Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Feast of the Annunciation - Thursday, March 25, 2021
In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing.
In 1920, Rilke wrote a verse dedication to Frau Theodora van der Muhll:
The final thing is not self-subjugationbut silent loving from such centerednesswe feel round even rage and desolationthe finally enfolding tenderness.
We know the paintings so well they’re cliché. There she sits, usually surrounded by books with a lily in her hand and a feathered angel bending toward her. Sometimes she’s holding her breviary, sometimes demure, sometimes with fiery cast to her eyes. Thanks to biblical and historical scholarship, we know that Mary would have been a teenager and a poor villager. We know she had courage or was foolhardy—probably both—she was a teenager, after all. Tradition tells us that she was next to sinless, the archetypal saint, so empty of self that she could receive God’s fullness.
After centuries and centuries of interpretation and imagining the scene, it’s too easy to think of the Mary whom Gabriel greets as either a demure, faceless vessel, waiting to be filled, or the Cosmic Feminine Divine, Sophia incarnate, who knew inherently how to open herself to God’s indwelling.
But if Jesus was fully human, then his mother certainly was, too. She was a real, historical person. She had hopes and fears. She loved and wept and twisted her hair in boredom. The demure, faceless vessel and the Cosmic Feminine Devine both rob of us of a foothold in this mysterious comingling of a human life with God’s life.
Mary was girl who said yes to God, with whatever freedom was available to her. We know her decision produced a great number of trials. Teenage pregnancy out of wedlock; a precocious child to raise, always running off to the rabbis; watching the torture and death of her child; wrapping herself in the mystery of his rising, this one who was and was not the man she had raised.
But, of course, all those trials were to come later. For now, in this moment of Annunciation, the angel sings his ave. And Mary pours herself out as best she can. This greeting from the Holy One is the key that unlocks her heart, the sun that warms the rose of her soul, coaxing it into bloom. For now, she knows the rose’s sweetness, even as the thorns hint their sting under her thumb pads.
This pouring out of herself to God, this making herself empty and hollow was not, as Rilke points out, self-subjugation. The virtue of Mary’s response, Be it unto me according to your word, is not that she obliterated her humanity, but that, at least for the space of a breath, she allowed God to fill and surround that humanity. She became alight with herself, even as God overshadowed her.
Falling as this feast usually does in Lent, I cannot help but wonder how this experience followed Mary throughout her life. Did she hear the rustle of the angel’s wings as she stood at the foot of the Cross? As her son cried out his consummatum est, did she remember her own cry of astonishment and joy those thirty odd years before? Seeing the thorns wrapped around his brow, could she still smell the sweetness of her soul opening to God? As Jesus surrendered his Spirit, was she emptied of self once more, barren or fallow or hollowed out for God?
Every so often Good Friday and Annunciation fall on the same day, uniting into one the moment God’s Spirit took birth in Jesus and then left his body. The two poles of living and dying wrapped round each other, like the snake eating its tail.
Although this concurrence will not come again in our lifetime—the next time will be 2157—we are living in such a moment today. This year of pandemic, which has seemed an endless Lent in its way, will not resolve itself on Easter. Our joy will be tempered and quiet. The tomb may be empty, but so will most of our churches. Like those first disciples, like Mary, we will throw our alleluia out on the wind to echo in the heedless world.
It’s not only our churches that have been carved out. Our hearts have been, as well. Whether we wish to be or not, we have been hollowed, emptied of all our certainties and easy assurances. We are left wide open, waiting for God to fill us up, to be born and then reborn in and through us. What is the angel’s call to us, then?
Perhaps they are Rilke's greeting to Frau van der Muhll:
The final thing is not self-subjugationbut silent loving from such centerednesswe feel round even rage and desolationthe finally enfolding tenderness.
We don’t need to obliterate ourselves to be open to God. Like Mary we can gather round us all our courage or foolhardiness. We can speak our yes, however timorous or weary it may be today. We can trust, or even pretend to trust if that’s what we have available to us, that God will wrap us up in her finally enfolding tenderness.
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