The Annunciation - 25th March 2025
Card designed and printed at Malling Abbey
As we come to this feast of the Annunciation I am drawn back to the card that kept cropping up over Christmastide – ‘You are the place where God speaks’. Mary is that place par excellence, the place where God spoke his son into flesh at the Annunciation. Although Mary was unique in her bearing of the incarnate son of God each one of us is called to follow her and to be that place where God speaks Christ to birth in our lives.
The moment when God spoke into Mary’s womb is extraordinary and precious, the creator stepped into his creation – how could that be? The universe would never be the same again, time and eternity have been united in this conception. Our card shows lines of power swirling around the praying figure and I imagine that as how it was for Mary, whether or not she perceived it. We too as we pray are partaking of God’s energies swirling through the universe, allowing them to transform us and those for whom we pray. We become bearers of Christ’s presence.
Mary was deeply embedded in her tradition with its expectation of God’s salvation but as a humble peasant woman how could she have a role to play? How could her child be given the throne of his ancestor David? I’m interested how in Luke’s account Mary is surrounded by a network of very ordinary people who in different ways confirm that something extraordinary is happening. They are, like Mary, faithful to their tradition and, hope against hope, are waiting for God to act. There is an air of expectation in the visit of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth and then in the angelic message to the shepherds at Jesus’ birth. As Jesus is presented in the temple by his parents Simeon and Anna too point to the coming of God’s salvation. But Simeon is the first to indicate that this salvation was coming in an unexpected way. He injects a note of darkness when he says ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed — and a sword will pierce your own soul too’.
Celebrating the Annunciation during Lent, as we journey towards Jesus’ death, inevitably links the joy of Jesus’ conception with his rejection and death. The manner of his death was not what anyone would have expected of God’s chosen one and even his closest disciples did not understand what was happening. Only after the darkest time of emptiness and grief did they encounter the risen Christ and begin to realise what God’s salvation meant. And the Christians who have followed them down the centuries have wrestled and struggled with how to express and live out this mystery. Each generation has had to find this anew, drawing on the tradition yet listening to God speaking into their own situation. During Jesus’ lifetime it was those who were confident in their religious institutions and the rigorous observance of their traditional practices who missed what God was doing. And so it has been ever since.
Mary’s obedient response to the message of the angel lays before us the challenge to let go our expectations and be open to God’s surprising ways, even as God derails our cherished plans for our lives. In our monastic life we always live with the tension of holding to an inherited tradition yet needing to be open to the new. In embracing the possibility of change we also need the humility to know that we may get it wrong, but better that than letting our tradition fossilise because we fear any change. Jesus was endlessly patient with his disciples, nudging them along to open up their understanding and not rejecting them when they got it wrong. I believe God is like that with us too, nudging us along and folding up any missteps into his plans that are so much bigger than anything we can imagine.
A couple of months ago I was sent a brief meditation from a book based on the writings of Meister Eckhart1. It has spoken deeply to me as I have pondered and prayed about where we find ourselves as a community. It has a feel of the Annunciation, that being open and receptive to whatever God wishes to bring to birth:
Making Space
What You are able to do
in me depends on the
quality
of my life and whether there
is enough space for
You to
act as You wish to do, and
my work is simply to
shake
myself loose of what I
think or expect You desire
so
that You might find
in my naked nothingness
enough room for
You to
be the love You ever are
and long to set free in me.
Mother Anne - 25th March 2025
1 ‘Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul’ by Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows, p57