Layer upon layer.

So how was Saturday?

Very nice! I only managed part of the “first Saturday” devotion over the weekend — I made it to Mass on Saturday morning, and I spent the extra fifteen minutes afterwards in meditation. I couldn’t easily get to confession over the weekend, and I doubt I’ll get to do it this coming weekend either, for a variety of boring and mundane reasons. So: I half accomplished what I set out to do. But I regard that as a good first step, and certainly better than not doing it at all.

Based on the reading I did about the first Saturdays, I planned to spend the fifteen minutes meditating on one single mystery (rather than, say, one per minute or one set of five). Which one? “Let’s just be optimistic and take them in order — maybe I’ll actually do this fifteen or twenty times.” So: the first joyful mystery, the mystery of the Annunciation. As I drove to the church, I wondered how I was going to find anything new or interesting enough within that single mystery to hold my attention for a whole fifteen minutes!

(I always think things like that, before starting a rosary, before an hour of adoration: I pick it up grudgingly with a hint of “Not this old thing again, I’ve done it countless times.” You would think I would have learned better by now.)

So after Mass, as the lights clicked out and the last parishioners left, I checked my watch and tried to enter into the scene. I stepped forward bit by bit through the well-known mental images, holding each before my mind, listening.

Young Jewish girl, the virgin betrothed to the carpenter, at her prayers and alone. And then not alone: someone is with her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you…

I stepped through that, thinking about the bare text and about what makes this story a unique story. “Full of grace” is something unique; if the angel had not used those words, we surely would never have said them of living man or woman. After all, elsewhere we have “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” — so none of us brims with all the grace we can hold. Except this girl, according to the angel.

But this is a path I’d been down before, so I moved on through the brief exchange between girl and being, up to: How can this be, since I know not man?

It’s a strange question on the face of the text, in the absence of our tradition, which provides an explanation for it. You’re going to have a baby, says the angel to the betrothed girl. Why ask “How can this be?” Wouldn’t most girls be thinking: well, of course I’m going to have a baby; I’m getting married. Betrothal, marriage, sex, babies — that’s the normal order of things. How strange that she would react as if … as if she wasn’t expecting pregnancy in her future.

So our tradition does provide an explanation for it: reading past the bare text. She obviously wasn’t expecting pregnancy and babies. Conclusion: she wasn’t expecting to get married at all, to have intercourse with a husband. Inference: she’d vowed lifelong virginity, privately. That much I know, the traditional explanation for Mary’s confusion. I’m willing to agree that it’s the most likely explanation for a perplexing text.

But wait. There’s got to be another level: Even given that Mary had vowed virginity, it’s still a strange question… She hadn’t had the option of refusing to marry, apparently, but instead had submitted to whoever had told her she was going to marry Joseph the carpenter. She was already betrothed. Why not simply assume that God had released her from her vow, that God had called her (through her betrothal) to some other way to serve him? And if she were to get married, she must have known she would be expected to have intercourse with her husband. It’s still not all that clear why she persisted in being certain that she wasn’t going to have the chance to have a baby, i.e. that she was going to remain a virgin.

The only explanation that makes sense, I thought, is to add a third layer: a layer of complete trust in God, in some promise she felt sure God had made to her that she would remain a virgin. Even in the face of a knowledge that she was going to get married, she must have believed God would hold her to her promise, or else to keep a promise made to her. She would go through with the wedding, and somehow, of course, she would remain a virgin. (Which is why the announcement that she would have a baby came as such a surprise.)

I immediately thought of Abraham, who had been promised that his descendants would number as the stars, and then who was given a task to perform that appeared to annihilate the promise. Sacrifice the only heir? Well, he went through with it, or tried to, anyway. In a way he did sacrifice the son, must have in his heart, and must have been confused and wondered how the promise and the command would ever be reconciled.

And here was Mary, in the same kind of situation: her vow of virginity apparently about to be annulled by a vow of marriage, but both apparently ordained by God, who makes possible the paradoxical.

So that was the connection that came to me in fifteen minutes on the Annunciation. One of these days I will learn to stop underestimating the newness that can be found in the mysteries of faith.