Mary's "yes" at the
annunciation freed all humanity from bondage to sin and death. Mary
is the perfect human response to God, and the pattern for becoming
a new cre-ation in Christ. She is the Mother of God and also the
first disciple of her Son.
Mary's vocation is unique,
of course, and yet at the same time it is the vocation of every
Christian disciple to bear the Word of God in the inner chamber of
their heart, and to give birth to that Word for the salvation of
others.
In the annunciation scene,
we have a portrait of God's initiative and human response. The
story of our re-creation reveals God's intimate work in the human
person as Trinitarian: the Father who speaks a promise, the
overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, and the birth of the Word of God
in time.
In Mary, we at last
understand the full dignity of the human person created in God's
image. The Word of God conceived in Mary's womb through the power
of the Holy Spirit is the same Word conceived in our hearts through
the Holy Spirit. In her Magnificat, Mary proclaims the joy of being
filled with the Spirit: the joy of her spirit abundantly reflects
God's Spirit.
Before Jesus was conceived
in her womb, Mary's heart was a hollowed receptivity, waiting for
God's formative word. Caryll Houselander describes Mary's
pre-advent wait-ing as emptiness: "Not a formless emptiness like a
void without meaning; on the contrary, it has a shape, a form given
to it by the purpose for which it is intended" (The Reed of
God, Arena Lettres, 1978).
Mary's emptiness has a
shape. It is not the formless void of the first creation, but a
form fitted to her particular call to discipleship: to be the place
of God's re-creation.
Here, again, we are faced
with the mystery of emptiness - a new understanding of emptiness -
as we ponder what it means in God's Mother. Understanding Mary's
emptiness enables us to see more clearly to what we are being
called. We need to enter into the process of being divested of our
sinfulness by rebirth in baptism and the inflow-ing grace of the
Holy Spirit, which progressively effects in us that original empty
receptivity before God.
We all need emptying of
something; we are all wounded and need to return to the first state
of innocence that opens our heart to receive God. Or perhaps it is
better to say that we need to recognise the God who is with us
always.
The emptiness of Mary is not
the vacant meaninglessness of our secular culture, which, instead
of being a receptacle for the divine, is so often a void filled
only with small desires and sensual pleasures that try to
substitute for the rich emptiness that waits for God.
God cannot be blamed for
what is wrong in our world: these problems stem from our divided
hearts and inordinate desires. Through grace, we have the capacity
to allow the work of the Holy Spirit to purify our desires, and
direct them to God and salvation. When Mary gave birth to life, the
world was set free from death, and brought into a godly
participation in giving the God-life to the world.
This is the third of four edited extracts from The
Sacred Place of Prayer: The human person created in God's image
by Jean Marie Dwyer OP (BRF, £6.99 (CT
Bookshop £6.30 - Use code CT771 );
978-0-85746-241-1).