Sunday Meditation: The Annunciation

This is the last Sunday in Advent and Christmas Eve all in one day.  It’s a strange coincidence of the calendar.  The Fourth Sunday in Advent is reserved for a Marian Gospel reading, and today’s reading is the most profound of the Marian passages.

 

The angel Gabriel was sent from God

to a town of Galilee called Nazareth,

to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph,

of the house of David,

and the virgin's name was Mary.

And coming to her, he said,

"Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you."

But she was greatly troubled at what was said

and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

Then the angel said to her,

"Do not be afraid, Mary,

for you have found favor with God.

 

"Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,

and you shall name him Jesus.

He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,

and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,

and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,

and of his kingdom there will be no end."

But Mary said to the angel,

"How can this be,

since I have no relations with a man?"

And the angel said to her in reply,

"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.

And behold, Elizabeth, your relative,

has also conceived a son in her old age,

and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren;

for nothing will be impossible for God."

Mary said, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.

May it be done to me according to your word."

Then the angel departed from her.

~Lk 1:26-38

 

Fr. Geoffry Plant does a great job explaining both ends of the readings. 

Fr. Plant also highlights a poem by Denise Levertov.  Let me present it for you.  It’s a wonderful poem.  Levertov was born in England but immigrated to the United States.  Her father was a Hasidic Jew but converted to Christianity, and Denise grew up under both religions.  As a young adult she was more or less agnostic but in mid life she felt a powerful calling back to faith and ultimately became Catholic. 

 

Annunciation

By Denise Levertov

 

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,

almost always a lectern, a book; always

the tall lily.

       Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,

the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,

whom she acknowledges, a guest.

 

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions

courage.

       The engendering Spirit

did not enter her without consent.

         God waited.

 

She was free

to accept or to refuse, choice

integral to humanness.

 

                  ____________________

 

Aren’t there annunciations

of one sort or another

in most lives?

         Some unwillingly

undertake great destinies,

enact them in sullen pride,

uncomprehending.

More often

those moments

      when roads of light and storm

      open from darkness in a man or woman,

are turned away from

 

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair

and with relief.

Ordinary lives continue.

                                 God does not smite them.

But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

 

                  ____________________

 

She had been a child who played, ate, slept

like any other child–but unlike others,

wept only for pity, laughed

in joy not triumph.

Compassion and intelligence

fused in her, indivisible.

 

Called to a destiny more momentous

than any in all of Time,

she did not quail,

  only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’

and gravely, courteously,

took to heart the angel’s reply,

the astounding ministry she was offered:

 

to bear in her womb

Infinite weight and lightness; to carry

in hidden, finite inwardness,

nine months of Eternity; to contain

in slender vase of being,

the sum of power–

in narrow flesh,

the sum of light.

                     Then bring to birth,

push out into air, a Man-child

needing, like any other,

milk and love–

 

but who was God.

 

 

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

 

A breath unbreathed,

                                Spirit,

                                          suspended,

                                                            waiting.

 

                  ____________________

 

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

                                                       raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

                                  consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

                               and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

              courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

 

It’s such a beautiful poem.  I absolutely love the last sentence: “Consent, courage unparalleled, opened her utterly.” 

And this gives occasion for a rendition of “Gabriel’s Message,” here by The King’s Singers.

Meditation: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word."

 

Faith Filled Friday: “St Thomas Didymus [the Twin]” by Denise Levertov

This coming Sunday—Second Sunday of Easter, “Divine Mercy Sunday”—the Gospel reading is from John 20: 19-31, the passage where St. Thomas the Apostle confronts the risen Jesus and puts his fingers into Jesus’ wounds.  I will probably have a Sunday Meditation post on Sunday for your contemplation.  Here I want to post a poem on the subject by Denise Levertov brought to my attention by my friend Mary Sue.  Denise Levertov was a British born and raised American immigrant who had a religious conversion late in life and ultimately became a Roman Catholic.  She was a poet from almost toddler years and as a child actually corresponded with T. S. Eliot, who had encouraged her.  After her religious experience, she wrote a number of Christian themed poems that I have always admired. 

