Celebrating the Mary’s Audacity on the Feast of the Annunciation

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord: 
Let it be with me according to your word.”
—Luke 1:38, NRSV

My favorite depiction of the Annunciation, the feast we celebrate today, is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, displayed at the Cloisters in uptown Manhattan.  Part of a triptych called the Merode Altarpiece, it was painted between 1427-1432 in the Netherlands and is attributed to Robert Campin.

On the right wing, we see a much older than usual Joseph hard at work in his carpentry shop, and on the left, the wealthy couple who commissioned the painting kneel in worship outside an open door. This door leads into the central panel where the action is taking place. In the center we see Mary, of indeterminate age and dressed in a lavishly draped red gown, reading a book while reclining against a sort of fancy wooden bench covered with celestial blue cushions. The Archangel Gabriel is to the left of her, just about to interrupt her study, looking for all the world like a hesitant pageboy afraid to disturb his mistress, except for the burnished golden wings.

The critical detail of this painting is easy to miss if you aren’t looking closely, but once you see it you can’t look away. Entering from a high-up window at stage left, coursing along a sunbeam, is the tiny baby Jesus cruising towards Mary’s ear like a Valentine’s Day cherub, clinging to a tiny cross. He is on his way, it seems, waiting only for the consent of his soon-to-be mother. 

The story of the Annunciation, once you take away the glorious wings of the archangel and the rich tapestries and carvings of the Medieval or Renaissance settings in so many depictions of it, is a story of a young woman presented with a world-changing proposition from God who found in herself the strength and the courage to say: yes.

My first grader has a weekly math test, and if she gets all the answers correct in the allotted time, she moves on to the next level the following week. Recently, she had been stuck on addition with 8s for a couple of weeks and was getting very frustrated with her inability to move on. We made flashcards and practiced the arithmetic at home, but the real issue holding her back was the time it took her to write the answers. So, we started doing practice tests to work on writing the correct numbers clearly but quickly, and after a few days, her confidence was coming back. 

She passed her next test. The day the graded test came home I turned it over and saw, in big letters on the blank back of the sheet:

I can! do this!

I can! do this!

I can! do this!

I can! do this!

I asked her about it and she said she wrote it to prepare herself for the test that day because she was feeling nervous. She also said she knew the exclamation marks were in the wrong place, but she needed extra that day. It worked, and as we celebrated her moving on to 9s, I stuck her motivational math test on our fridge, backside out. It has stayed there for a while now, and I find myself looking to it for an extra little boost on hard days.

I currently am living in the increasingly common, liminal space of the Sandwich Generation, balancing caretaking of elderly parents and raising young children. My father lost his vision shortly after my mother died, and a few years ago, my husband and I made the decision that I would leave the parish where I served as rector so we could move back to my hometown to be closer to him. I set aside my formal ministry for this season, unsure how I could balance so many different responsibilities while not giving any short shrift. Instead of making pastoral visits or planning liturgies and supervising staff, my to-do list these days includes daily check-ins with my father, making gerontologist appointments alongside pediatric checkups for my two elementary-aged kids. A few days a week, squeezing into the hours between morning school carline and afternoon pick up,  I drive my father to run errands, have meals or just get out of the house.

Anyone who has lived this life knows that it can be as stressful as it is joyful. But mostly, I recognize in a way I couldn’t in the early days of parenting how fleeting this time will be and how quickly this stage of life will pass. I can appreciate that one day soon, I’ll be missing my dad rather than doing my absolute best to avoid any sort of political discussion over breakfast at the Waffle House. 

On the hard days, I find strength in the confidence and the courage of Mary’s yes that day thousands of years ago that upended the world. I do my best to remember the reasons for my own yes to this chaotic life of caregiving, and I repeat the mantra of the math test, “I can! do this!” Sometimes, I pray the words of the Magnificat, and other times, the rosary because I find that Mary’s strength supports my strength when it fails. Her prayers are my prayers when I can’t find my own words. Her confidence in her vocation as the Mother of God gives me courage in my sometimes conflicting vocations of mother, caregiver, and priest. Her tears are my tears when the grief of what I know the future holds overwhelms me.

I have always had an affinity for Mary because she is the only player in our Divine drama of Incarnation and Crucifixion and Resurrection who is *only* human. She stands in the place of each and every one of us and models for us that power of saying Yes to God, saying Yes to Jesus, saying Yes to this countercultural Christian life. So often in Mariology, it is her suffering that is emphasized, her tears from the foot of the Cross. I choose to focus my heart and my mind on the audacity of a young woman, a girl really, who on one otherwise ordinary day was greeted by an angel who presented her with the choice to change the world and found the courage to say: Let it be with me according to your word.