The Holy Spirit will come to you, and power of the most high shall overshadow you.

Here in the temperate climate, we may think of shadows as negative – places of threat or sadness.  The root of the word in Latin languages is “somber.”  I grew up with a politically incorrect image of a Mexican man leaning against a wall asleep under his sombrero – which means “something that makes shade”.  Mexico and the location of the Gospel story share a reality different from ours.  Both are hot climates.  Shade is a source of safety from the threat of the burning sun.

In our culture, being “overshadowed” means that something – or someone – is rendered less important than the thing or person overshadowing them.  In our culture, we can miss something beautiful in this line.  The Spirit is not diminishing Mary.  The Spirit is enfolding her in a protecting embrace.  But more.

Albert Delp S.J. speaks of Advent as relieving the “temporal-eternal tension” which we experience as existential longing, an ache that frames our very existence.  The enfolding of the angel (and Mary’s acceptance of it) is the first stage in this process of relieving.  The angel in its immortality (never ending-ness) is a forerunner of the eternity of God (God’s always having been and never ending)   Don’t the wings that we have used to depict the angelic image provide a kind of shawl (see Catherine McAuley’s spiritualityof the shawl, enfolding and including the other) or umbrella or canopy or…sombrero?  The Angel, who cannot embrace (for lack of touch) , can enclose and shelter, without touching, without completely closing the distance (or satisfying the longing).  Perhaps the angel is the promise, the foretaste of the union to come, to come with her “Yes.”

With Mary's “Yes” comes the complete relief of this “temporal-eternal tension” the complete closing of the distance between temporality and eternity, the touch and physical embrace of God.  In that moment of conception, immortality surrounds Mary and Eternity fills Mary.  And in that moment she is the first of us humans who know that truly God is within us and God is all around us.

For much of my life I felt the celebration of my birthday, on this shortest day of the year, to be overshadowed by Christmas. While resentment of God would have been beyond me, I spared no self-pity.  I felt that the proximity of these two annual celebrations made my birthday somehow less.

Fr. Delp, in his "Meditation on the Third Sunday of Advent from Tegel Prison December 1944" (quoted above) continues more deeply into the “temporal-eternal tension” by writing, as if of me (two weeks before his hanging, two years before my birth) “He has fallen into the experience of limitation.  He experiences himself, and the world, and all things, even though the colorful wings of his mind, of his yearnings, press beyond all limits.”

In this Advent Season of expectant waiting, in this season of my life when age bends me more naturally to reflection,  I am grateful to Fr. Delp for this birthday present of turning my eyes from the darkness of the meteorological season to the “colorful wings” of God’s Spirit, and the joy of being overshadowed by God who longs to be one with me, and yet waits for my  “Yes”.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.