The Annunciation

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. He went in and said, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.’ She was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what this greeting could mean.

“But the angel said to her, ‘Mary, do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God. You are to conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. He will rule over the house of Jacob forever and his reign will have no end” (Luke 1:26-33).

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation. It's a Solemnity. It's the feast of the vocation of Our Lady, when the angel Gabriel announced to her on the part of God that she was to be the Mother of God.

This is her calling. It's a day for us to be mindful of our own calling: our own vocation—our Christian vocation, our marriage vocation, our professional vocation—but ultimately, our vocation to holiness and apostolate.

The way that Our Lady responds to her vocation is a model of how our response to our vocation should be at each moment of our life.

Pope St. John Paul liked to say that Our Lady's vocation was like “a pilgrimage of faith,” a journeying forward to a new destination (John Paul II, Encyclical, Redemptoris Mater, March 25, 1987).

And so, our vocation is also called to be a pilgrimage of faith, a journeying forward, day by day, month by month, challenge by challenge.

We can have great faith in our vocation—the fact that God has called us to realize that this is His will for us, that I would be here in this place at this moment in time, in this period of history, in this marriage, in this family, in this job, with these financial constraints, with this health situation, at my age. This is all the will of God for me.

There's a calling every day with its own graces that are there to help me to be holy.

We're told by St. Paul to the Galatians: “But when the fullness of time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive adoption as children” (Gal. 4:5).

This is “the fullness of time.” It's one of the greatest moments in the whole of human history, when God becomes man.

A kindergarten teacher was teaching her class one time, some little girls, preparing them for First Holy Communion. She explained what was going to happen on their First Communion Day, and also explained to them a feast on that particular week, which was the Feast of the Annunciation. She told them how the angel Gabriel came down to visit Our Lady, and then baby Jesus began to grow inside Our Lady. He grew and grew and grew, and nine months later, on the 25th of December, He was born.

Tthe following week, the teacher asked these little girls what was going to happen on their First Communion Day. One little girl said: “I'm going to receive Jesus beside me.”

The teacher said: “Beside you? Why not within you?”

And she said: “Well, I don't want Him to grow and grow and grow.”

So the teacher had to explain that that only happened with Our Lady.

When we receive Jesus, we receive Him spiritually, sacramentally, really, truly, and substantially, but not physically. And so, “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14).

At that particular moment, when Our Lady said yes, initially she didn't understand. “Mary said to the angel: ‘But how can this come about, since I do not know man?’” (Luke 1:34).

All the saints down through history have suggested this was an expression of the purity of Our Lady—again, a model of modesty and purity and chastity for us.

“The angel answered: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. For the child will be holy and will be called the Son of God. I tell you this too, your cousin Elizabeth, also in her old age, has conceived a son, and she whom people call barren is now in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible to God’” (Luke 1:35-37).

Mary is the recipient of a Trinitarian revelation: “The Holy Spirit will come down upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. The child will be holy and will be called the Son of God.”

Mary is being invited to be the Container of the Uncontainable, as Cardinal Pell has recently described her in his recent book. She's been given a great challenge, a great calling, but something that is a bit mysterious, the consequences of which she can't possibly fully grasp, like any one of us with our vocation.

Somebody told me once that following a vocation is like jumping off a cliff. When you look with a human perspective, from the cliff edge you see the waves down below crashing against the rocks.

Maybe there's a wind that blows in there from the ocean, goes upwards and can lift you out of it. From a human perspective, you see the wind, the waves, the swell, the rocks, so many things that don't look at all inviting.

But he said, “Our Lady is standing six meters out from the edge of the cliff. She has her arms open and she's saying: ‘Jump, jump into my arms!’”

Following a vocation is like jumping off a cliff, leaving the terra firma, the firm, solid land and clay that's under our feet, and launching ourselves out into the unknown. But Our Lady is there to catch us.

Her vocation is a model for all vocations. It's a story of calling, a story of beauty, of purity, of faith, of generosity, of humility—where God wants us to react like she did and say yes, and to realize that nothing is impossible with God.

