This is the first feast day – besides Christmas – that I have really celebrated in a meaningful way with my family.  I always want to celebrate different feast days but I’m never organized enough and my oldest child is just newly 2 – so my ambitions never really turn into reality.

But today we colored pictures of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary, to announce that she had been chosen by God to be the mother of Jesus, and to ask for her consent.  Then we baked muffins and dropped the pictures and the muffins off on neighbors’ doorsteps (my child was kind of mad that we weren’t keeping all of the muffins for ourselves), explaining that Christmas is 9 months from today…. the length of one pregnancy.  As of today (liturgically), the Light has officially entered the world as a human – a tiny human in the womb of his mother.  God is with us, Immanuel. 

My faith has been on the rocks for, hmm, 17 years.  That’s when my dad died, back in 2003, and the simplistic Christian story of an all loving and all powerful God who looks out for us and is in control of everything stopped making sense to me.  I was only 11 years old but that was plenty old enough to understand that the prayers of so many people around the world didn’t “work” to heal my dad, that he died at 44 years old, leaving behind a widow and six children.  The problem of evil and suffering ceased to be abstract and the seeming powerlessness (or unwillingness?) of God to do anything about it became oppressive.

17 years and many more personal tragedies later, and here we are faced with a world pandemic.  As of the time of my writing this, 20,524 have died in the past three months from this virus and it’s not slowing down.  My little nuclear family is vastly inconvenienced by the reality of the virus and we are some of the luckiest and least affected on the planet – neighbors are losing their jobs, elderly friends are in total isolation, community members are dying.  Where is our all good and all powerful God?  Even though we personally are so unaffected on the spectrum by this virus, our prayers of “thank you” seem to bite – “thank you” as we sit in our palace, eating our food in our air conditioned house enjoying good health, while people all over the world and even in our own community suffer, hunger, die. 

The simplistic answers don’t work.  They don’t satisfy.

But, what we celebrate today is not simplistic.  Oh yes, even though images of the Annunciation show a wealthy white Mary praying on her Roman Catholic kneeler as the angel comes to her – truly this day is profound.  For the woman who received the message from the angel was not me, not a wealthy American girl caught up on her vaccines and baking muffins for the neighbors.  No, she was a poor, oppressed teenage girl, living in a world without medical care or grocery stores or hardwood floors.  She consented to conceive and carry in her womb the child – God – in a world without epidurals or C-sections, when many women and children died in childbirth.  She and her husband were likely outcast from their religious community for what others perceived as an “impure act” and their child was likely considered a bastard.  She was to give birth in a cave surrounded by the smells of manure and forced to lay her beloved baby in a feeding trough. 

This child was to grow up, despised by many, fatherless at a young age, poor, working with his hands, betrayed by his friends and murdered in public for crimes he didn’t commit.  And this child was God.  Is God.  This is God with us.  Immanuel. 

I don’t understand what all of this means.  I still struggle with the pervasive and overwhelming reality of evil.  But what the Christian story proclaims, the Good News, is that God is with us.  God suffers alongside us.  God enters into THIS reality – this dark, evil, scary reality.  And he experienced it all, even death.  So even though I don’t understand it even a little bit, I do know that to be a Christian does not mean denying the evil or sugarcoating the problem or looking for quick fixes and easy answers.  To be a Christian is really to follow the way of Christ – to face the darkness head on, to suffer with those who suffer, even at times to cry out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”.  Even to die a gruesome, lonesome, seemingly pointless death.

On this Feast Day of the Annunciation, we Catholics do look to Mary as our first example of this Christian faith.  For she, upon hearing the good news but also the suffering that would come for her – “a sword will pierce your own heart also” – responded with strength, “Be it done unto me according to thy will.”  Time and time again, in the face of all that was confusing and scary and seemed to lack answers, Mary “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

May I also have such faith and strength in the face of evil.