 

St Thomas Didymus [the Twin]

by Denise Levertov

 

In the hot street at noon I saw him

a small man

gray but vivid, standing forth

beyond the crowd’s buzzing

holding in desperate grip his shaking

teethgnashing son,

 

and thought him my brother.

 

I heard him cry out, weeping and speak

those words,

Lord, I believe, help thou

mine unbelief,

 

and knew him

my twin:

 

a man whose entire being

had knotted itself

into the one tightdrawn question,

Why,

why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,

why is this child who will soon be a man

tormented, torn, twisted?

Why is he cruelly punished

who has done nothing except be born?

 

The twin of my birth

was not so close

as that man I heard

say what my heart

sighed with each beat, my breath silently

cried in and out,

in and out.

 

After the healing,

he, with his wondering

newly peaceful boy, receded;

no one

dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,

the swift

acceptance and forgetting.

I did not follow

to see their changed lives.

What I retained

was the flash of kinship.

Despite

all that I witnessed,

his question remained

my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,

known

only to doctor and patient. To others

I seemed well enough.

 

So it was

that after Golgotha

my spirit in secret

lurched in the same convulsed writhings

that tore that child

before he was healed.

And after the empty tomb

when they told me that He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,

told me

that though He had passed through the door like a ghost

He had breathed on them

the breath of a living man –

even then

when hope tried with a flutter of wings

to lift me –

still, alone with myself,

my heavy cry was the same: Lord

I believe,

help thou mine unbelief.

 

I needed

blood to tell me the truth,

the touch

of blood. Even

my sight of the dark crust of it

round the nailholes

didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through

to that manifold knot in me

that willed to possess all knowledge,

refusing to loosen

unless that insistence won

the battle I fought with life

 

But when my hand

led by His hand’s firm clasp

entered the unhealed wound,

my fingers encountering

rib-bone and pulsing heat,

what I felt was not

scalding pain, shame for my

obstinate need,

but light, light streaming

into me, over me, filling the room

as I had lived till then

in a cold cave, and now

coming forth for the first time,

the knot that bound me unravelling,

I witnessed

all things quicken to color, to form,

my question

not answered but given

its part

in a vast unfolding design lit

by a risen sun.

 

The poem recreates and marries two moments in the Gospels, the moment where a man asks Jesus to heal his convulsing son and when St. Thomas—the doubting Thomas—puts his finger into Christ’s open side but Levertov’s imaginative leap as to what he finds is wonderful.  Both scenes are from the perspective of Thomas, since as an apostle he would have been present at the curing of the possessed young boy.  When Thomas puts his finger in he feels “but light, light streaming/into me, over me, filling the room/as I had lived till then/in a cold cave.” 

Now I don’t know how much Levertov knew of St. Faustina Kowalska and her image of Christ’s Divine Mercy, but that that light coming out of Christ’s wound has an amazing similarity to St. Faustina’s iconography.  Take a look.

 I wrote about the history of this wonderful painting St. Faustina had commissioned to capture her mystical vision, “The Divine Mercy Painting by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski” just over six years ago.  

There doesn’t seem to be a video of Levertov reading her “St. Thomas” poem, but if you like you can watch her read six poems to get a feel for her style and person.

 

Back to the “St. Thomas” poem.  If you’re wondering why Levertov combines the convulsing boy scene with the Doubting Thomas scene, contemplate first the struggle for the boy’s father to believe (“help my unbelief”) and what I think is the key image in the poem, the metaphorical “knot that bounds” Thomas inside his soul.  The convulsing boy, “twisted,” is a visual knot that Christ unwinds.  The boy’s father’s unbelief “knots” his insides as Thomas’s unbelief does to him.  Christ the healer “unravels” all knots.