Getting to Know Mary

Nov. 29, 2010 — -- One of my favorite parts of Advent is that we get to think about the holy audacity of this season -- the teenage mother of God, the angel, the surprise, the grace, the invitation -- I love the miracle and the mystery woven into the mundaneness of Mary's world.

"The Lord is with you," "Do not be afraid," "You will conceive," "The Holy Spirit will come upon you," "For nothing will be impossible with God."

These words of unimaginable gift and burden, blessing and possibility are cast out to Mary in the midst of her daily routines. I wonder what she was doing when Gabriel came to her house. Was she cleaning or cooking, daydreaming of Joseph or getting tips from her mother about the inevitable wedding night?

Every year, I am fascinated anew by Mary. There is so much I wonder about her. Was she as sweet and innocent as our cultural imagination likes to portray her? I'm not satisfied with a naive, angelic and docile Mary, a saccharine mother of God who slips behind the stage after the first chapter of Luke.

What if she was saucy and short-tempered, and Gabriel just happened to catch her on a good day? What if she was dreading her wedding day because she was actually in love with someone else, and not the carpenter whom her parents thought was such a good match? What if she had been praying for a life more interesting than what she thought lay ahead for her? It's all very unlikely, I know, but I like to play with the possibilities, to imagine that there was much more to Mary than met the eye, so much more than we, or even her own community of people, could probably imagine.

Truthfully, I like to think Mary was a bit mischievous and defiant in a playful and strong-willed kind of way, one of those girls of whom her elders always said, "That Mary, whoever marries her will have his hands full!" (Little did they know ? )