All the things that might seem so challenging, all the difficulties, can get blown away in a second.

St. Paul tells us as Eve was the mother of all humanity (Gen. 3:20), doomed to sin (Rom. 5:12), so now Mary becomes the mother of the new Adam (1 Cor. 15:45) who will be the father of a new humanity by His grace (Rom. 5:15).

“God spoke to man down through the ages through the Old Testament. He revealed himself to man and now God becomes man” (cf. Heb. 1:1-2).

Revelation becomes personified in the person of Christ through Mary. This child to be conceived in her womb is the fulfillment of all God's promises. He will be “great” and will be the “Son of the Most High: and “King” and His name shall be called “Jesus” (Luke 1:31-32), which means “the Lord saves” because “He will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).

The promise of an everlasting kingdom in the house of David is fulfilled in the King to be born in Mary's womb. Mary realizes she's hearing something beyond her capability. It will surely take a miracle that surpasses all that God has done previously.

Our Lady is left wondering, “How can this be, since I know not man?” She is not doubtful or skeptical. She's just trying to find out a little bit more, trying to understand this great mystery that God has placed before her.

And then we have the response of Our Lady: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word.”

Our Lady is a true hearer of the Word. She immediately responds with faith and trust. We're told later that she kept all these things carefully in her heart (Luke 2:19, 51).

In the moment that God speaks to us in our life, we also have to keep those words carefully in our heart, to remember the moment when God lit the candle of our vocation in our heart, a new light in our life that helps us to understand the meaning and the purpose of what our whole existence is about.

This prompt response of “yes” to the divine message is a model of faith for all believers. Mary believed God's promises, even when they seemed impossible.

On this feast day, we can ask Our Lady to increase our faith.

Blessed Álvaro del Portillo, writing about Our Lady in 1987, said, “At Nazareth, we contemplate the divine mission of Gabriel to whom Mary responds with heroic faith interwoven with a limitless humility, confessing her own nothingness. ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ The Virgin Mary shows herself to be totally identified with God's plan to the point of immediately assenting with unshakable trust in God to what the Archangel has announced.”

We can ask Our Lady that we might also be totally identified with God's plan, whatever that might be, in the course of our life and vocation—that we grow in our trust, in our abandonment, in our faith, putting that faith into practice in concrete situations.

He continues, “That is the way our faith should be whenever we are confronted by obstacles in our Christian mission. It must be a firm and humble faith, born of a sincere conviction of our personal incapacity before such a great task, and at the same time full of assurance that what God asks of us can be done, because we count not on our poor strength, but on God's omnipotence.”

If you look at the history of the Church down through history, you find that people of the Church have been people of great faith.

They've “launched out into the deep” (Luke 5:4) to do all sorts of wonderful things, especially in education and health care, to build up a civilization of love in so many countries of the world, to bring the message of the Gospel to those places, to people who otherwise might never have heard it—and all of this, in the face of what might seem to be insurmountable difficulties.

“Let us recall,” he says, “the cry of St. Josemaría: ‘What is needed today are people of faith.’ He calls your attention to it, and my attention also. He expressly demands it from each one of us when difficulties grow to be enormous, when we lower our sights, when human considerations, often artful considerations, make us turn back and seem to force us into reasoning with purely worldly logic.

“Though apparently coherent, this logic is born of our love of comfort and responds to the cries of the old person who resists facing God because to live in this way would make them see clearly the need to cut the fine threads or the heavy cables that try to shackle us to the mirages of earthly existence.

“Faith, my child, faith. Faith like that of Mary. Even if at times you don't understand, be convinced, absolutely certain, that everything worldly is nothing. It is sadness, egoism, sensuality compared to the task of God to which we are called.”

Our Lady responds with this great faith. She doesn't look at the difficulties. She was willing and eager to do God's will, even if it seemed costly. She was full of grace because she trusted that what God said was true and would be fulfilled.

