'the power of the Most High will overshadow you" Luke 1:35

For March 25. Today is the feast of the Annunciation. There was Mary, living in a poor town, really a peasant woman. Alone in her home. Surely she was praying in some way when the angel came and began talking to her. Hail full of grace, the Lord is with you. She wonders about these words to her. She engages in conversation with that angel and questions the angel too. She does not run out to consult someone else. In the depth of her being she realizes she is being asked to make a decision that will have effects unknown to her. The future is not spelled out to her. Is ours, really?

She doesn’t ask for details of the future. She seems to have no anxiety about that. Rather, she asks How? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Then she said yes. Overshadowing was a treasure in that sun soaked land. It was shelter from the heat that could kill you. So there was assurance of the care of God in these words.

Jesus gives us that same assurance when he says I am with you always. Or when he says abide in me as I abide in you.

Freely Mary said: Behold the servant of the Lord. She is aware that only one is her Lord, God who in the prophet Isaiah (Ch 45) says: I the Lord am God, there is no other, none beside me. God who is love can be trusted to be our Lord, to whom we can each say behold the servant of the Lord. Then Mary says Be it done to me according to your word. And so we say Hail Mary full of Grace. Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us.

By her example we can trust that in prayer God will lead us too. The Spirit of God also overshadows us. And in a way when we meditate, we entrust our lives to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

We sit in stillness as best we can. We close our eyes gently. We speak to God present with us and within us. We need to acknowledge the living reality of God in a personal way. Be present to God as God is present to us. "Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." Ps 23. Then we start saying a prayer word or phrase and keep repeating it. Whenever our mind drifts into thoughts, images, feelings, we gently return to our prayer word. We can have a timer and when it rings the 20 minutes, we quietly say the Lord's Prayer in our hearts. We have entrusted our whole life to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit!

"to know the love of Christ" Eph.3:19

“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Eph 3:18-19

God’s attitude toward us is one of whole, eternal and everlasting love. Salvation is from love, from God seeking to convince us of the great love in which God holds us. It is positively primitive, even barbaric, to think that we have to appease God for our sins. Yes, in Lent we look at our lives and repent of our sins. But what does Jesus say? Repent and believe the good news. Believe in this, that God so loves the world and each one of us that he sent his Son to share our human life to the full. And for us to realize that to the full means Resurrection from the dead.

Love is at the heart of all that Jesus did on earth. We are saved by believing in God’s love. The love God has for us is always available. It is not conditioned by our behavior. So when we acknowledge our sins, we gradually begin to realize that these come from our wounded false self. They do not diminish God’s love, for the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit at all time. What our sins do is somehow block our awareness of love and this is why we need to distinguish our true self from our false self. I believe that our sins come from insufficient belief in the unconditional Love which God has for us!

I love something Thomas Merton said in a conference on Prayer: “The great central thing in Christian faith and hope is the courage to realize oneself and to accept oneself as loved by God even though one is not worthy.”

When we take the time to meditate, for 20 minutes we let go of our thoughts and images and entrust ourselves, our superficial selves, our surface selves, and our deep selves, false self and true self, to LOVE who is God. For this half hour we just let God do in us as His love desires.
Let us pray.