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The Tireless Stalker

A few years ago when I was writing a book about conscience, I needed a folktale to anchor the chapter on marriage. So I sat down and dreamed one up myself, about Cinderella and Charming after the wedding, when they got down to the serious business of "happily-ever-after." At least in my imagination, when Charming's father retired and left him the engrossing issues of running the kingdom and their children developed unfathomable interests of their own, Cinderella found herself actually almost missing the days before her exaltation, when her dishpan hands looked like albino prunes and she fell asleep every night exhausted, smelling of Murphy's Oil Soap, and Comet cleanser, and New Improved Blue Cheer with Borax and Brighteners.

That memory came back this week when I encountered yet again Luke's recounting of the annunciation. I wondered if right now Our Lady might feel some very real pangs of nostalgia for the old days in Nazareth, after enduring all the adulation heaped on her for 20 centuries by well-intentioned theologians and preachers, like drunken poets trying to out-do one another enumerating the foot-candles of illumination in her radiant presence, how many graces God swamped her with even before she was born, how extravagantly renaissance painters gussied her up in gold brocade when they pictured her receiving the huge-winged Gabriel in what seemed a high-arched Florentine reception hall. Even Luke in his narration of Jesus' birth really lays on the special effects in a way that might embarrass even George Lucas or Peter Jackson. Sudden appearances of huge alien beings were probably as rare in what no one knew then was the first century as they are now in the 21st. Can you imagine your mother in her kitchen shaving carrots, suddenly aware of a rustling behind her, and she turns and beholds this humongous winged hermaphrodite panting from his long flight across the endless cold of space from heaven?

As I said, all those embellishments are well-meaning. They try to show what was really going on, trans-historical importance that no this-world onlooker actually present would have discerned. This wasn't just some illiterate hillbilly girl from a no-name Roman province. This was the previously unrecognized personage God himself was inviting to become the Mother of God, the Queen of Peace, the Mediatrix of All Graces. If Luke underplays anything at all, it's Mary's astonishment. She doesn't say, as any normal girl would, "I must be losing my mind! There's an angel in my kitchen." She doesn't say, "If you're real, Mister, you must be out of your bloody mind." All she says is, "Ahem! How am I-a virgin--supposed to pull this off without the one element no female in history has ever been able to produce a child? I mean, getting pregnant has never not involved a male."

But that's what you get, even in the gospel, when you fire all the dressmakers and cosmeticians and manicurists and hair stylists, and just take a look at this ordinary little girl. If we can just surrender and "allow" God to be dumb enough to choose this nobody to be his irreplaceable assistant. Forget the immaculate conception. Forget the titles, along with the brocade and the Florentine reception hall and the Anglo-Saxon blue eyes we've insisted she have. It was a very ordinary, very un-dramatic, very commonplace occurrence. God comes to just plain Mary-as God comes to just plain each one of us, at this ordinary moment-and says, "Hi. I hope I'm not intruding on more important matters, but, ahem, could you find it convenient to conceive my Son within you today? I'd be ever so grateful if you'd carry him within you, into places no uniformed assistant like a priest or nun would be particularly comfortable or even welcome."

In Matthew's picturing of the Last Judgment, the Father says, "Whatever you did to the least of mine, you did to Me." That means his Son lurks inside every single person on earth. But it follows, then, that Jesus must also be within you and me. All God asks at his daily, ordinarily unheeded annunciations to each of us, is that we acknowledge that presence within us. That we carry with us the presence of Christ wherever we go. That everyone we encounter will encounter that liberating presence, that supernatural aliveness, that unwavering yearning to forgive and heal.

Hah! And you thought you were safe if you were nobody special! Nope. This God-the one we allow to reveal himself, rather than the one we expect or demand-is head-over-heels in love with Cinderallas. He haunts them, stalks them. But you'll sense his presence not like some Macy's blimp angel zooming up in front of you. It'll be like the smallest whisper within a silence. A still small voice that speaks your name.

If you want to play it safe, if you want to avoid at all costs that invitation to conceive Christ within you, then whenever you're alone, be sure to turn on the TV and the stereo and the i-pod and the cell phone. Really loud. And really pray there's never be a power outage. Because you can be sure of one thing: God will never suffer a power outage.

Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit