Christmas 2024 -- In Praise of Mary

On Christmas Eve, and then again on Christmas morning, I open a small book entitled “In Praise of Mary: Hymns from the first millennium [thousand years] of the Eastern and Western Churches.” A hymn is a prayer, an early Christian rendition of a poem.

This one is from “The Scroll of Ravenna” and is accompanied, as are all the hymns, by miniatures: small, intricate, elaborated, highly decorative paintings on vellum made to adorn the hymns.

O true light, our Lord God,

who from the depths of your heart

have voiced the saving word

we pray to you:

as wondrously you descended

into the pure womb of the Virgin Mary,

grant us, your servants, to await with joy

the glorious nativity.

For the accompanying miniature, see above.

Pope Benedict offers us a clarifying elucidation of the Annunciation:

“In one of his Advent homilies, Bernard of Clairvaux offers a stirring presentation of the drama of this moment. After the error of our first parents, the whole world was shrouded in darkness, under the dominion of death. Now God seeks to enter the world anew. He knocks at Mary’s door. He needs human freedom. The only way he can redeem man, who was created free, is by means of a free ‘yes’ to his will. In creating freedom, he made himself in a certain sense dependent upon man. His power is tied to the unenforceable ’yes’ of a human being.

“So Bernard portrays heaven and earth as it were holding its breath at this moment of the question addressed to Mary. Will she say yes? She hesitates … will her humility hold her back? Just this once — Bernard tells her — do not be humble but daring! Give us your ‘yes’! This is the crucial moment when, from her lips, from her heart, the answer comes: ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ It is the moment of free, humble yet magnanimous obedience in which the loftiest choice of human freedom is made (‘Jesus of Nazareth 3: The Infancy Narratives,’ chapter 2).”

Mary, it should not surprise Catholics, is the first theologian of their church, faithful through the ordeal of the cross and resurrection.

So then, on Christmas Eve, we men, faint and irresolute in the face of the divine, turn to Mary for courage, as all Christians in the first millennium turned to her in whom there was no error of belief.