-Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Annunciation. This is the moment when we celebrate the wedding of the Holy Spirit with humanity, the wedding of the Spirit of Wisdom and Love with the dust of the earth.
-It is in Our Lady that God fell in love with humanity. Our Lady said yes for the human race. Each one of ous must echo that yes for our own lives. We are all asked if we will surrender what we are, our humanity, our flesh and blood, to the Holy Spirit and allow Christ to fill the emptiness formed by the particular shape of our lives.
-We shall not be asked to do more than the Mother of God; we shall not be asked to become extraordinary or set apart or to make a hard and fast rule of life or to compile a manual of mortifications or heroic resolutions.
-What we shall be aske to give is our flesh and blood, our daily life, our thoughts, our service to one another, our affections and loves, our words, our intellect, our waking, working, and sleeping, our ordinary human joys and sorrows, to God.
-To surrender all that we are, as we are, to the Spirit of Love in order that our lives may bear Christ into the world, that is what we shall be asked.
-Our Lady has made this possible. Her fiat was for herself and for us, but if we want God’s will to be compelted in us as it is in her, we need to echo her fiat.
-In the great fiat of Our Lady, the strength and foundation of our life of action and contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.
-In giving her humanity to God, Mary gave all humanity to Him, to be used for His own will. In wedding her littleness to the Spirit of Love, she wed all lowliness to the Spirit of Love.
-In surrendering to the Spirit and becoming the Bride of Life, she wed God to the human race and made the whole world pregnant with the life of Christ. The Blessed Virgin Mary knew in what the joy of the world was to consist, what it wold be that would make everyone call her blessed, for it would simply be her own joy.
-Everyone who wished it could be wed to the Spirit: not only monks and nuns, but everyone in the world; not only young girls and boys, or children who had been somehow spared from sin, but the repentant sinners too; not only the young but also the old, because the Spirit makes everything new.
-Marriage, which seems to us to be such a wonderful consummation of love, is only a faint shadow, a kind of symbol, of the wedding of the Spirit of God to humanity; and it is from that wedding that Christ is born into the world.
-The union with the Holy Spirit means that the Spirit infuses His qualities into us. He sows us with wonderful seed, His gifts and fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, humility, wisdom. Knowledge, understanding, counsel, piety, fear of the Lord.
-Christ is born into the world in lives that have received those qualities. Every trifling thing and every great sorrow is told to her; she is the sharer of all earth’s joys and griefs.
-It stands to reason that if we surrender our will to God’s will we will make our lives the echo of Our Lady’s prayer, “Be it done to me according to your word,” that is to say, may Christ live in me the life He wants to live in me, where, with whom, and how He wants to live it. “For nothing will be impossible for God.”
Fr. Alberic Maisog