We can ask Our Lady that also we might live the life of grace. Mary was the most beautiful creature that God ever created because she was full of grace, immune from sin, conceived without original sin.

Her fullness of grace can lead us to yearn for that grace that's available to us in the sacraments in a regular way—to always live the life of grace, and if we ever have the misfortune to fall out of the state of grace, to get back into the state of grace as soon as possible.

Mary is the Mother of God, because God becomes Incarnate and He takes on flesh in her womb.

Pope St. John Paul liked to talk about how the Word became flesh. He gives great importance to human nature, to our human body, in his Theology of the Body, because “the Word became flesh.”

A mother was going out to Mass one day and she told her little girl that she'd be back later; she was going to receive Jesus. Every day she told her little child: “I'm going to receive Jesus.”

One day the little girl piped up and says: “And will you receive Mary also?” The mother was a bit perplexed. She didn't quite know how to answer that question.

One time she met St. Josemaría and put that question to him. She said, “Father, what will I tell my daughter?”

He thought for a moment, because he wasn't often asked that type of question, and he said: “In a way, yes. You can tell her that you're also going to receive Mary, because the blood of Christ before was the blood of Mary. You won't find that in any theology textbook, but it's a very nice, pietistic thought and one full of faith, and very true at the same time.”

Unity between the two. Mary gave Jesus her blood.

When we pray the Creed every Sunday, the Nicene Creed that dates from the year 315—it’s seventeen centuries old, that prayer—we state our Confession of Faith in this great mystery:

“For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”

God gives us His grace. He expects us to respond with the same willingness, obedience and heartfelt trust as Mary did.

When God commands, He also gives the help, the strength, and the means to respond.

But we're also free. We can yield to His grace, or we can resist and go our own way. We can ask Our Lady for that grace to correspond like she did.

Pope St. John Paul, in an Apostolic Letter called The Dignity of Women, says: “The sending of this Son, one in substance with the Father, as a man ‘born of woman’, constitutes the culminating and definitive point of God's self-revelation to humanity. ... A woman is found to be at the center of this salvific event” (John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, August 15, 1988).

It's interesting how Pope St. John Paul points out the central role of women. In many ways, the Church is always lifting up women, talking about the key role they have in the whole message of salvation.

He said: “Do we not find in the Annunciation at Nazareth the beginning of that definitive answer by which God himself attempts to calm people's hearts? It is not just a matter here of God's words revealed through the Prophets; rather, with this response ‘the Word is truly made flesh’ (cf. John 1:14).

“Hence, Mary attains a union with God that exceeds all the expectations of the human spirit. It even exceeds the expectations of all Israel, in particular the daughters of this Chosen People, who, on the basis of the promise, could hope that one of their number would one day become the mother of the Messiah. Who among them...could have imagined that the promised Messiah would be ‘the Son of the Most High’?

“On the basis of the Old Testament's monotheistic faith, such a thing was difficult to imagine. Only by the power of the Holy Spirit, who ‘overshadowed’ her, was Mary able to accept what is ‘impossible with men, but not with God’” (cf. Mark 10:27).

St. John Paul says, “The ‘fullness of time’ manifests the extraordinary dignity of the woman.” He liked to say that Our Lady was God's first Opus Dei in the order of creation.

“This dignity consists in the supernatural elevation to union with God in Jesus Christ, which determines the ultimate finality of the existence of every person both on earth and in eternity. From this point of view,” he says, “the woman is the representative and the archetype of the whole human race: she represents the humanity which belongs to all human beings, both men and women.”

“On the other hand,” he says, “...the event at Nazareth highlights a form of union with the living God which can only belong to the woman, Mary: the union between mother and son. The Virgin of Nazareth truly becomes the Mother of God. This truth, which Christian faith has always accepted from the beginning, was solemnly defined at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431.”

All these truths of our faith—very clear, very true, very ancient.

“In the expression ‘handmaid of the Lord’ one can sense Mary's complete awareness of being a creature of God.”

