The Annunciation

The First Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation

Fruit of the Mystery: "Yes" to the unknown

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, San Marco Monastery, Florence

I've already explained here why Fra Angelico is my favorite artist, so I won't dwell on that; I'll merely say that this is my favorite depiction of the Annunciation. The specifics of its theology will probably come up over the course of the post; for now it speaks for itself.

As stated here this series of meditations on the rosary is set in the context of a vocational journey. And so let us begin.

God comes into our lives and announces to us that great plan that he has for us. At times he does this directly, and at times through intermediaries -- just as the angel Gabriel was an intermediary to Mary. At times the vocational call is something we have known for all of our lives; at times it is a total surprise -- something we have never imagined. The Virgin Mary's call certainly falls in the latter category. Though  the length of time between when one hears the call and when it comes to fruition can vary greatly, one thing is constant: it is always something for which God has been preparing us for all of our lives -- just as he prepared the Virgin Mary by her Immaculate Conception.

It is crucial to make a distinction here. Although God has been preparing us for this moment for all of our lives, this is not Calvinistic predestination. We still have the freedom to reject it -- although this would be a rejection and a fracture of our own being (this idea is expressed very well in And You Are Christ's by Fr. Thomas Dubay). Mary, just like us, would have been capable of rejecting the invitation to be Christ's mother had she wanted to do so; in the Immaculate Conception God merely gave her the enormous grace necessary to be able to understand and accept His call.

There are several reasons why this is so interesting to me. The first is that something about the combination of the Immaculate Conception and Annunciation has always (ironically) struck me as a bit too Calvinistic to sit right -- especially when you have hymn verses like "predestined for Christ by eternal decree."1 Mary, however, is not predestined in the traditional Calvinistic fate-robot sense of the word. To see why, we have to look at the nature of concupiscence.

Concupiscence, as it turns out, is a tragically misunderstood word. Most dictionaries, in a form of demented synecdoche, equate a facet of it -- sexual desire -- with the whole thing; however concupiscence is much more than simply a synonym for libido. According to CCC 405:

[O]riginal sin [...] is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called "concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

Our own concupiscence makes it hard for us to follow God's will in our lives. An absence of concupiscence doesn't mean we are obligated to do good, merely that the playing field is level instead of tilted. With concupiscence, the devil already has a foothold in our hearts before the battle even starts. We're already inclined to listen to him. For Mary to have been born with concupiscence would have been the ultimate lottery for him. If you have to fight a battle just to not snooze the alarm in the morning, just think of the war he must have waged against the woman "destined" to crush his head with her heel. No concupiscence doesn't mean no temptation -- just look at Eve -- it just means the slate is clean; there's no "acquired taste" for sin.

God gives us this grace as well -- although it is not necessary for him to totally remove our concupiscence.  Without this grace we would be utterly incapable of accepting the magnificent gift he offers us; it would seem to us like a punishment instead of a gift. It is critically important that we see Mary's fiat in this same light -- if she becomes roped into Divine Motherhood by her pre-conception acceptance of unsolicited gifts and the accompanying obligations, one of the most profoundly beautiful aspects of salvation history goes stale. Just like with the dual-authorship of the Bible, God has the divine condescension, the profound humility to let humans share the credit for the mystery of his grace working in our world.

This is why Mary is the New Eve, and why her "Yes" is so beautiful. She, like us, had the power to say "No." She, like us, was given the grace to have the freedom to say "Yes."

There are many times in our vocational journey when we are asked to say "Yes." Most of them are mundane and have no angels or moments of Divine Revelation, they are nothing more than painful perseverance on a path we have already begun to trod. But here, in the Annunciation, we meditate on the grace Mary received to make that first painful, beautiful fiat. There would be other, more meaningful surrenders later (with Simeon at the presentation, in the crowd as the mob yelled "Crucify him!", at the foot of the Cross), where she knew just how much was asked, and still surrendered all.

The Annunciation is a jump into an abyss. It is a "Yes" to an unknown: an act of love, an act of trust, an act of grace.
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1 Thankfully for my spiritual life I generally tend more towards the "I'm too stupid to understand what's actually going on" than the "let's nail my objections to the Church door" approach; as an end result I developed a voracious appetite for reading apologetics materials in high-school.