Chaplain's Reflection

Mary says “Yes!”

If we held a “reality” entertainment show to find a mother for the divine incarnation, then Mary of Nazareth wouldn’t get a start. She wouldn’t make it through auditions. In fact, she wouldn’t get a call up at all.

An unmarried peasant child from the least of the clans, the least of the Jewish people! Thank God, his ways are not our ways. God did the selecting and, from all of human history, he chose this unlikely girl. Why? 

Mary is a volunteer. She has the free will to refuse the mission. What would have happened to us if she had? Would God have entered the world? Would humanity have been saved? 

As God knew she would, Mary was a willing, faithful, loving, and obedient believer. She gives the angel a believer’s, “Yes!” Rightly, Elizabeth proclaims, “Blessed is she who believed!” (Luke 1:39-45)

Pope Francis reminds us that, “Mary’s ‘yes’ at the Annunciation was more than a yes to bearing the Son of God but was also an acceptance of everything she would endure after – something every mother experiences with a new child.  

“It was not easy to answer with a ‘yes’ to the angel's invitation; yet she, a woman still in the flower of youth, answers with courage, despite not knowing anything about the fate that awaited her.”

“Mary at that moment looks like one of the many mothers of our world, brave to the extreme when it comes to welcoming in her womb the story of a new human being who is growing. Her ‘yes’ to the angel at the Annunciation was just the first step “in a long list of obedience” leading to the moment she stands at the foot of her Son’s cross.” (Pope Francis 100517)

Wishing all a Happy and Holy Advent, Christmas and New Year!

Reflection on the Prophetic Holy Family   

Father Richard Rohr praises the courageous and prophetic faith of Mary and Joseph:Kingdom of God people are history makers. They break through the small kingdoms of this world to an alternative and much larger world, God’s full creation. People who are still living in the false self are history stoppers. They use God and religion to protect their own status and the status quo of the world that sustains them. They are often fearful people, the nice proper folks of every age who think like everyone else thinks and who have no power to break through, or as Jesus’ opening words put it, “to change” (Mark 1:15; Matthew 4:17).

How can we really think that Mary—if she thought like any good Jewish girl of her time was trained to think—could possibly be fully ready to hear, to speak, or to live out God’s message? She had to let God lead her outside of her box of expectations, her comfort zone, her dutiful religion of follow-the-leader (a feature of all religions at their lower levels). She was very young and largely uneducated. Perhaps theology itself is not the necessary path but instead simply integrity and courage. Nothing anyone said at the synagogue would have prepared Mary or Joseph for this situation. They both had to rely on their angels! What proper bishop would trust such a situation? I wouldn’t myself. All we know of Joseph is that he was “a just man” (Matthew 1:19), probably also young and uneducated. The circumstance is a total afront to our criteria and way of evaluating authenticity.

So why do we love and admire people like Mary and Joseph, and then not imitate their faith journeys, their prophetic courage, their non-reassurance by the religious system?

Like the prophets we have met this year, Mary and Joseph trusted their encounter with God and acted accordingly: These were two laypeople who totally trusted their inner experience of God and followed it to Bethlehem and beyond. There is no mention in the Gospels of the two checking out their inner experiences with the high priests, the synagogue, or even their Jewish Scriptures. Mary and Joseph walked in courage and absolute faith that their experience was true, with no one except God to reassure them they were right. Their only safety net was God’s love and mercy, a safety net they must have tried out many times, or else they never would have been able to fall into it so gracefully.    

Deacon Mark Kelly

College Chaplain