520. March 25, Annunciation of Our Lady (I)

Meditations no. 452 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Mary, the new Eve, accepts with faith and obedience the mission announced to her by the Archangel.

At last the word of God, which had been announced to the serpent when our first parents were cast out of Paradise, came to be fulfilled: I will establish a feud between thee and the woman, between thy offspring and hers; she is to crush thy head, while thou dost lie in ambush at her heels. The whole of creation had long yearned for that moment; centuries of long expectation, an uninterrupted clamour of prayer for the long awaited day to come in which a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel. It is the mystery we commemorate today: the Incarnation of the Word, who comes into the world to free us from sin and from eternal death, and to make us children of God.

Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you. At the announcement of Gabriel, Mary was greatly troubled… and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. The whole history of our salvation depended on her reply. Open your heart to faith, O Blessed Virgin, exclaims St Bernard on contemplating the scene, your lips to consent, your pure womb to the Creator. See how the one Desired by all peoples is calling at your door. What a calamity if you should delay in opening to him and he should pass on, and afterwards you should go back in sorrow to look for the beloved of your soul! Rise up, make haste, open. Rise up by your faith, make haste by your devotion, open by your consent!

There is not a shadow of doubt in the words of our Lady when she questions the Archangel, but rather only the desire of knowing with certainty what the Will of God was, in order to put it into practice: ‘How can this be since I have no husband?’ And the angel said to her, ’The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. The Blessed Virgin accepts these words and with her faith she obtains our salvation. As Eve had believed the serpent, so Mary believed Gabriel. The fault which the first one committed through believing was erased by the second through believing. Or, as a Father of the Church says, the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience; what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith.

Our vocation leads us to fulfil the divine Will with the same generous self-giving we see in the Blessed Virgin.

Popular piety has represented the Blessed Virgin in prayer when she receives the message from the Archangel. There can be no doubt that our Lady lived an habitual spirit of recollection which prepared her to receive the divine message and to accept it. In order to perceive the call of God it is essential to have an habitual orientation towards the divine.

The spirit of the Work teaches us to listen to the voice of God in the midst of our daily concerns. We are contemplative souls: our cell is the street. We are contemplative souls, because in the middle of our work our heart escapes to God, it goes often to the oratory, and we tell him, without anyone hearing us, without doing anything strange: My Jesus, I love you. Don’t be afraid to call him Jesus, to call him that often.

The dialogue of our Lady with the Archangel shows us this contemplative life. Her tone, recollected and trusting, speaks to us of true prayer. The Blessed Virgin listens to the voice of God and she meditates on his words in her heart. And as soon as she becomes aware of what the Will of God is, she prepares to carry it out. Mary was not merely passively engaged by God, but freely cooperated in the work of man’s salvation through faith and obedience so that consenting to the word of God, she became the Mother of Jesus. Committing herself whole-heartedly and impeded by no sin to God’s saving will, she devoted herself totally, as a handmaid of the Lord, to the person and work of her Son.

The response of Mary to the announcement of Gabriel expresses her immutable decision to fulfil the Will of God exactly as it has been made known to her. Observe her obedience, observe her desire, St Ambrose exclaims. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord”: is the disposition to serve. “Be it done unto me according to thy word”: is the desire conceived. In the words of our Lady there is a tone of resolve, of firmness, of something finished, definitive. She does not respond with a mere yes to the divine Will, but with a fiat! - let it be done! - which expresses an active and total conformity to what God is asking of her. It is much more than a mere giving of permission. It is a resolute adherence to the plan of God, a commitment of her whole life without wavering. The obedience of faith (Rom 16: 26) must be given to God who reveals, an obedience by which man entrusts his whole self freely to God… At the Annunciation, Pope John Paul II writes, Mary entrusted herself to God completely, with the ‘full submission of intellect and will’, manifesting ‘the obedience of faith’ to him who spoke to her through his messenger.

Before the example of Mary we can consider whether our own dedication to God is also total, full of faith, cheerful and unquestioning, without the slightest hesitation. Does our dedication, which was initially full of love, continue now to be full of love? Is there not something that has managed to get into it, little things that muddy it?… Ask Jesus: Lord, how is my dedication? Has there been some look of displeasure, something that can hurt you, Lord, my love?

The example of Mary spurs us on in the task of doing Opus Dei on earth.

In the case of each one of us too, God has chosen us from all eternity; he has called us by our name. It is not we who have chosen him, but rather he who has chosen us to do something specific: Opus Dei, his Work on earth. He has called us, moreover, at the beginning of the Work. For the fact of belonging to the first generations of children of God in Opus Dei, we have the special responsibility of passing on the spirit of the Work in all its integrity to those who will come after us.

We must be faithful to our vocation. Each of us must be the foundation for what will come afterwards: a foundation built on rock - the sense of divine filiation, the reality of having been called personally by God - which will withstand all adversity and keep the entire building firm. Our Father called this to our attention on inviting us to consider the meaning of this word: whether the foundation should be solid or fragile; whether it should stand out or be hidden; whether it should serve as a base on which to build or should remain alone… This will lead you to defend many things, and to discover many consequences of this divine calling.

The life of Mary was always steeped in fidelity. Her fiat! was not only the answer of a moment, but rather influenced her whole life, filling it with supernatural meaning, identifying it absolutely with the Will of God. And those words with which she answered the Archangel - ecce ancilla Domini, behold the handmaid of the Lord - became a reality, day after day, in her dedicated life, in her service to Jesus, in her concern for those who passed by her side.

How much the life of our Mother in heaven can teach us! From her we learn to pass unnoticed, to work only for the glory of God, to treat everyone with affection, to discover the presence of our Lord in the tasks of each day… But, above all, it teaches us to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength.

For that’s what explains Mary’s life - her love. A complete love, so complete that she forgets herself and is happy just to be there where God wants her, fulfilling with care what God wants her to do. That is why even her slightest action is never routine or vain but, rather, full of meaning. Mary, our mother, is for us both an example and a way. We have to try to be like her, in the ordinary circumstances in which God wants us to live.

Today we ask Holy Mary, Handmaid of the Lord, to obtain for us from her Son the love and dedication necessary never to defraud God or souls in the great responsibility we have of doing Opus Dei on earth.