As with Mary at her Annunciation, God recognizes who we truly are

God knows us, He knows our true name and what we are called to be (Rev 2:17). It seems to me that this is why Mary was so startled at the angel’s words. It was the amazement of recognition.

Mary had always walked in God’s gaze, but the Annunciation brought this to
a new consciousness. She lifted her head like someone who is called aloud after a lifetime of prayerful silence. She heard her name, a name that contained the significance of not necessarily how she viewed herself or her state that day but her truest self, which always contains God’s plan for us. And though, in her most profound modesty, she could hardly have guessed at the magnitude of what that might mean, she of all people would have recognized the rightness of God’s vision of her. Full of grace. One who will be filled with God. Who will be nearest to God.

Mary is without sin. She is the cut pink rose that never browns at the edges of its petals. She has not inherited the twisted, gnarled growths of sin through her being that the rest of us have. It did not take much to make her realize herself in God’s gaze — just that moment of soft rupture, that moment of being “troubled.”

For you and me, this realization of ourselves is more difficult. Anxiety makes us illogical, and deaf to God’s gentle call. Stress can make us bad tempered, and bad judges of our own actions. But what shocked me about finding God (and this often happens in the minutes after Communion) was the realization of myself as I was gathered in his gaze.

After Communion, when Christ is in the physical depths of you, it is as though a lamp has been placed in the darkness of your soul where you truly are… You may be aware of God watching you, even as he watched Mary. He sees far beyond the present moment to things you cannot know — and the contrarieties inside you, the scuffed days or moments that you would rather blot out, the things that make no sense and that you would never post on social media. He knows all of that, and deeper, further; and in the context of that knowledge, pain and shame are lost….

Mary heard God’s name for her that afternoon, and then she heard his incredible divine plan. And then she could say, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.” She knew that the authenticity of her self lay in doing God’s will. He made her; he loves her; he knows her. His plan for you, like his plan for her, will, as Saint Catherine of Siena wrote, set the whole of Italy and the world ablaze. Only in fulfilling God’s plan for ourselves will we find peace. But first we must listen to God and recognize who we are.

Excerpt from Annunciation: A Call to Faith in a Broken World by Sally Read
(Ignatius Press, 2019), pp. 74-76, www.ignatius.com.

SALLY READ is the author of Night’s Bright Darkness: A Modern Conversion Story (Ignatius Press, 2016) and three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe Books. She is poet in residence with the Hermitage of the Three Holy Hierarchs, and she lives with her family in Rome.