Answering the Angels
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I want to acknowledge right up front that the story of the Annunciation, the visitation of Mary from the angel Gabriel as described in the Gospels presents us Unitarian Universalists, with all sorts of challenges. Was Mary a virgin, or simply a young woman of child-bearing age? (It depends on how you translate ancient languages.) Is the primary role of women to bear children? What kind of message does that send our children and youth? Does God communicate with us by sending heavenly messengers?
There are many issues with this story, but I want to invite you to put them aside for the moment. I’d like you instead to hold Mary in a different light. Let’s take Mary down from whatever celestial throne she sits on. Let’s make her real, or at least more real than she is in the myths and stories that have grown up around her. Mary is a young girl, probably 13 or 14 years old. She’s from an ordinary family living in Roman-occupied Judea. Her father is probably a tradesman, perhaps a mason or a cobbler. She is to marry Joseph, the son of a local carpenter. It’s an arranged marriage. He’s older than she, but he has learned his craft from his own father and will be a good provider. Mary is resigned to her fate, knowing no other possibilities. She’s never traveled more than a few miles in any direction outside her village, and all her friends, as well as her older sister, have been married off this same way. Mary doesn’t know how to read or write. But her mother has taught her all the skills she needs to make a good home for Joseph and their family. Life, she knows, is hard. The best you can hope for is a few moments of joy within a life that is otherwise filled with hardship. She likely won’t live to see 50 and there’s a high degree of likelihood that she’ll die in childbirth much sooner than that.
So, we have a picture of this young girl living a hard life in a small village. And what happens next is, at least to me, unbelievable. In this little mud home where Mary is perhaps sweeping the dirt floor or mending a dress, there’s a flash, and an angel appears before her. Now, we have to assume she was afraid because one of the first things the angel says is “Be not afraid.” And we know she’s confused, because Luke tells us she was “much perplexed.” Really, who wouldn’t be?
Then the angel tells her that she has been chosen by God for an especially important task, to give birth to the son of God. She does question him. But Gabriel is the ultimate pitch-man, and it doesn’t take long for Mary to say yes. “Here I am,” she tells the angel. “Let it be with me according to God’s plan.” And then he disappears.
Now, I don’t want to go into what happened after this miraculous event. To speculate about how she explained this whole thing to her parents. Or even more, to Joseph. Because what matters to me most about this story isn’t what it took for her to convince Joseph to stick with her and go through with the marriage, even though she was pregnant. Or whether there was a star in the East when Jesus was born. What fascinates me about this story is that Mary said yes to the angel. Think about that. Here we have Mary, a mere teenager, betrothed to a local carpenter. Her future is mapped out before her. She will be an obedient wife to her husband and hopefully bear him many children. It’s likely that she’ll never leave the little hamlet of Nazareth, that her entire world will consist of a few square miles in and around the village. A simple life. A hard life. Perhaps it is all she ever hoped for; perhaps she would be satisfied with such a life. We don’t know if Mary was a dreamer and a hoper, or simply a do-er. But regardless, her whole world was turned upside down in an instant. In one unexpected and uninvited thunderbolt from the heavens, the course of Mary’s life was altered forever. The unseen force of the Divine intervened in whatever plans Mary had made (or had been made for her) and told her, in no uncertain terms, “Here is what you need to do.” The miracle of this story isn’t in the appearance of the angel, or the conception of the child by the Holy Spirit. The miracle was in the fact that Mary said yes. “Here I am, Lord. Thy will be done.”
I suppose it would be easy to chalk up Mary’s response to her youth, to her innocence and her naiveté. Maybe it was her subservience to authority, taught through years of watching her fellow villagers grovel before the Roman guards or watching her mother comply with anything her father said. Mary certainly could not have understood or appreciated what it was she was signing up for when she said yes to Gabriel. She could never have anticipated the life that her son would lead, and how he would be put to death much too soon. Had she known how this was all going to play out, I wonder whether she’d have agreed to take on this task? “Can I think about it and get back to you, Gabriel? I need to weigh my options.” That seems like a reasonable response under the circumstances.
Few of us are lucky enough, if you can call it that, to be struck by the proverbial bolt out of the blue. Angels don’t appear on our doorsteps. Messages from the divine tend to take other, more subtle forms. Maybe it’s a passing thought that occurs to us as we’re reading a novel. Perhaps it’s a persistent nagging at the back of the mind that’s been there since we were kids. It could be a call out of the blue from a long-lost friend. Those are the better angels, really. Our calling might also come from experiences that aren’t so nice. Being fired from our job. The sudden end of a relationship. Having a near-death experience that opens our eyes to new possibilities.
More than likely, receiving our call, or finding our purpose if you’re more comfortable with that language, isn’t a monumental encounter that changes our life forever. It grows over time. It’s the accumulation of our experiences and our responses to them. Sometimes we find it in the confluence of several seemingly unconnected events that, when pieced together in the quiet of the night, open up a pathway to us. We may at first call them coincidences but, if we’re attentive enough to discover the connections, we begin to see what some call “synchronicities.” Gregg Levoy, the author of the book Callings, writes:
When you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. Once you start noticing these synchronicities, these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere.
It’s a lot harder to answer our angels when they don’t appear before us the way Gabriel did to Mary, when they appear as subtle hints, persistent intuitions, dots that appear random and unconnected.
And that, of course, is only the beginning. Noticing the signs pointing us in a direction isn’t the same as embarking on the journey itself. Remember what I said was the real miracle of the Annunciation? That Mary said yes. Mary was able to let go of whatever plans or dreams she may have had, to step into the unknown and to cast her fate with the mystery that presented itself to her. Think of the courage that took. Gabriel as much as said to her, “You will be an outcast. Your family will disown you and your fiancé will desert you.” You can be sure that Mary knew all this and more, for under Hebrew law of the time an unwed mother could be put to death. And Mary, although confused and fearful, and surely without fully understanding what her future held, said yes. Despite all of the risk and all of the doubt, she said “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
As mere mortals, groping in the dark for the “cosmic cairns” that Gregg Levoy talks about, hoping that meaning emerges out of our disparate experiences, it’s not often possible to offer up an immediate, outright yes in response. While Mary was able to respond in the moment to God’s call, for us it may take some time. Not to delay or defer the call, but to hear it more clearly. That is what a personal spiritual practice is all about. Creating time and space in our busy lives to hear and to heed, to connect the dots, to peek down the path and prepare ourselves to step onto it. We are not, most of us, firemen trained to run into burning buildings, plunging headlong into the unknown. Nor do we possess the youthful innocence of the trusting Mary. Getting to yes isn’t automatic for us. And so we must carve out of our hectic days the time to reflect, to consider, to meditate, to pray—to find our way into hearts and minds open enough to say yes to the unexpected.
Whether we call them angels, or God, or coincidences or synchronicities, there is something calling us to achieve the fullness and the magnificence that we are all capable of becoming. We are all Marys, pregnant with possibility and potential. And, disguised though they may be, the world is full of Gabriels, heralding new beginnings, urging us in unexpected directions, and revealing unknown opportunities. If we but pay attention and notice them, even in the face of uncertainty, we can choose to respond with a faithful “yes.”
- Answering the Angels - December 1, 2019
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- Freedom From. Freedom To - May 1, 2018
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