On the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

 Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

 

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’

 From the Angelus

 

The ancient Christian Church placed a feast in final week of March that prepared the way for Christmas, a feast close enough to First Equinox to be heir of a spring celebration and its conclusion nine months later, close enough to Second Solstice to hail the consummation of that miraculous pregnancy at Christmas, and then close enough to First Equinox and the moveable feast of Easter once again to fill the cycle of the year, to conjoin birth and rebirth, and to make the story whole.

March 25, the feast of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, is a beginning for the Great Myth, one form of the fantastic spiritual-sexual tale that bears witness to the land come back to life again. Like in a dream, an angel named Gabriel appears with wild, dangerous tidings, and the beautiful young girl is suddenly with child at his presence, her inevitable but still reckless assent changing forever the history of the wintery world.

As structured within the ritual of the Christian year, the story never really ends. One thing always leads to the next, which leads to the next and the next. It is a circannual answer to a death which hides where it was conceived, making new and old fit tightly, dual parts of the same whole.

I was brought up surrounded by this and other interlocking narratives, and, year after year, I keep asking the same thing that I ask of any novel or movie or song: What does it really mean? Oh, I know what it sort of means, but I want more. My conditioning won’t let me alone. I keep digging, but I never really quite figure out what more I want. I have made the willing suspension of disbelief but can’t relax and enjoy it. I dismiss the problem of historicity because stories are always true, no matter if they are factually accurate or not. Something just doesn’t fit. Maybe a key sentence has been left out. Maybe critical chapters have been erased. Maybe the climax has been butchered in translation.

And so I keep reading the text again each year at the feast of the Annunciation, trying to figure out what is missing, hoping to find flesh to the words. Sometimes I come close. But always I encounter inscrutable shades and twists to the plot that skew the outcome. Once again the characters and episodes become too scrambled and scattered among the soft bloodroot and hepatica and twinleaf and violet cress of middle spring.

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