He says, “The word ‘handmaid’, near the end of the Annunciation dialogue, is inscribed throughout the whole history of the Mother and the Son. In fact, this Son, who is the true and consubstantial ‘Son of the Most High’, will often say of himself, especially at the culminating moment of his mission: ‘The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve’” (Mark 10:45).

This moment of the Incarnation and the Annunciation is the starting point of our divinization. We're not mere passive bystanders at the Incarnation, but rather, by becoming “partakers of His divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), we may work with Christ to rebuild the world for the glory of the Father.

Some spiritual writers have liked to say that Mary is “like the dawn.” She heralds the coming of the “Sun of Justice” (Mal. 4:2). She did not just receive the light of God, but she received God Himself, and that's why she shines so much. She gave birth to the Light.

Mary is a true hearer of the Word and immediately responds with faith and trust. She believed God's promises even when they seemed impossible. She was full of grace because she trusted that what God said was true and would be fulfilled.

We can celebrate this day as a day of great joy and perhaps imagine the scene that St. Josemaría liked to encourage people to do: Imagine how the Lady of the Sweet Name is absorbed in prayer, and then the angel appears to her. We follow that dialogue.

“Without God's help," we're told in The Forge, “it is impossible to live a clean life. God wants us to be humble, and to ask him for his help through our Mother, who is his Mother.

“You should say to Our Lady, right now, speaking without the sound of words, from the accompanied solitude of your heart: ‘O, my Mother, sometimes this poor heart of mine rebels. ... But if you help me...’ —She will indeed help you to keep it clean and to follow the way God has called you to pursue. The Virgin Mary will always make it easier for you to fulfill the will of God” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Forge, Point 315).

He says in the Furrow (Point 481), “The scene of the Annunciation is a very lovely one. How often we have meditated on this! Mary is recollected in prayer. She is using all her senses and her faculties to speak to God. It is in prayer that she comes to know the divine will. And with prayer she makes it the life of her life. Do not forget the example of the Virgin Mary.”

If we are trying to discern our own vocation, like Our Lady, we need to withdraw to prayer. That's where we will come to know the divine will. She gives us great example.

We're told in The Forge (Point 527), “We have to love the Blessed Virgin Mary more. We will never love her enough! —Love her a lot! It shouldn't be enough for you to put pictures of her, and greet them, and say aspirations. You should learn to offer her, in your strenuous life, some small sacrifice each day, to show her your love, to show her the kind of love that we want the whole human race to proclaim her.”

“I have come to see,” he says, “that every Hail Mary, every greeting to Our Lady, is a new beat of a heart in love” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 615).

Today is a day to pray our Rosary with great piety and devotion, to thank Our Lady for all the joy that comes to our life in her and through her; to thank her for being our Mother, perhaps for showing us the pathway of our life and asking her that she might continue to show us that pathway from now to eternity.

She can also be a model of femininity for us. What did Mary's freedom stand for? Fulton Sheen likes to say it stood for life, for marriage, for the family. She was poor, she was pregnant, she was unmarried. But yet it stood for all those things. This is Christian femininity.

Alice von Hildebrand said, “Women have the key to the future because they are the guardians of purity.”

She said, “This is already clearly indicated by the structure of their bodies, which chastely hides their intimate organs. Because their organs are ‘veiled,’ indicating their mystery and sacredness, women have the immense privilege of sharing the sex of the blessed one: Mary, the most holy of all creatures.”

She says radical feminism “began in Protestant countries for the plain reason that they had turned their backs on Christ's Mother, as if the Savior of the world would feel deprived of the honor given to His Blessed Mother.

“Mary—so gloriously referred to in the Apocalypse—is the model of women. It is by turning to her, praying to her, and contemplating her virtues that women will find their way back to the beauty and dignity of their mission (Zenit News, Interview with Alice von Hildebrand on The Privilege of Being a Woman, Nov. 26, 2003).

With the Church we can say today, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.”

Help me to keep looking at you and to love and savor beautiful feast days of yours like today, together with all your other feast days.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

GD