Annunciation Solemn Chapter
This past Saturday, we celebrated the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord. On the day preceding, we hold Solemn Chapter to announce the upcoming feast. The community gathers in the Chapter hall, and one of the chantresses chants the prologue to the Gospel of John, announcing that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The community makes the venia, the traditional Dominican prostration, reverencing the taking of human flesh by the eternal Word of God at the fiat of the Blessed Virgin which this feast celebrates. Then, the prioress invites a Sister to come forward and give a sermon. It is often the youngest postulant who is chosen, and this year, Sr. Natalie gave the chapter sermon which you can read below.
My dear Sisters,
As a postulant, I thought that I probably had very little to offer on deep theological insights and how they might apply to monastic observances or daily life here. So naturally, I’d like to start with how the Hypostatic Union is key for understanding the mode of our sanctification. Just kidding, but the reality of the hypostatic union is what we celebrate at the Annunciation—that God humbled himself to partake in our humanity; that he took on our nature so that His divine nature, His grace, could perfect it.
God and man! The reality of the Incarnation reveals that God is a God of mercy. It does so in many ways but I would like to reflect on three ways:
1) God did not have to save us, but He has!
2) He gave Mary the grace to accept His Will.
And finally, what I just alluded to, that
3) Taking on a human nature allows us to participate in the divine nature.
First, the Incarnation reveals God’s mercy to all of humanity. God created the world and holds it in existence. Thus, everything belongs to Him, but He made everything with freedom. So the reality that sadly so many people believe now in which God could have stood infinitely distant from his creation was a real possibility. In this train of thought, man is limited in His freedom and abilities to reach God, but God can answer in an infinite number of ways and one of them could be ignoring man. As infinite being, God never has to explain Himself and can create more possibilities and forget about a race that has chosen to turn away.
But the Incarnation is our celebration that He hasn’t rejected us. In the merciful love through which He made us He knew we would fall and arranged all of the cosmos and history to prepare for the day in which He would definitively speak His WORD into humanity. By uttering His eternal WORD, the complete expression of Himself, he became a part of the world itself. His plan revealed itself little by little and from the human point of view God’s work in the people of Israel and the prophets cemented God’s mercy in His Will to take on a human nature. Through them we see that God continually calls “Turn to me! I am mercy! I am love and I have not chosen to remain distant!”
The Annunciation is thus the decisive point before the climax of Good Friday and Easter Sunday because our salvation, the cross and Resurrection, presuppose the Incarnation. We even celebrate this solemnity (and Christmas 9 months later) as a consequence from a third century African tradition that holy men died on the day of their conception and at that point Good Friday was calculated to have landed on March 25th. All of creation and history revolve around this event. God was to come into the world to save it…and He started by coming into the world!
But we still had (and have) freedom and his entrance was to be determined by man’s response to that freedom. And so the drama of the Annunciation unfolds.
When a mother loses her child in the supermarket and the child is returned to her, she often cries. This solemnity ought to fill us with awe and joy because it could have been otherwise. Our salvation, our vocation, our life are not things we can take for granted because they could have been otherwise! The lost drachma or the lost sheep could have been permanently lost! But they were found!
In the words of Karl Rahner:
“The eternal God has himself determined that the world itself shall definitely be drawn into his eternal mercy, and now it has a goal which infinitely transcends it and yet is its own: God’s own self. When we genuflect and say: And the Word was made flesh, we are saying that judgement is not God’s last word, but mercy; not infinite remoteness but indescribable presence; not his searing holiness and inaccessibility, but ineffable love, in which he gives himself to what is not God”[1]
We celebrate that God in His mercy is making all things new, that our salvation has come and it has come because Mary responded to God and accepted Him and returned His love.
