Father Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam.

This is one of those feasts on which it is interesting to do a eucology, a study of the prayers and texts with which the church garlands this feast in order to understand what the church is urging upon us. Of course this is a befuddling feast for liturgists, because it’s not clear if this is a feast of our Lord or a feast of our Lady. In spite of our penchant for order—it really doesn’t have to be either, but the texts do come down on the side of Jesus. Often we are taught that if we want to find a “theme” for a particular feast, we should look first at the responsorial psalm, which serves as a bridge from the first reading—normally, and in this case as well, from the Old Testament—and the Gospel.

But in this case the responsorial psalm is looking ahead to the second reading from the letter to the Hebrews, and is echoing back the entrance antiphon offered for the day, which in all three cases is the same in Latin: Ecce venio, Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam—that’s the point of today’s feast: “Behold, I have come to do your will, Lord.” If we see mentioned something twice in a liturgy, we had better pay attention. If we hear the same phrase three times, we better be on the edge our seats. It’s of course from Psalm 40, but both the author to the Letter to the Hebrews and the Roman Missal put it not on the lips of Mary, but on the lips of Jesus: “When Christ came into the world he said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God.”

So my vote is—it’s the feast of the Annunciation, the feast of an event, the feast of God’s will being done, on earth, in someone, in two someone’s—Mary and Jesus—as it is in heaven.  So let’s talk about Jesus, and then about Mary, but mainly let’s talk about what this has to do with us.

The bookend here, since we are celebrating this feast, as usual, during Lent, is coming up next week, when we hear Jesus say it explicitly: “Your will be done,” in the garden of Gethsemane. ‘My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done’ (Mt 26:42).  Sometimes people speculate about what Jesus’ mantra might have been, the prayer ever on Jesus’ lips. Abhishiktananda says it was Abba, for instance, but I think it was this: Your will be done. I think of that as the very center and a summation of the Our Father: your will be done.  In sorrow and in pain, in sickness and in health: Your will be done.  What a mantra this would be! We hear it on the lips of Jesus at the end of his life—even a variation on it on the cross when he says “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”—because this was the mantra of his entire life. “I have come not to do my own will, but the will of the one who sent me.” Jesus’ glory is not in his power, but in his nothingness, in that he emptied himself of “his” will, and it was therefore that God raised him on high.

It is a common teaching in the spiritual life—this is an especially big theme of the Bhagavad Gita, for instance—that we have to detach ourselves from the fruits of our labors; we just do our work and then we let it go, whether it be a work of charity, a work of art, a construction, any duty that we do. But there is a deeper teaching yet, that we even renounce the work, that we at some point stop claiming that we are even the doer of the work. In other words, at some point even the doer must disappear, when we become instruments, vessels of the Divine. Aurobindo puts it this:

…in this movement by which the soul divests itself gradually of the obscuring robe of the ego… not only the fruit of works belongs to the Lord alone, but our works also must be his; he is the true Lord of our action no less than of our results. This we must not see with the thinking mind only, it must become entirely true to our entire consciousness and will.

Our whole being! We must not only “think and know” but “see and feel concretely and intensely even in the moment of the working and its initiation and whole process” that our works are not ours at all, but are coming through the Lord. We must always be aware of another will, the divine will “that acts through our individual nature.”

I think about Mary when I hear that, and why Carol Houselander refers to Mary as the “reed of God.” In some way the doer disappears when Mary says, “My whole being rejoices in God my savior,” and even more when she says, “the Lord has done great things in me.” The doer has disappeared. Thomas Merton wrote in New Seeds of Contemplation––and this is why she is such a model for monks, for contemplatives––that “Mary’s chief glory [too] is in her nothingness,” Mary’s chief glory is in the fact of being one who “acted simply in loving submission to [God’s] command, in the pure obedience of faith.” It is this “that enables her to be the perfect instrument of God, and nothing else but [God’s] instrument. The work that was done in her was purely the work of God. ‘He that is mighty hath done great things in me.’ The glory of Mary is purely and simply the glory of God in her,” and she can say that she has nothing that she has not received from God through Christ.

As a matter of fact, this is precisely her greatest glory: that having nothing of her own, retaining nothing of a ‘self’ that could glory in anything for her own sake, she placed no obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resisted [God’s] love and will. Hence … [God] was able to accomplish his will perfectly in her, and [God’s] liberty was in no way hindered or turned from its purpose by the presence of an egotistical self in Mary. She was in the highest sense a person precisely because… she was free from every taint of selfishness that might obscure God’s light in her being.

(New Seeds, 170-171)

There it is again––that obscuring robe of ego! And when it’s gone, the mercy, the light, the liberty of God shine through.

And so for us––it’s summed up in the opening prayer, which asks God that just as “your Word became [flesh]… may we become more like Jesus.” And the alternative prayer prays, “May the prayers of this woman bring Jesus once again to the waiting world” and by the prayers of this woman may you “fill the void of incompletion with the presence of her child.” And how does this happen but by the Word being planted and becoming flesh in us. God is with us—Emmanu-el—every time we consent to God’s will, every time we empty ourselves and say, “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come on earth—in me—as it is in heaven.”

I want to do a eucology on another prayer, too, what might be my favorite prayer of all time, the Third Step Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous. It strikes me as a version of Jesus’ own prayer, another version of Mary’s Fiat. It begins like this:

Oh my God, I offer myself to you
to do with me and to build with me as you will.
Relieve me of the bondage of self
so that I might better to your will.

This “self” of which I want to be relieved though is not my real self hidden with Christ in God; it’s the obscuring robe of the ego that stands between my awareness and the law of God written on the depth of my being.

Let’s pray that by the grace of this feast we would be more like Jesus, more like Mary, having nothing of our own, retaining nothing of a ‘self’ that could glory in anything for our own sake, that we would place no obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resist God’s love and will. So that God is able to accomplish his will perfectly in us, and that God’s liberty would in no way be hindered or turned from its purpose by our egotistical self. May the obscuring robe of the ego not block God’s light, mercy, and liberty in our being.