Fiat, Full-of-Grace
A sermon preached at Holy Cross Monastery for the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, 2019; Luke 1:26-38
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Fiat, lux—Let there be light’…”
The angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, [will sweep over you,] and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy…” Then Mary said, “Fiat mihi—Let it be with me according to your word.”
* * * *
Fiat. “Let it be done.” Let there be; let it be. Luke’s account of the Annunciation intentionally echoes, or responds to, the story of Creation; it becomes our account of the New Creation, or, maybe better, the ongoing Creation—it tells us that Creation is not finished, is still unfolding.
The same core elements are in each account: the Spirit moves over the face of the deep; the Spirit moves over the depths of Mary; and in both, the Fiat is spoken—“Let it be.” But in the first account, it is God’s fiat, drawing forth Creation; in the second account, it is Creation’s fiat, drawing forth God. In the first, Creation takes form in the womb of God; in the second, God takes form in the womb of creation, in the womb of Mary.
Theologian Sarah Jane Boss, in her wonderful 2003 book Mary, puts forward what she calls a “green Mariology”; she writes:
Mary […] stands at the Annunciation in the same relation to God as do the waters of creation at the beginning of the world. It is as though the world’s redemption in Christ is in fact its re-creation, and that God accomplishes this re-creation by breathing and speaking afresh upon the world’s foundations, in the person of Mary […]. Mary is the dark water, Christ the fiery light. And this work of creation and renewal is neverending…
And so here she explicitly links our two creation stories, our two fiats, our two annunciations, as one—each a face of the neverending, ongoing unfolding that is creation, that is the life of God. But then she continues, and even more boldly asserts:
…insofar as the Blessed Virgin shares an identity with the deep from before the dawn of time, she too is mysteriously present in all things […]. If we start by imagining the cosmos as fabric whose thread and weave are ever changing, then Mary is in some sense the same as the entire assembly of the most minute, invisible particles of the fibres of which the world is spun and woven.
And so for Boss, Mary becomes the deep identity of the whole created order, the thread and weave of life itself. In the beginning God says “Let there be” and calls forth from her womb Mary; Mary says “Let it be,” and calls forth from her womb God.
And in the meeting of these two fiats is Christ: the full and perfect union of the created and the Uncreated; the goal and longing and center and heart of all that is. God’s call, God’s longing; and Creation’s response, Creation’s longing. And the two become one—one single longing, one fiat, one dance, coursing through all things.
This is the goal of all our living, of every breath: Can we bring ourselves into alignment with that primordial fiat that gave birth to the worlds, and with Mary again speak “Let it be”—or rather, let that original, that only, fiat be spoken through us—and thereby give birth to God? Little by little, every breath can become “Let it be”; every breath God’s birthing of us and our birthing of God.
When Gabriel announces to Mary of Nazareth, Mary in that moment becomes the human face of all creation, the human face of that primordial Mary; the human face of the God-bearing dimension of existence. And through her—the human face of creation—is born the human face of God.
* * * *
In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart wrote of the Annunciation, “Gabriel addressed not her alone, but a great multitude: every good soul that desires God.” That desire, that longing for God, is at the heart of every soul, and of all creation. But we often seem to think that our longing is a sign of God’s absence, of our lack of God. This is perhaps our greatest error, this is perhaps our “original sin”—because that desire in our hearts that we so often try to fulfill in small and limited and unsatisfying ways—it’s not our desire for God. It’s God’s desire in us. Not a sign of absence or lack, but the surest sign of presence, Divine Presence.
In that original fiat, God poured God’s own longing into Creation, into primordial Mary, into us. Our longing has always been God’s presence in us. And in our individual fiats, we give God’s longing expression. Can each of us, human faces of creation, let our whole being become “Let it be” and give birth to the human face of God? This is our high calling—the potential that we so often fall short of.
* * * *
In Gabriel’s opening words to Mary, he says—in our rather flat New Revised Standard Version—“Greetings, favored one!” This is, in Latin, Ave, Gratia Plena—“Hail, Full of Grace!” And the Greek word here is Kecharitōmĕnē, which is in perfect-passive-participle form, and so implies “has been, is, and will be.” Gabriel greets her not with a name (“Mary”), but with a title—“Full-of-Grace.” And if Mary is the human face of creation, then this is the name of all Creation, of the primordial Mary who is the thread and weave of all that is: Full-of-Grace, Kecharitōmĕnē.
Again, Eckhart says, “What good would it do me for Mary to be full of grace if I were not also full of grace?” And he writes with a boldness that could only come from Meister Eckhart: “We are all an only son whom the Father has been eternally begetting out of the hidden darkness of eternal concealment, indwelling in the first beginning of the primal purity which is the plenitude of all purity.” The Kecharitōmĕnē. The primordial Mary. She is that primal purity out of which God is eternally begetting, or, in Sarah Jane Boss’ words, “of which the world is spun and woven.”
And so it is no mistake that most of our traditional depictions of the Annunciation show Mary spinning wool—a detail which comes to us from the Protoevangelium of James, where we learn that at the moment of the Annunciation, Our Lady was spinning purple wool, at the request of the Temple priests, to make a new veil for the Holy of Holies. The Kecharitōmĕnē, spinning from her limitless Ocean of Grace, all the veils of Creation—weaving every world that ever has been or ever shall be.
* * * *
The Fiat makes one final appearance in Church tradition, recorded by St. Maximus the Confessor in his 6th century Life of the Virgin. He tells us that shortly before Mary’s death, the angel Gabriel appeared to her a final time. “Hail, Full-of-Grace,” he says once more. Then he tells her, “Your son and Lord bids you: ‘It is time for my mother to come to me.’” Maximus writes, “she responded to the angel with her original reply: ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me now again according to your word.’” The perfect bookend. And so her whole life, her whole being, has become “Let it be.”
So may it be with each of us, in God’s ongoing work of creation. As God speaks us into being moment-by-moment, may we speak God into being also.
And so to all of you, “Hail, Kecharitōmĕnē!”
And may we each respond “Fiat!—Let it be!”
Amen.
