Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb.

With this phrase, John Donne closes a sonnet to the Virgin Mary about the Annunciation of the Incarnation. Marvellously in the span of fourteen lines the poet condenses and encompasses the sublime mystery of the Divine Word entering our human condition through Mary’s simple acceptance of God’s invitation addressed to her via his messenger. Her faith-filled response begins and is the exemplary answer which all humankind is called to make to what in fact is a divinely initiated dialogue.

 

     New beginnings are always difficult. They always present a challenge to overcome the residual inertia that resists being disturbed from accustomed ways or habits of acting. The greatest or even the smallest of the difficulties about beginning something afresh consists in not knowing what it may entail and fearing the end of the journey to which it may lead. On the other hand, to act hastily, boldly pretending and blindly presuming that we’ll solve our difficulties of ignorance or overcome our imperfect knowledge, is sheer imprudence that plummets us into the chasm of folly. But what is even worse would be to regard this throwing ourselves into a frenzied muddle of actions without consideration of the consequences as making progress. Wendell Berry thus wisely stated: ‘To trust “progress” or our putative “genius” to solve all the problems that we cause is worse than bad science; it is bad religion.’ (Life is a Miracle, p.11) The same author goes on to point out:

In our foolish insistence on substituting technology for vision, we forget that we are not the first to have seen “the whole earth” from such a distance. Dante saw it (Paradiso XXII, 133-154) from a higher level of human accomplishment, and at far less economic and ecological cost, several hundred years before NASA. (Ibid., pp.16f.)

     Wendell Berry reappraises all features and aspects of human experience as imbued with a significance that consists in being sign-posts, that is, having a sacramental value of something beyond themselves, namely the wholesomeness of wholeness in and because of God’s love for the world. As he states:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world... I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God. (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays.)

The significance of this world’s grandeur is proclaimed in the mystery of the Incarnation celebrated in the feast of the Annunciation.

Life’s significance unfolded in a great mystery

The Annunciation is entirely about the miracle or wonder of human life’s richest significance and purpose unfolded in a great mystery. At this event the Virgin Mary accepted God’s design in sheer and undaunted faith – “Be it done unto me according to Thy Word.” Her acceptance wasn’t without questioning God’s purpose, but was a questing to understand, as faith must always be: fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’ - as St Anselm put it). In other words, although she didn’t and couldn’t conceive any more than our humanly limited vision allows, yet, conceive she did, in a most tremendous way! She embraced in love the end, the purpose God mercifully intended in the beginning to shed anew the Light of his Presence on the face of our sin-darkened condition of woe and misery. More wonderfully than when “darkness was upon the face of the deep,” and he said, ‘let there be light’” (Gen 1:2-3), his freshly uttered Word reveals the dawning of a new creation, being indicated by the tenses of two verbs in the following sentence: “The true Light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (Jn 1:9).

     This announces something wholly wonderful, the birth  of a new language, the actual coming into the world of a fresh kind of knowledge, a knowledge that isn’t abstract or impersonal, a mere passing on of information, but truly a transforming knowledge of an intimate and gracious outreach to heal and strengthen what is frail and disordered in being human, namely, “flesh” (sarx). The Annunciation of this is proclaimed in that amazing sentence: “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). This is communication in the most vital, world-transforming sense – communication that would be, however, a dead letter, unless it were received and responded to, believed in as empowering human beings to become God’s children (Jn 1:12). This Annunciation opens up a culture of a conversational reality – that dialogue of God and humankind being-related initiated by and spreading from God to us and between us. The Annunciation of the Incarnation is precisely the unveiling of the mystery of the Spirit-filled Word of Life (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-4; Jn 6:63), genuine communication of realistic hope-giving “Good News” – evangelisation regarding the Presence of the Person of Jesus Christ, God and Saviour.

This Presence particularly invites our reciprocated response for God’s gracious Gift. His Word’s Presence among us indeed requires more than a formalistic verbal articulation of belief about it as a fact or elaboration of the creedal truth in theological discourses, valuable as these are. The only fitting response to this Presence is in the gift of our selves, the offering of our whole lives, minds and hearts to him their Life-Giver, like Mary did through living out the implications of her availability as God’s faithful humble servant.  

The mystery of Incarnation is closely linked and continued in the Eucharistic mystery, the whole purpose of which is Communion, the “pledge of future glory” (in St Thomas Aquinas’ lapidary phrase). The realisation of this richly profound truth was expressed by St Peter-Julian Eymard, the “apostle of the Eucharist,” who especially near the end of his life sums up the teaching of the Fathers of the Church – a teaching carried on by the French School of Spirituality:

"Communion is the extension of the Incarnation. It is the same Jesus who comes into us who was incarnate in the womb of Mary... The end of the Incarnation is Communion. You, the faithful, are the end of the sacrifice and the consecration." (27 June 1867, sermon at the end of an Octave of Corpus Christi – PO 18,15)

 The whole of the liturgy, in fact, proclaims the divine Word, becoming most wondrously the eternally life-giving Flesh and Blood of the Son of Man (cf. Jn 6:53). By his dwelling among us God requires and shows us how to do the same as Mary in our particular situation. She tells us, as she did at that life-celebrating event – the marriage of that couple in Cana of Galilee - to do whatever Jesus requests (Jn 2:5). She helps us never to forget, to keep in mind and heart and deed the mystery that Jesus communicates of his Paschal Presence: “do this in memory of me”... Our remembering is impregnated and made fruitful by attending to and letting the Spirit lead us into the truth of the Word of Life (cf. Jn 16:13f.). Through the Holy Spirit, the interpreter, we are enabled to translate our ritual enactment of gratitude and praise for his Paschal Mystery into the whole texture of the liturgy of living in generous and joyful service, worship of God and service of one another and all people.

 

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Image above:

Annunciation (1898) by Henry Ossawa Tanner,

                     Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Image at the end:

                   First sign,  the Marriage at Cana in Galilee by Giotto (1304-1306),
                   Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.