Today, on this Solemnity of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel presents Mary with an impossible task.
“You will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you will name him Jesus.” (Lk 1:31)
Even setting aside all that follows – the Son of the Most High, the throne of David, the ruling until the end of time, all that conspires to make this task overwhelming to the point of absurdity – there remains the fact that Mary is being asked to bear a child, and along with him, a world of uncertainties.
“How can this be…?” (Lk 1:34)
This is not something she has anticipated or prepared for nor can she imagine being able to accomplish it. My own mother has told me that having a child was for her a responsibility so terrifying it stood without parallel in her life. She has to change. Her body has to expand to make room for a new occupant, and her heart, too, will need to find room within itself for an expanded range of concerns.
They say that children help their parents to grow up by calling forth from them, through their helplessness, a response of loving self-sacrifice. In the monastery we need this too. It is offered to us through another kind of family life and another kind of dependence. It is all too easy to rationalize a refusal to bear the burden of responsibility, of being needed, depended upon, and even taken for granted. After all, we have no children – in the flesh, at least. But such a refusal would be a shame and a loss of the deep and transforming gift of Christian community.
Becoming a mother hurts – in spirit more than in body – because a person has to die to the self she thought she knew, and to life as she has known it up until now. Something new is called for. Does she have what it takes?
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” (Lk 1:35)
This is not possible for her. Let us be clear about this. It is another (the Mighty One) who will do it in her. But the receptivity that is called for is not passivity of an irresponsible sort. Sr Miriam Pollard, in one of her books, makes a most helpful distinction between experiences of constructive activity and of a true and constructive passivity:
“What would you find at the source of activity? Choice and energy. What would you find at the source of passivity, the kind I’m talking about? Choice and – though it seems in much lower supply – energy. Then what’s the difference?
The difference, it seems to me is this: the experience of activity emphasizes what we do. We exert ourselves in the interest of getting a handle on what’s happening. We may succeed or we may not, but there’s stuff on which to exert our doing skills.
A passive experience, on the other hand, emphasizes what we can’t do. Our opportunity for controlling, fixing, building, doing, is lessened, sometimes radically. Choice, in this case, endures, perseveres, gets on with it, sticks with it. Choice here is patient, sometimes resilient, obeying, groping, getting up in the morning to put one foot in front of another. Choice here summons up its courage in the face of the thing that cannot be done.
What is it then that we choose in agreeing to a set of circumstances, or what may seem to be a chaos of noncircumstance, which we cannot bind or mold or fashion?
We choose to accept the forming work of God – in ourselves and in whatever has been taken out of our own forming hands by his. God may not need or want the form of action we have determined to give; he may not want or give the result we’ve determined to have. We can choose to fight God’s view of things, or we can choose to choose his vision and intent.”
(Miriam Pollard, The Other Face of Love, 106-7)
“For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Lk 1:37)
It was St Francis who said: “Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” Without faith, everything is impossible. Many of the things life asks of us seem impossible, that is to say, they lie beyond the scope of our imagination. I believe St Benedict recognizes this in his chapter on impossible tasks. In chapter 68 of the Rule, he invites a monk to keep an open mind toward whatever is asked of him and to cultivate a preemptive disposition to give it a try. In this attitude lies the possibility of transformation beyond his wildest dreams. Even when quaking beneath the burden of uncertainty and fear, he is willing to take one more step: “Out of love, confident of God’s help, let him obey” (RB 68.5).
Sr Miriam again: “What we can’t do is often more important than what we can do, and the activity that pulses within the confining arms of an impossible situation is often the most expansive form of activity we will ever learn.”
(Miriam Pollard, The Other Face of Love, 120)
So let us, together with Mary, dare to open ourselves to the impossible tasks with which life presents us, whether they be in the area of responsibilities or relationships or a burden of suffering.
Let us, together with Mary, choose to embrace these occasions of inner growth that will make us spacious and ready to bring new life to others.
Let us, together with Mary, allow God to have his way in us.
“Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord.
Let it be with me according to your word.’” (Lk 1:38)