We tend to manage life more than just live it. We are all over stimulated and drowning in options. We are trained to be managers, to organize life, to make things happen. That is what built our culture. It is not all bad, but it you transfer that to the spiritual life, it is pure heresy.– Fr. Richard Rohr from Preparing for Christmas

Growing up I didn’t know Mary much. She was that lovely, flawless Madonna, Jesus’ mother, and that was about it. As I developed a new understanding of Mary theologically, Mary has been a companion and model of Christian servanthood. As Mother of Sorrows, she has walked with me in my own loss and prays with me for the grieving. As advocate for peace, she guides my prayers for those victimized by violence.

Each liturgical year we return to the Mary of the Annunciation for what she can teach us:   her humility, trust, obedience, her powerful “Yes,” risking all that she is to become a vessel of the holy will of God. This season, though, it is a certain kind of receptivity to what life brings her that I want to try to understand, that I want to shape me. In whatever form the divine “messenger” came, it was a staggering experience breaking into her life with astounding words about her future. But rather than doubting, feeling unworthy, or running screaming into the hills, she is described as “perplexed”—puzzled, bewildered, wondering. She listens deeply, her fears stilled, and she begins to “ponder.” This meditative and reflective stance, different from needing to discount, decide, manage, judge, keeps her open.  She asks a question, but it is not like Zachariah’s desire for certainty and proof in his own divine encounter—“how shall I know”; it is a wondering question: “How can this be?”

Mary’s receptivity requires a kind of spaciousness in the self that doesn’t urge us to quick conclusions, that allows us to hold uncomfortable oppositions together without canceling one out, that bids us stay in the midst of all that is swirling around in us. It involves, according to Fr. Rohr, a “gradual emptying of our attachment to our small self so that there is room for a new conception and a new birth. There must be some displacement before there can be any new ‘replacement.’ Mary is the archetype of such self-displacement and surrender.”

Prayer

I need this Mary right now. And many I know do. Rather than acting out of fear of the uncertain future or painful loss or trying to control God’s movement in our lives with a worthiness contest, may we pray into the spacious expansiveness of waiting, in the full trust that the grace-filled birth already begun in us will indeed become a holy child. Amen.