadowing of all we are and all we have been. Through patience and, perhaps, longsuffering, we emerge from this dark baptism fully ourselves, maybe for the first time: God-bearers in a God-born world, holy Theotokoi—not from our own holiness but from the holiness of God forever infusing our bodies. This is what we were born for: to become the womb and the empty tomb, the fruitful vine and the flowering Cross.
The emptiness that seemed to be our undoing becomes, through God’s great mercy, the very truest expression of our divine nature: the fullness of God’s love flowing through us into a hurting world.
I am convinced that this is the place of monasticism and of all authentic Christianity in our world today. We are called to bear witness (in the Greek, to become martyrs) to the love of a God who brings life out of death and whose final word is always love. In order to witness authentically to that love, we must step into the cloud of our own undoing, we must eventually choose to surrender to this unknown God who loves us into wholeness.
In 1920, Rilke wrote to a friend “The final thing is not self-subjugation / but silent loving from such centeredness / we feel round even rage and desolation / the finally enfolding tenderness.”
Surrender to the overshadowing of God’s power is not self-subjugation, but consent to transformation. It is an apotheosis, a full revelation of God’s power made manifest in our own humanity. It is an allowing of God’s life to stream from our very pores. It is the recognition, even the celebration, of that finally enfolding tenderness that never can or will desert us, whatever the rage and desolation.
My brothers and sisters, let the power of the Most High overshadow you. Surrender to this unknown God and be reborn as yourself. Step into your poverty that is also your glory. Let out your be it unto me and your consummatum est. Today is the day of our undoing and our full becoming.