In this Gospel scene, I sometimes try to accompany the angel Gabriel being sent on this very important mission which God had kept hidden until that moment. He’s not sure what to expect of the girl who is to be Queen of Heaven but when he arrives and sees the most incomparably beautiful creature he loses all composure and cries, “AVE! MARIA!” and no one wonder Mary is troubled at his greeting! She’s got this angel in front of her who can hardly hold himself together revealing God’s plan to her when just moments before her prayer she was sweeping the probably packed dirt floor of her house.
He declares to her and she conceives by the Holy Spirit.
I once had a Protestant friend who was trying to argue something about predestination and that even Mary’s choice was not free. I think that was when I noticed that in the Angelus “Coceived by the Holy Spirit” happens before “Be it done unto me”. However, “And the Word became flesh” happens after “Behold the handmaiden”, so his argument was null. But it did strike me that we say she conceives by the Holy Spirit even before her fiat. Surely this points to the kind of motherhood that Mary has. First, she conceived of Him in her heart. She hears God’s Will, his offering of grace, and accepts it wholeheartedly. Yes, even Mary’s fiat is a grace, an effect of God’s mercy but it is also her act, her consent to place herself body and soul before God: “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord!” And thus through God’s mercy, this personal act of faith makes her God’s mother and places her in relationship with us. The biological reality is secondary as Jesus clarifies when the woman cries out about the blessedness of the womb that bore him he replies, “Rather, blessed is she who hears the word of God and keeps it”.
Mary acknowledges that God is the giver of the great grace. She acknowledges that God’s mercy is first. In her response to Elizabeth she says her soul magnifies the Lord because He has looked with favor on His humble servant. God looked with favor on her so that she could give her consent. She is called blessed because the Almighty has given her such grace to receive Him. The next coupled lines of the Magnificat reveal that He has mercy, He has mercy, He has mercy and that He has mercy because of his promise of mercy.
What allowed Mary to recognize the depths of God’s mercy and what will help us to do likewise is her humility. In her humility, Mary understood the distance between creature and Creator and thus His mercy more than any other human ever has or will. Yet she was also privileged to know how small that distance was when he became the most helpless and poor—an unborn child, a man on a cross!
This is yet another aspect of the mercy of God that the Incarnation of Christ reveals (and the last that I will comment on): that because Jesus is both God and man He opens for us the way to share in His divine glory. God chooses to become the most unvalued and lowly so that nothing is out of reach from His grace. He delights in our frailty because through our weakness He can show His glory. By the constant obedience of his human will to the divine Will even to the point of death on the cross, He heals humanity of its disobedience.
Through Him, with Him, and in Him, we can finally do what we were made for: to become like God. Because we do so through the Son, we must receive this gift as children: “But to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name” (Jn 1:12). As His children, God looks at us with the same sort of heart-melting, almost-drooling sweetness a parent has towards their two year old who runs up to them for a kiss. We may make mistakes constantly, but unlike the fall of a grown-up which is either dangerous or comical, when little children fall it is easy to pick them up, dust them off and set them running again after assuring them that they are not hurt just scared. Sometimes we do get scrapes and need confession, but that is another mercy that I don’t have time to talk about. We can now live in the freedom and glory of the children of God!
What is our response to all of the mercy that God has shown to us? As children, we must learn from our older brother. His human nature grows in grace and wisdom under obedience to His parents and in obedience to His heavenly Father. His human nature is in constant communication with His divine nature, consubstantial with the Father, and thus is constantly being perfected through this union. For us to truly become sharers in His divinity, our lives must be an imitation of and an entering into His unceasing prayer rooted in obedience to the Will of the Father. Going back to John’s Prologue, “From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace” (Jn 1:16). Thus our response to His mercy is to allow His grace to work in us little nothings with gratitude, peace, and joy! So let us thank Him and rejoice that in His mercy He does not abandon us; in His mercy we have a mother who teaches us how to accept Him into our hearts; in His mercy we have a prayer and mystery that we can enter into so “that we who confess our Redeemer to be both God and man may merit to become partakers even in his divine nature” (Collect).
[1] Rahner, Karl. (1963) Mary, Mother of the Lord “Mary the Mother of God”