Joyful Mystery—The Annunciation [1 of 20]

8THWORKER@PHJESUITS.ORG / JM SJ

Joyful Mystery—The Annunciation [1 of 20]

Marco Romano’s early-fourteenth-century sculptures of the angel Gabriel (28 inches high) and the Virgin Mary (43 3/4 inches high), from the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. This illustration of the two figures is the first unified photographic image ever seen.’ Art critic Andrew Butterfield has written about this duo in The New York Review.

irst Joyful Mystery—The Annunciation. And when the angel had come to her, he said, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you" (Lk 1:28).

There is joy in not knowing fully well yet the plan of God for us at a given time and place. There will always be a difference between what God knows and what we know because God is eternal. Mary had a sense of this joy, a woman's intuition—a sense of how everything gradually falls into its proper place hic et nunc, a being-in-the-world or life-world (German: Lebenswelt) and choosing it. This joy is not a spiritless, self-abasing, unassertive, resistless joy, but joy of ascent, a joy that is spirit-filled, assertive but obedient and docile. The great paradox of the exercise of total freedom is the exercise of its total surrender. This is the enigma behind Mary's person. As human beings like her, we too can experience this paradox. Hans Urs von Balthasar (12 August 1905–26 June 1988), a Swiss theologian, captured this sense anchored on the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, which, to me, are the bedrock of Mary's joy, I quote:

"You, O God, are right in every case, even when I cannot see it or perhaps would prefer the opposite." Hope means: "In you alone, O God, do I have my continued existence, and for that reason I leave behind all assurances resting on myself." Love means: "All my strength and heart and mind are straining themselves to affirm you, O God (and myself only in you), and those whom you have placed beside me as my neighbors."

Additional Materials:

The Visitation [2 of 20]

Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord: Mary's Free Agency (March 25, 2021)

Fr James Martin SJ reflects on the unusual artistic rendering of the Annunciation figures above.