The Most Important Choice

In what could have been a bit of shameless self-promotion, a friend of mine graciously suggested that I write about the Annunciation (coincidentally her birthday, as well) since I'm fresh out of ideas for what to write a new post about. She lived in a women's leadership cohort last year, and was one of very few conservative girls in the entire program, and she wasn't shy about it at all. Her suggestion was that I write about the Annunciation examining it by looking at Mary's sacrifice being the mother of God. It's also timely because I finish St. Louis de Montfort's Total Consecration on the Annunciation, and if anyone has something beautiful and profound to say about Mary, it's St. Louis.

I suppose I'd like to start by pointing out that Mary is important. That should be a given, but America is heavily influenced by its majority Protestant Christian background, so perhaps it ought to be established as our jumping-off point. If we accept the premise that God exists and that He was incarnated, it stands to reason that His mother would be an important lady. She wouldn't necessarily have to have been someone important in the place and time in which she lived (i.e. the wife of a king or governor), but by virtue of her role in God's life (and in the Catholic worldview, all of salvation history), she would be important.

Many Protestants eschew this idea because they believe that Catholic veneration of Mary is displaced. They think that Catholics worship Mary in place of or as an equal to God. This is untrue, as St. Louis de Montfort correctly states in his book True Devotion the the Blessed Virgin, "Mary, being a mere creature that has come from the hands of the Most High, is in comparison with his infinite Majesty less than an atom; or rather she is nothing at all, because He is 'He Who Is', consequently that grand Lord, always independent and sufficient to Himself, never had, and has not now an absolute need of the Holy Virgin for the accomplishment of His Will, and for the manifestation of His Glory." Mary is not God, nor is she equal to God, but because God chose to come into the world through her, and showed her all the love and respect due a mother by her child, it is the Catholic belief that we as Christians owe Mary the same filial love and respect.

Protestants further argue against Mary that she was either not free to refuse God when Gabriel announced to her that she would bear God's son, or that if she was free to refuse, God would simply have chosen some other woman to take her place. These arguments, however, respectively negate free will and diminish the plan God ordained for man's salvation. If God created man with free will, then to take it away from Mary, who would suffer more than any person in history, would be exceedingly cruel, an attribute which no Christian ascribes to God. If God had chosen Mary, and she had refused, and He had simply sought some other woman to take her place, how important could any of God's plans really be, that He could simply take another tack on something as important as the redemption of His most beloved creation?

Since we now know why Mary is important, let us move on to the most important choice she ever made. Many women in today's society are fond of saying things like, "my body, my choice", and when it comes to sacrifice, are much more comfortable with the thought of ending a life in their womb than adjusting their own lives to accommodate the one which they have conceived. It is from these mentalities that we have things like partial birth abortion, the HHS mandate, a 10% birthrate for children with Down Syndrome, and ideas like the moral permissibility of killing a newborn because its mother doesn't want it anymore. The concept of self-sacrifice for the good of another is alien, and the will or desires of an individual are more important than the well-being of weak or unpopular entities. "Choice" has become the paramount good, but what if we were to examine Mary's choice? Some women say that the choices they make, though distasteful to some, produce a greater good. What if we were to hold up an example of a similarly difficult and distasteful choice, but one that helped produce the greatest good?

Enter Mary. By all accounts, likely a 14 to 16-year-old virgin in Nazareth, a good Jewish girl betrothed to Joseph, by all accounts a 17 to 21-year-old man, a carpenter, and a good Jewish boy. One day, Mary is visited by an angel, a creature often painted as an adorable cherub, but actually more like the seraphim in Revelation 4:8 "...with six wings, [and] covered with eyes inside and out." So this terrifying creature comes to Mary, greets her in a way that troubles her, and then tells her not to be afraid, because she has found favor with God, and He wants her to bear His son. Totally casual. Then she asks the angel how she will have this child, since she hasn't had sex with a man, and he tells her that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, making her child the Son of God. Did I mention she was a teenage girl? This would have been the scariest thing she could never have imagined happening to her. Then there was the responsibility of raising God. Mary would be responsible for making sure that God knew His Scriptures, that He would be raised well, fed, clothed, and sheltered until He was ready to go out into the world. And since she would have been taught the Scriptures by her parents, she would have known that if her son was to be Israel's messiah, there was a tremendous amount of suffering that was going to be involved in this proposition. She would have to flee with Him shortly after His birth to Egypt to prevent Him being killed. Her child would be tortured and killed later in a brutal way by the Roman government at the behest of His own people. She, of course, would watch this happen, being powerless to stop any of it, seeing her child abandoned by almost all of His friends and followers. Mary knew she would watch her son die for His people one day. And then she said yes.

This will sound like insanity to anyone who is interested in self-preservation. Who in their right mind chooses, after being told by a scary looking thing they're going to be the mother of God, knowing all the pain and suffering that entails, to go ahead and say, "Yes, I will be the mother of God". And not only that, because Mary didn't enter into the Incarnation as God's business partner. What she said was, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word." Mary knew that what she was doing was a service, and she was ready to perform that service as a faithful follower of God. Not only does Mary choose to suffer, but she chooses to subject herself to God's will in order to do it.

Why would Mary do this? It makes no sense to the modern mind, or indeed, to most minds, why she would make the decision she did. Mary said yes because she knew that the suffering her son would endure, and by extension, her suffering, would redeem sinners everywhere. Mary knew that for her to choose to enter into that terrible suffering willingly would allow other people the greatest blessing that could ever be known: salvation and union with God in heaven. Mary sacrificed of herself because she knew that something infinitely greater and better than her pains would be achieved through them. Mary knew that the great end that would be achieved was worth the great means of achieving it.

And what did Mary get for her pains? The greatest reward that a person could receive. Not only did Mary get to see her son converting people back to God in front of her eyes, not only did she get to see Him risen on the third day, not only did she get to behold Him ascending gloriously into heaven, and not only did she die in peace and get assumed body and soul into heaven herself, but once there, Mary was made a queen. Mary was made Queen of Heaven and Earth, given the power to dispense and mediate God's graces as she wished, and made sovereign of all creation, second only to God Himself. God glorified her above any other creature, and gave her the greatest and most precious responsibilities there are, allowing her to mediate for us and bring us back to Him, making her our mother as she was His. On earth, she is by far the most beloved of all saints, and rightfully so, because she sacrificed the most. And all that glory and prestige she has been given rested on one big sacrifice, in one little word.

This is all well and good, but how does it apply to you, you might wonder? It applies to you because each day you can choose to follow Mary's example, and make the same sacrifices she did. You may not be asked to bear the Son of God, but your sacrifices can still bring great good out of suffering. It is difficult to fathom making this choice in a culture that is so averse to even the slightest discomfort, but choosing to suffer for the sake of another can be not only a great good for us who bear the load, but for the ones for whom we sacrifice. We have forgotten that suffering can have a purpose, that it can be good, and so in our desire to avoid suffering, we have started to cause others pain, and to do evil. We can come back from that, though, through imitating our Blessed Mother in her love and self-sacrifice. We can bring people to Jesus through Mary.