Jesus is the Icon of the Gift itself and how the Gift is given. Mary is the Icon of how the Gift is received. In her great “Magnificat” (Luke 1:46-55), Mary is not afraid to first of all boast openly of her own beauty and greatness, because she knows it is all a gift. It is not a statement about her; it is a statement about God!
She is the perfect yes to God, precisely because her yes is spoken out of her accepted “nothingness” (Luke 1:48). We instead demand some kind of “somethingness” from ourselves, and foolishly avoid the God-given emptiness that we are. Our somethingness is only revealed from a previous admission of our littleness. Or as Simone Weil puts it, “God creates the vacuum that God alone can fill.”
Mary will always be the most orthodox Biblical image of how grace works in humanity, how God is received, and how love itself is received. It is our daily emptiness that allows us to need and to receive God’s utter fullness, and Mary does not hesitate to admit three times that she also lives under the divine mercy (Luke 1:50, 54-55) and like all of us is a “lowly” one, which she says two times (Luke 1:47, 52). Ironically, people who know they are chosen or beloved do not need any form of self-promotion. They are already permanently promoted.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go (CD)
It has been said many times that, after transformation, you seldom have the feeling you have found anything. It feels much more like Someone has found you! You find yourself having been grabbed, being held, and being Someone’s beloved. At first, you do not even know what is going on. All you know is that it is a most wondrous undergoing, but an undergoing nevertheless. You do not “do” much yourself, but like Mary you know something “has been done unto you” (Luke 1:38).
Finally, you allow yourself to stand before one true mirror for your identity—you surrender to the naked now of true prayer and full presence. You become a Thou before the great I AM. Henceforward, as Teresa of Avila said, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God.”
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mytics See
We have in Mary’s story what some call the second creation story in the Bible. Again it is a creation that is ex nihilo, or out of nothing (Genesis 1:2). Mary is the one quite willing to be the nothing. Ironically this is what makes her and us “something”!
God does not need worthiness ahead of time; God creates worthiness by the choice itself. It seems God will not come into the world unreceived or uninvited. God is gentle and does not come into your world unless you actually want God to.
Presence is a reciprocal or mutual encounter. One can give it, but it has to be received or there is no presence. For many, Mary is indeed the model of how “real presence” effectively happens. It is not just through a priest’s transubstantiation of bread, but by the transformation of the persons who eat that bread. She was the first “priest” who first transformed matter into Christ, and she could do that because she fully allowed her own transformation.
From Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
