A New Joy
AM: Psalm 85, 87 • Isaiah 52:7-12 • Hebrews 2:5-10
PM: Psalm 110:1-5(6-7), 132 • Wisdom 9:1-12 • John 1:9-14
“What should I write about for the Annunciation?” (Though Nathan and I don’t always consult each other about our reflections, major Feasts sometimes call for a second opinion.)
“Write about”—and here he assumed a holier-than-thou tone—“Mary’s purity.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Too much baggage.”
Mary’s purity encompasses more than her virginity, but the emphasis on her virginity at the Annunciation (Q: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” A: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon you,” et cetera) is unavoidable. The most destructive force the Church ever unleashed on my life was the equation of a woman’s purity with her virginity. This plus the Catholic dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Mary’s perpetual virginity add up to an image of Mary estranged from humanity. Try as I might I can’t disentangle sin from sex in that cluster.
Yet I’m enchanted by poetic language surrounding the virgin conception and birth of Jesus, as in the Latin hymn “Ecce novum gaudium”:
A Virgin [...] knew not a man,
But as the pear tree bears the pear,
The flourishing papyrus
Brings the lily from the soil.
See how nature changes her laws:
A pure virgin bears the son of God.
The God who set the rules of meiosis and zygosis in motion tweaked those same rules to become Incarnate, pulled tricks on nature all his life, then died and, in the pièce de résistance of God’s flex on biological imperatives, was resurrected.
The Annunciation proclaims an inversion of our nature that nonetheless exalts it, like the perspective change of hanging upside down makes the right-side-up world fresh and new. God favored one pear tree at one time to bear a passionfruit instead, but not because of any animosity towards the normal sexual reproduction of pears, but because only the God who made pear trees (and saw that they were good) could do so.
Written by Kathryn Haydon
Kathryn holds a doctorate in Plant Science from the University of Arkansas and currently lives in St. Louis where she works as a food and plant scientist. She shares a happy, book-filled home with her husband Nathan and their cats Ollie and Adair.