Solemnity of the Annunciation

The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary…And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.
Behold the Handmaid of the Lord…Be it done unto me according to your word.
And the Word became flesh…And dwelt among us.
Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God…That we may be made worthy of the promise of Christ.
Pour forth, we beseech You, O Lord, Your grace into our hearts, that we to whom the Incarnation of Christ, Your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His passion and cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ out Lord. Amen.

Normally I attend 5:30 PM Mass at the Mission San Diego. Because it ends at about 6:00 we always pray the Angelus after the final blessing, except during Easter then we pray the Regina Coeli. That was the last thing on my mind today as we received the final blessing from our priest. The only thing I thought about was how perfect it is to pray the Angelus on the Solemnity of the Annunciation and how the events of history are represented in the prayer.

While the focus of the Annunciation is on Christ, I can not resist expressing my love for His mother. My love affair with her had a rocky start coming out of a Protestant denomination in my mid-twenties. As a Protestant, I never gave the Mother of God a second thought; she was completely eclipsed by the Lord. As I slowly subjected my thinking to the teachings of the Roman Church my affection slowly grew and grew. The first leap out of Protestant thinking came from an argument I first heard from Scott Hahn. He pointed out that as a Christian we are called to imitate Christ. In our imitation of Christ we need to honor Mary as Jesus honored her as His mother. That was not hard to swallow either theologically or morally. Praying the Hail Mary was not hard to swallow either because it comes straight out of Holy Scripture. Then I began to pray the Rosary regularly. Getting to know the mysteries of the Rosary and meditating on them while praying the Rosary warmed me up to Mary even more. After discussions with my dad it was pointed out to me that everything Jesus has as a person came from Mary. All His DNA is Mary’s DNA. That would give her a special distinction among mankind. She is the only person that ever lived that shares the exact DNA of God Himself. My latest development in the way I view the Mother of God came as the result of reading Roy Schoeman’s book Salvation Is From the Jews. The last chapter of his book is a collection of conversion stories of Jews becoming Roman Catholics. It appeared that Mary was critical for a disproportionately large number of Jewish conversions to Christianity. It occurred to me (with the help of some discussions with my dad, again) that Mary would be very important to devout Jews because she is the personification of the perfect Jewish state (which may merit a post in itself)!

The gravity of the Incarnation goes much deeper than the I portrays (of course). God came down to Earth and became one of us! That gives dignity to every man, woman and child that ever lived no matter how degenerate, debased or repugnant they are or were. They now share the same form and likeness of All-Mighty God. God never wanted to be a snowy plover or a humpback whale or any kind of animal. Humans were the only creatures He willed to be His own. Now all of mankind, whether Christian or not, can say, “I am like the Most High.”

Finally I will leave with a poem by John Donne, who I was introduced to in college and immediately fell in love with.

Annunciation
Salvation to all that will is nigh,
That all, which always is all everywhere,
Which can not sin, and yet all sin must bear,
Which can not die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo, faithful Virgin, yields himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though he there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet he ‘will wear
Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in his mind, who is thy son, and brother,
Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived; yea thou art now
Thy maker’s maker, and thy father’s mother,
Thou’ hast light in dark; and shutt’st in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.