Happy Solemnity of the Annunciation! This day marks our 36th anniversary of foundation as the Religious Family of the Incarnate Word in San Rafael, Argentina: 1984 – 2020.
Unlike past years, the feast of the Archangel’s greeting comes to us quietly, more hidden than usual. We have no large public solemn Mass, no festive reception, no bustling of seminarians and sisters and families and friends. And yet truly the day is no less extraordinary than when it first took place in Nazareth of Galilee.
The hush that has fallen over nearly the whole world because of the global pandemic invites Christians to listen in more closely to the words of the Angel and the courageous response of the Virgin Mary: Ecce ancilla Domini! (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord!”) Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum! (“Let it be done unto me according to thy word.”)
Perhaps unlike past years, we might not pass by this mystery in a hurry, but rather ponder how that conversation which we repeat daily in the prayer of the Hail Mary (“Hail Mary! Full of grace, the Lord is with Thee…”) marks the beginning of our salvation.
The angel spoke, and Mary answered with reasonable questions, and then made a definitive response. She used her liberty to welcome God’s will for the good of the whole world.
Thus the Annunciation yields the greatest fruit of human freedom: the Incarnation of the Word, our Savior, the Second Person of Most Blessed Trinity made Man.
Let us not pass by this mystery in a mindless rush. Let us not ignore real drama with daily humdrum affairs, as W. H. Auden once so beautifully captured in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a layered work of Western images, Classical mythology, art, poetry, and the Christian imagination (see the poem and related Breughel painting below).
Instead today we might marvel at the delicacy by which a girl in a small and unimportant city in the north country of Israel welcomed “something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky”; natura mirante (“nature itself marveling to see”): a creature has become the Mother of her Creator, as the Alma Redemptoris Mater notes.
Because the Word has become flesh, He might lay it down upon on the Cross for us, and take it up again in glory. The paschal road is marked out for us.
Happy Feast to all! The beginning of our salvation comes to earth today!
Sisters at the Provincial House
Washington, DC
NB: these are great days to memorize some poetry to recite to your companions of your quarantined household; good for the heart, good for civilization, good all around.
Musée des Beaux Arts (1939, publ. 1940)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus
Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels. (image in the public domain)
