Two unavoidable things about fire: it both gives light and burns. In 1955 Flannery O’Connor said the following to one of her correspondents on her difficulties in being a Catholic writer: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation: that is, nobody in your audience.” Now, why would she refer to the central mystery of our faith as awful in its effects? Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t put it past her to be playing on the two meanings of the word “awful”: at the same time the everyday one of “terrible, off-putting” and then the other more exalted one: “full of awe”. Indeed, the fact that God at a certain point decided to become a human being is at the same time the most comforting and the most problematic of events, if we take it with all the earnestness of a believer like Flannery O’Con-nor, or of Our Lady herself. After all, Mary’s first reaction to Gabriel’s announcement was not delight but fear, and she was “greatly troubled” at God’s proposal to her—a truly honest and realistic reaction, hinting that she quite suspected all the hardships the Incarnation would bring in its wake.
When we say that the Mother of the Lord presents to us the perfect model of faith, we often forget that this means not only accepting the will of God wholeheartedly as a source of joy but also wrestling mightily and bravely with the difficult contradictions that God’s will almost always introduces into our lives. It seems that God never comes to us only to console us and make us feel better about whatever situation we find ourselves in. Because God’s will always involves a plan for the salvation for the whole world and everyone in it, God’s consolation to us always comes accompanied with the expectation that we will become partners with him in the redemption of the world: that is, his grace in us must always become fruitful for the good of others, exactly as in Mary’s case: not for nothing do we call her the “Mother of the Redemption”; and this demand on God’s part can be an intense trial for our quintessentially lazy human nature.
But let’s take a look at these two aspects of the central Christian mystery which we are celebrating today in the middle of Lent: the aspects that make the In-carnation to be at once awesome to hear and terrible to bear.
What could ever equal the marvel of God’s intense desire not only to be with us but to do so not in any external, superficial manner but indeed by becoming one of us? This extraordinary wonder should never cease to resonate in all the fibers of our being, every day of our lives. In fact, our awareness of this unheard-of marvel should be the habitual center of our faith, the place of refuge to which we flee in every temptation and in every suffering. It is a secret we want to shout out into the stars out of all the nights of our soul: the Creator of the universe has wanted to be at home in us, in me, sharing who we are from the inside out, not as a superior Being coming down upon us from above but, rather, as a devoted and active presence more intimate to my heart than I am to myself, and this every minute of my life!
How magnificent for us to feel wanted, desired, understood, and supported by the very Source of our being! Is there any difficulty then that we cannot face, when the Creator has made himself at home in the dwelling of the creature, because he is so ravished by the beauty and goodness of what he has created, despite its myriad flaws? And the way in which all this occurs is so surprising and reassuring precisely because it is so ordinary. To effect Our Lord’s Incarnation the Holy Spirit comes, not only into our world, our habitat, but to the land of Israel, to the town of Nazareth, to the humble house of Mary and Joseph, and to the very room where Mary happens at that moment to be sewing, or cooking, or cleaning, or perhaps simply praying. (I doubt very much whether she was actually reading Scripture at that moment, as some pious authors and artists want to represent her. Because at that time poor Jews did not have scrolls of the Bible lying around the house. One magnificent icon shows Mary weaving, but weaving the red thread of her Son’s flesh!) She in whom the Scripture’s greatest promise was about to be fulfilled did not need to be reading Scripture. She herself was the living book of flesh in which the Holy Spirit was about to inscribe the Word of Life! It must have been a consolation beyond any imagining for Mary’s faith suddenly to become inhabited by the presence of the God who was already her all as her Creator.
However, all is not consolation. When Our Lady gives her unconditional fiat to God through the angel, she must already suspect that the Almighty cannot come into our lives in that absolute, irreversible manner without certain fundamental challenges emerging, challenges that would prove terrible to an ordinary human heart. The initial trembling of her soul at Gabriel’s approach was not a misunderstanding or an excess of humility. Her human nature quaked at what she sensed was in store for her as Mother of the Messiah. The glorious fact that her son Jesus “will be called Son of the Most High…, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever” could not conceal the other fact that this Messiah was coming to deliver his people from their sins, and that he would do it by the offering of his own life as an atoning sacrifice. Her Son would be the King of Love who reigns from a cross. She was being invited to become the mother of a crucified King.
Mary had intimate knowledge of the prophecies of Isaiah and of the ways of a God who is love; and so she must have already suspected what Simeon would eventually tell her explicitly in the temple at the Presentation: namely, that “this Child is to be a sign that is contradicted, and your own soul a sword shall pierce”—surely the sword of her compassion at the foot of the Cross. One doesn’t become intimately involved in the life of a redeeming God, one doesn’t admit the transforming presence of God into one’s house and soul, without joining God in the massive project of the world’s redemption. After admitting God and all God’s ways into the sanctuary of one’s life, one will never be able to go back to one’s previous, private, self-determined life. From the moment of the Annunciation on, neither Our Lady nor any of us can fail to find the Lord Jesus, the eternal God of the ages, alive and present and suffering in all human flesh we encounter, especially in the least of God’s children.
Once human flesh has been touched by divinity, the whole world lights up with the burning presence of God. As at the burning bush, God present in human flesh through Mary’s unconsumed virginity makes us take off the sandals of our self-protection, the sandals of our arrogance, of our separateness, of our sham autonomy, in order to touch the Godhead with the skin of our feet and hands, with the sensitive skin of our hearts, in order to adore and serve the living God as he encounters us continually both in our own suffering and in the suffering of all who share our very same flesh.
