Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
The Feast of The Annunciation, March 25, 2023
I have never been to the Holy Land and quite honestly, I don't have a burning desire to go there. And please don't get me wrong. I have been deeply touched by the stories of those who have visited there and who have had their faith deepened and their lives changed. And if someone offered me an all-expense paid Holy Land trip, I would probably take them up on it. After all, I did go to Egypt in 1994 and was able to see the Holy Land in the distance from across the Red Sea, though like Moses of old, I did not get to enter it. If I were to visit, there are a few locations that would have pride of place on my spiritual bucket list. The first, of course, would be the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem which is the traditional site of Golgotha (Mount Calvary) and the tomb of the Resurrection. I can imagine spending hours and hours there. I might also want to spend time on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem contemplating both our Lord’s triumphal entry into the city on that first Palm Sunday as well as his betrayal and arrest only a few days later. And of course, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
But there is one other site on my imaginary itinerary, and that is the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth which commemorates the Annunciation and indeed claims to be the very place where the Angel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary with the news, however shocking, that she would be the mother of the Savior. (This being the Holy Land, of course, there is another church nearby, an Orthodox Church, which claims to be the real site.)
From what I've read, the Church of the Annunciation is the largest church in the Middle East. It was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s in an architectural style described as “Italian brutalist,” perhaps not unlike the church at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, with its exposed concrete beams and unfinished surfaces. But that's not what I would be looking for. Because below this contemporary edifice is another older church dating from the 4th century. And even below that is a grotto dating perhaps from the 3rd century where the words of the Angel Gabriel’s greeting, “Hail Mary,” had been scratched into the wall. And on the front of the altar at the center of that grotto are inscribed familiar words from the Prologue to St. John's Gospel, words that we pray here several times daily: The Word was made flesh…though there it is written in Latin: Verbum caro factum est. If you look closely, however, you will see that a small word has been inserted into the phrase. It reads: Verbum caro hic factum est. “The Word was made flesh here.” And who knows? Maybe this is the spot where it all began. Where the Logos, the primal Word from the Father uttered from before time and eternity, was made flesh, here and not elsewhere. Here: at a particular point in time, in a particular place, in a particular cultural setting and at the meeting point of diverse cultures, religions and civilizations, a place marked by a complicated history and a troubled political situation, one that was altogether messy.
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Claims such as this that locate a transcendent mystery in more or less definite space and time and in concrete historical details permeate the Christian story. They constitute what scholars or theologians refer to as the ‘scandal of particularity’: Here, not there. There is of course a universalizing tendency in our Christian tradition, offering a message of hope to people everywhere and of every age. That is its glory and its power. But at its root, at its conception (quite literally) it begins and unfolds in particular historical and tangible circumstances: then and there. This Jesus event, though marked by universal themes and a transfiguring message and a saving promise, is not just an abstract idea or a pious dream, but an actual historical happening, something that occurred in the give and take of everyday life. And in this case, it is in the everyday life of a young Middle Eastern woman named Miryam [Mary], engaged but as yet unmarried, and faced with an invitation to accept perhaps the most unplanned pregnancy in human history.
Here and now, at a particular time and place. Thus it was with Mary. And so it is with us as well. Our sitting down and our rising up, our faith, our salvation, our growth in grace, our struggles, our failures, our triumphs, our transformations, our divinization…none of this happens in the abstract but only in the concrete specificity of our own lives and times. As Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1980’s, was fond of saying: “All politics is local.” And so, I think, is grace.
Invitations are extended to each of us by an angel—which is to say, by God—in a thousand different ways and at a thousand different moments. The shape and content may vary wildly...perhaps there are as many invitations or annunciations as there are people who ever lived and then some. But at heart, it’s always the same invitation. It is the invitation to surrender, or to put it another way, to abandon or release ourselves to God's will, to God's dream, and freely to cooperate in it and to work with it so that something new, something transformative, something holy--however modest and apparently insignificant--can take birth in us and in our world. I wonder how many opportunities have been offered over the centuries, how many embraced, and how many have gone overlooked, unnoticed or refused?
The late 20th century poet Denise Levertov in her poem titled Annunciation considers this mystery. I have quoted her here before. The poem begins with these words:
“We know the scene: variously furnished, almost always a lectern, a book; always the tall lily. Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings, the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering, whom she acknowledges, a guest. But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage. The engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent. God waited.”
And God still waits.
Levertov continues by asking:
“Aren't there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen pride uncomprehending. More often those moments when roads of light and storm opened from darkness in a man or a woman, are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives continue. God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.”
To become aware of and responsive to these annunciations, these invitations that come to us daily, is a Christian spiritual duty and a deeply human task. And like Mary, we can and often must ask the messenger some tough questions and seek solid confirmation and only then respond…and not always with a YES but sometimes with a well-grounded “Not Yet” or “Let me think about it” or “No, thank you.” Only let us, as the poet urges us, not answer out of dread or weakness or despair, but out of an abounding trust in the love and mercy and providence of God.
Mary’s honest, questioning dialog with the angel led to the Incarnation of Christ the Eternal Word. Our honest, questioning dialog with our own angelic annunciations can also lead, not to a new Incarnation of Christ in the literal sense but to its continuation or prolongation through history in us who constitute the Church, the very Body of Christ given, like our Lord’s body, for the very life of the world. That is our calling, a calling rooted in the specificity and particularity of you and me in all our humanity with its strengths and weaknesses, its flaws and annoying and wonderful idiosyncrasies, and in the particular details of our biography. That is the way our God worked with Mary. I expect that’s how our God works with us.
“Verbum caro HIC factum est! The Word was made flesh HERE” says the altar engraving in the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. And the Word continues to be made flesh in you and me, hic et nunc, here and now: in West Park, New York. March 25, 2023. Imagine that. Imagine.
Amen.
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