March 25 — THE ANNUNCIATION OF MARY

Presence of God. — Beside you, O Mary, I want to learn to repeat in every circumstance your: “Ecce ancilla Domini!”.

Meditation

1 — Through the evocative account of St. Luke (Vg.: 1, 26-38) let us seek to penetrate the dispositions of Mary’s soul at the moment of the Annunciation.

The Angel, sent by God, finds the Virgin recollected in solitude and, “entering to her,” says: “Hail, full of grace; the Lord is with you! Blessed are you among women.” Before such words, Mary - says the sacred text - “was troubled”; we must not understand this expression in the sense of a real disturbance that takes away serenity of mind, but rather in the sense of profound wonder before such an unusual greeting, wonder so great as to generate a sort of fear. This was Mary’s first reaction before the angelic message, a reaction arising from her deepest humility, to which such extraordinary praise had to seem very strange.

Meanwhile the Angel communicates to her the great announcement: God wills that she become Mother of the Redeemer. Mary, living under the continual guidance of the Holy Spirit, had by His inspiration made a vow of virginity and is therefore persuaded she must remain a virgin and that such is God’s will. But now God makes known to her that He has chosen her Mother of His Son and she, humble handmaid, is ready to adhere to the divine plan; nevertheless she does not understand how she can be both mother and virgin, and precisely on this point she asks the Angel: “How shall this be?” The Angel explains: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon you and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you.” Her maternity will be a direct work of the Holy Spirit and will preserve her virginity.

God’s will is now entirely revealed to her, and Mary, who in all her life had always and only been moved by the divine will, immediately embraces it with the fullest adherence and with the most intense and pure love: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word.” Total acceptance is accompanied by total self-giving: Mary accepts by offering herself and offers herself by giving herself. She offers herself as handmaid, indeed as slave, if we take the word in all the force of the Greek text; she gives herself by abandoning herself as prey to the divine will, adhering in advance to all that God will want of her. Passive and active adherence together, whereby Mary wills all that God wills, accepting from God all that He does and doing all that He desires. Mary thus appears to us as the model of the soul totally united, fully given to the will of God.

2 — The Angel’s explanation does not remove the fact that many circumstances of what must happen remain hidden and obscure to Mary’s gaze. She stands before a mystery, and a mystery she intuits to be rich in suffering; from Sacred Scripture she knows that the Redeemer must be the man of sorrows, sacrificed for the salvation of humanity. The ineffable joy of divine motherhood thus appears to her enveloped in a mystery of sorrow: to accept being Mother of the Son of God means accepting being Mother of One executed, condemned to death. And Mary in her fiat embraces all this: as before joy, so before mystery and sorrow, she has only one simple response: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” By this adherence Our Lady is intimately associated with the life of suffering of her Jesus and therefore with His work of Redemption, and she becomes the spiritual Mother of the human race. This was God’s plan for her, and Mary accepted it totally, without reserve, precisely because her will was totally united to God’s will.

Every Christian receives from God a vocation, a mission to accomplish, through which he is called to participate in the redemptive work of Jesus. This mission, then, for souls consecrated to God, culminates in a task of spiritual fatherhood or motherhood. Oh, if before the full divine call every soul knew how to answer with the full adherence of Our Lady: “Ecce ancilla Domini... fiat!”

Many times in our life we have received invitations from the Lord - and certainly we will receive more - invitations to suffering, to sacrifice, to self-gift. How have we responded? Has the vision of the hardships and sorrows we would have had to embrace perhaps held us back? At least for the future let us seek to have the eyes of our soul more open to understand, like Mary, that precisely through suffering God calls us to contribute with Jesus to the sanctification of souls.

Colloquy

“Hail Mary, O full of grace, the Lord is with you! Not only is God the Son with you, to whom you give your blood, but also God the Holy Spirit, by whose operation you conceive, and also God the Father who from eternity begot Him whom you conceive. With you is the Father who makes His Son yours; with you is the Son who, wishing to accomplish a wondrous mystery, hides Himself in your maternal womb without violating its virginal integrity; with you is the Holy Spirit who together with the Father and the Son sanctifies you. God is with you, truly” (St. Bernard).

“O Mary, Mary, temple of the Trinity... O Mary, vessel of humility, you pleased the Eternal Father, and so He seized you and drew you to Himself, loving you with singular love. With the fire of your charity and with the oil of your humility you drew the Divinity to come into you.

“Mary, at the Angel’s word were you perhaps troubled out of fear? It does not seem so, though you showed a sign of wonder. At what, then, were you amazed? At the great goodness of God, while, considering yourself, you knew yourself unworthy of so great a grace. You were therefore amazed and astonished by consideration of your own unworthiness and weakness and of God’s ineffable grace... and thus you showed profound humility. But in you too, O Mary, today the dignity and freedom of man are shown, because before the Word was incarnate the Angel is sent to you to seek your will’s consent. The Son of God did not descend into your womb before you consented; He waited at the door of your will for you to open to Him, who wanted to come into you; and He would never have entered if you had not opened by saying: - Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to your word...

“O Mary, my sweetest love, you opened to the eternal Divinity the door of your will and immediately the Word was incarnate in you. And by this you teach me that God, who created me without me, will not save me without me... but He knocks at the door of my will and waits for me to open to Him” (St. Catherine of Siena).

O Mary, by the ineffable mystery accomplished in you today, I beg you always to teach and help me to throw wide open the door of my soul to every divine call, to every urging of grace. Grant that before every manifestation of the divine will I may always repeat with you my humble and prompt: “Ecce, fiat”.