âMAY IT BE DONE TO MEâ
Homily, Solemnity of the Annunciation
March 25, 2017
Fr. Charles Fox, Spiritual Director, St. Paul Street Evangelization
Today, especially in those pockets of the Church where the new evangelization is (rightly!) emphasized, a strong nomenclature has developed about what it means to be a Catholic. We hear the call for âintentionalâ disciples, âdynamicâ Catholics, ârebuiltâ parishes, and so on. And there is a lot of good in these concepts. We do need to be, in the words of Pope St. John Paul II, ânew in ardorâ as we live and share our faith today.
But sometimes we can get ardor mixed-up with aggressiveness or self-assertion, and so we should never forget that the first Christian act, the first act we see Our Lady perform in todayâs Gospel, is what we might call a passive-act. Mary is *available*. Mary *receives* the message of the Archangel Gabriel. Mary is not proactive but *reactive* when she speaks those words which made the whole Christian life possible, because they welcomed Christ into the world: âMay it be done to me according to your word.â
Saint John Paul II called this receptivity to Godâs word a hallmark element of the âfeminine geniusâ. It is the very opposite of aggression or self-assertion. It is the very opposite of a sinful act. It is the way you act when you are âfull of graceâ. It is a model for every one of us who are disciples of Jesus Christ.
Our Lord tells us in Lukeâs Gospel that âout of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaksâ (6:45). Only a heart as full of grace as Maryâs was could say what she said. She was holy in an utterly unprecedented way, and so she could say âyesâ to an utterly unprecedented proposal from God.
Yet each of us has her or his own âyesâ to say to God. And we might worry that since our hearts *arenât* full of grace, that we still havenât completely let go of our sins, we wonât be able to do it. Or we wonât be able to live out the âyesâ weâve already said to God. Sometimes, a few years after we have committed to a vocationâto marriage, the priesthood, or to the consecrated lifeâwe can be tempted to doubt our âyesâ. We can be tempted to doubt whether we really meant it, whether we were even capable of meaning it, or whether weâre capable of staying faithful.
Pope Benedict XVI has some words of consolation for us. He writes, âThe mystery of the grace that takes place in Mary does not create a distance between us and her and make her unapproachable, turning her into an object of mere (and therefore empty, meaningless) wonder. On the contrary, she becomes a consoling sign of grace, for she proclaims the God whose light shone on the ignorant shepherds and whose mercy raised up the lowly in Israel and the world. She proclaims the God who is âgreater than our heartsâ (I Jn 3:20) and whose grace is stronger than all our weakness. If John the Baptist represents the unsettling seriousness of the divine summons, Mary represents the hidden but profound joy that this summons bringsâ (Dogma and Preaching, 327-328).
There is a lot we could say about *how* we say our own âyesâ to God, our own âmay it be done to meâ. For todayâs feast of the Annunciation, I want simply to emphasize that you *can* say this âyesâ and live it faithfully, looking to Maryâs example and trusting in her help.
[Pictured: The Annunciation, El Greco, c. 1590-1603]
Our beautiful Mother, thank you Fr. Fox.
my questio is….is rosary rally a form of street evangelization???
Look at how jp2 failed to deal with the cardinals and bishop’s who covered up the sex abuse by priests. He is NO saint.
Randy, I feel your pain. Forgiveness brings much freedom.
Saints are not necessarily people who never failed. In fact, I can only think of one who was preserved sinless