Shape and Substance

3 December 2024

Annunciation, 1898. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937). Philadelphia Museum of Art

Annunciation

The feast of the Annunciation falls in April, nine months before Christmas. That’s logical; it takes thirty-six weeks to gestate a human being. Yet every year I want to hark back to that moment at the beginning of Advent when we stand on the verge of seeing what the Annunciation began. I want the Annunciation to be the word that is Advent’s annual starting gun.

In truth, I don’t think time means much in the biblical universe. Or, to put it a bit more precisely, I don’t think time has any meaning in the reality of the One, in which all times—like all things—are one. In the reality of the One, there is only one moment, the eternal moment, in which all moments are gathered and in which there is no separation between one moment and another. So I feel some justification in rehearsing the myth of the Annunciation here at the beginning of Advent. If it’s all the same to the Holy, it’s all the same to me.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Here is a poem:

Annunciation

Luke 1:26-38

Suppose it was not an angel,

But dust motes floating in a shaft of light,

an idle breeze billowing the curtains

whispering the wild and wordless wonder

of the ages.

Suppose it was not a message

from gods no one has ever claimed to see,

and from whom only madmen claim to hear

promises like these that strain the limits

of belief,

but merely a poor girl’s fantasy

who had no sense of natural causation

and no better explanation near to hand

than godly violation of the sanctum

of her womb.

Tell me, could you blame her

for telling such a tale and, tale once told,

believing with a girl’s ferocious power

relying on the growing evidence

of her belly?

And if she believed it,

kept it within her heart, then why not we?

Why not the world—can it not make good use

of a god who yields up life in service

to the Holy?

Here I am, she said,

a statement less of certainty than hope.

And wondering if we could say as much,

we follow at a distance on the road

to Bethlehem.[1]

Occasionally, people ask me to tell them what I intended a poem of mine to mean. My standard answer is that I want it to mean whatever it means to whoever is reading it whenever it is read. I can’t determine meaning; that is the province of the reader.

But I can tell you what was on my mind when I began writing it. I was sitting in my study in the late afternoon, and sunlight was streaming through the half-closed louvers on the windows, creating an alternating grid of light and shadow on the floor. In the illumined spaces, where the light poured in as though from some sort of celestial ewer, I could see dust-motes floating in the air, moving aimlessly in every direction.

I don’t remember if I had been reading Luke’s story of Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, but something about the dust and the alternating pattern of light and dark and the silence of the room and the stillness of the world made me think of that young girl and her angel.

I never think of angels as embodied. Which is why I love this painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, the African American artist who painted it in 1898. Tanner doesn’t show the traditional angelic figure, robed in white and standing in the midst of a heavenly aura. Tanner in fact doesn’t yield to our anthropomorphic arrogance at all but gives us instead an angel who is a shaft of brilliant, white-hot light, almost too bright to look at, and surely too unsettling to get comfortable with. Which is why, I think, Tanner depicts Mary as a shy teenage girl, seated on her bed, a little hunched as if to make herself smaller, looking sideways and upward with apprehension on her still-childlike face. This is not a mature woman who is ready to declare the eschatological revelation that will turn the world upside down. This is a frightened daughter of timid parents who know what it is like to live with the boot of the oppressor on your neck and his hands in your pockets. This is a child who knows more about threat than promise, more about fear than hope. And yet…

… there is something defiant in her glance, too, and in those quiet hands clasped in her lap. Not the eyes of the terrified, the rabbit suddenly aware of the wolf, the deer illumined by fast-approaching headlights, but the eyes of the wary and worldly, who know how to look out for themselves. Not hands raised in self-protection or flung forward in fright, but hands stilled and patient, as if to say, let us see what is in store, what the future already unfolded in the ken of the One who sends the light will show to rest of us who wait in the mottled time-bound darkness. She is saying, let us play this out, ravel this skein to the end, well beyond a manger and even all the way to a cross.

I suppose something like that is what I was hoping to convey with my Mary. Pregnant by some cause—does it really matter whether human or divine?—she is gathering her grit and mustering her moxie to take on this charge to bear the One into the many. I think she knows it will not be easy to carry this child, that there will be plenty who want to take him from her. Some of them sit on queasy thrones and would take her child because they need to feed their visions of grandeur with the blood of innocents. Others—and herein are most of us—dream up visions and versions of our own desiring and would take Mary’s child as the sigil of our own self-aggrandizement. I pulled up behind a car in traffic today, which bore a sticker on the rear window: “Just a girl who loves Jesus.” No, you don’t, I thought. The “Jesus” you think you love is a figment of your imagination, created to suit the predilections of your own life and lifestyle. The same, I then thought, is true of mine. And yours.

There is quite likely only one “girl who loves Jesus,” and that is the teenager reticent and yet somehow resilient, who sits and faces the Light that falls from the One, terrifying as it must be (Rilke once said, “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich – Every angel is terrifying”), and still musters courage and voice to say, “Here am I; let it be with me as you would have it.” Loves him enough to accept the angelic assignment: pregnancy and delivery, motherhood and martyrdom and myth, heaven’s light and tomb’s dark. Here am I, she says, incredibly. So be it. 

I don’t have that kind of courage. The best I can do is to follow her at a distance, as she makes her way toward Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, and into the world beyond, and finally into the mystic wonder of the heart. It is, I suspect, a holy and harrowing journey.

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[1] Paul Hooker, The Longing: Poems. Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024, pp. 95-96.