Day 6: Vandalized

Mary reminds us how the Advent journey can be a dangerous one. It is also a story of God being with those most vulnerable.

Who is God redirecting your focus towards in your life, neighborhood, and world? What is one simple act of kindness that you can do today?

The Annunciation must be one of the most commonly depicted scenes in the history of art. From paintings, to music, to poetry and narrative, the story of Gabriel’s message to Mary—infused with doubt and belief, joy and sorrow, fear and comfort—has proved to be remarkably generative for both the life of faith and the creative impulse. It is a story sharing space with both devastation and hope, and this means it is a story for all of us, whoever we are and wherever we are in life.

We cannot imagine Mary—comforted here by the angel and comforted still along the way by Joseph not abandoning her, by her shared experience with her relative Elizabeth—as continuously recalling the event of the Annunciation in comfort, ease, and delight. And nowhere do we hear of her being entirely settled, unworried, and confident after her meeting with Gabriel. We cannot imagine that she didn’t have to wrestle through those words of the angel: ‘Do not be afraid, Mary’, each and every day. Maybe even chanting them like a mantra, like a blessing, like a song you can’t get out of your head. Surely, she must have performed her own ‘erasure’ time and time again: ‘be afraid Mary’, ‘be nothing’, ‘be impossible’, ‘and the angel departed’.

We all perform erasure in our lives. And that’s OK. It’s OK to enter into times of fear and doubt or uncertainty, but we also have to remain aware of our selective consciousness—that we are forgetting parts of ourselves; that we are practising erasure. The story of the Annunciation is a story of both uncertainty and belief, sorrow and joy, and everything in between, but it is also a story about radical newness, about openness, about beginnings. Just as Mary must have had her own erasures and fragmentations of memory, so would she have been able to recall and hear, ‘The Lord is with you’; so would she have been able to live her calling again and again: ‘Here I am … let it be according to your word’.

—Excerpted from “A reflection on Mary Szybist’s ‘Annunciation under erasure’”