Joy in the Morning?

[Note: My essay from The Liguorian is now posted to my website (click on "essays"). If you are new to my blog, that essay is a good place to see my perspective. If you are unfamiliar with the rosary or how it is prayed, see prior posts for the prayers, framework, and biblical references.]

Up to now, I have been quite the pedant here, didactically telling you what to do to and how to do it. While that's certainly fun and all, not to mention easier, I now step out uncertainly into the realm of prayer. Away from how toward why and what, from the quantitative to the qualitative, from works to faith.

We think of prayer as a means to communicate with God, but the word communication indicates sharing, listening--dialogue, not monologue. However, if you look up prayer in the Oxford English Dictionary (Queen Mother of all dictionaries), every definition has to do with entreaty, with asking God's help. Take it a step further and you have the one-way conversation we all fear, where you can just see God playing Celestial Solitaire, jamming with the iPod while you blather on. If you Google the word, though, you get the more connotative, intuitive meaning of prayer as communication with God. Which brings us to the central problem of prayer: How can we differentiate God's voice from our own? When I talk about my day with God as though God were a friend, how can I be certain that the responses I think I hear come from God and not from my own ever-present, insistent, strident imagination clamoring for attention?

That is where the rosary helps me to transcend my selfish, mucked-up narrow view. So now, on to the Joyful Mysteries, one at a time (just the first one today, though): The Annunciation, wherein the angel Gabriel announces that Mary has been chosen as Theotokos, God-bearer. Quite an honor, especially for a humble girl living under the hairy thumb of Roman occupation.

We Protestants tend to think about Jesus' birth in December, mostly, when it's easy to see and feel the joy in this scene, the hope. Mama to the Messiah! Does it get any better than that? Within the context and excess of our modern Christmas orgies, this angelic visit glitters with starry-eyed optimism. Until I began to pray the rosary, I never really looked at it from Mary's view, immersed as I always was with the holiday hoopla.

She's young, we know that, probably no more than 13 or 14. A virgin still, promised in marriage to a man much older. Poor. Jewish. Born into oppression, this girl-child finds herself facing an unplanned pre-marriage pregnancy. Her thoughts, at first anyway, had to be skeptical. We get a glimpse of her spunk when she reminds the angel that she is a virgin, but before Gabriel heads back to heaven, this courageous young woman graces us with that handmaiden of the Lord thing. We see her spirit as well as her spunk.

In a temporal world with limited choices, hemmed in by gender, ethnicity, and poverty, Mary says yes to Gabriel, yes to God. It's not logical. It's not rational. I'm glad she's not my daughter. But I love the girl's sweet, steely defiance.

The Annunciation is pregnant (pardon the pun:) with meaning.

What do you think of when you remember the angel's night-time visit to Mary?