The marriage of heaven and earth,
of eternity and history,
began in silence,
invisible,
under the heart of a girl.
It is the day of the Annunciation. The Father sent His Only Son into the world through a girl. The Holy Spirit came upon her, the Power of the Most High overshadowed her, and the Son of God became the Son of Mary.
Because she said, "yes."
She stood there, on behalf of the whole of the vast universe of creation, holding in her own heart creation's most awesome mystery: Freedom.
Perfect Freedom.
She was a created person. The marvel of the cosmos. And she was truly and perfectly free: attuned to the Mystery of Being, open to cooperation from her very own self with the ineffable wisdom of that Mystery, capable of giving herself as a person, of adhering as a person, a human person, a woman, to the Mystery.
She was a woman.
She surrendered herself in her perfect freedom to Him, so that He might entrust Himself to her virginal womb, taking human flesh and human nature as His own, making each of us His brothers and sisters.
God who creates and sustains the being and the vitality of every human person has united Himself in a new way with every human person. He has begun the great drama by which He will identify Himself with every person and share the burden and the suffering and the death of every human person.
At this Wondrous Intersection of God and man--the foundation of the taking up by God of the destiny of each human person who has ever lived and ever will live--there is the Woman and her freedom.
Her love.
Her maternal love.
At the center of God's glory, of His revelation of Himself, of His giving of Himself in Love:
it is there
that we find
the Woman.
