A Chapter Conference for the Friday of the Third Week of Lent

+ Lent has been rather interrupted this week by the first class feasts of St Joseph and St Benedict, and now this evening finds us in the chapter room for a Lent conference having already celebrated solemn first vespers of the Annunciation. Almost in spite of our good resolutions to keep a strict Lent, our Holy Mother the Church insists this week that we feast rather than fast.

And for good reason; for amidst our penitential practices there is joy: the joy of the saints who have persevered in the Christian life and who live in heavenly glory, assisting us in our perseverance by their intercession; there is the joy of knowing that our hopefully-more-than-meagre efforts in Lent, insufficient in themselves, are not the whole story: the manifold graces given to the saints are available to us also. And there is joy in the celebration of news borne to the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Archangel Gabriel: “behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:31).

At matins tomorrow morning Pope St Leo the Great and St Ambrose will teach us much about the cosmological and soteriological significance of the Annunciation, and we should attend to their voices with the ears of our minds and our hearts. This year, for the feast of the Annunciation I propose that we consider the sine qua non of the Annunciation, that element of it without which nothing would have happened: namely, the response of Our Blessed Lady to the news brought to her by the Angel Gabriel, more precisely her words: “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum”—“be it done unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38), which are often referred to as Our Lady’s “fiat”.

For without these words, without this grace-filled human consent, the Annunciation is a non-event. The Angel Gabriel would have had to return to the heavenly court downcast, with the saving plan of Almighty God frustrated (at least temporarily) because God chose to lay as its cornerstone the free cooperation of a human person. We know, of course, that the Virgin, “full of grace” did consent, and in this great feast of the Annunciation we celebrate that and its salvific import. The Annunciation is, one may say, the feast of the fruits of human consent to the will of Almighty God—what wonders Almighty God can work when man says “yes” to His divine plan!

This is particularly true for the monk. Whether it be in our vocational discernment, during the different stages of formation, or in the ongoing living of vowed monastic life, we cannot begin to even imagine what Almighty God can do with and through us if only we say, inspired by the same grace of Almighty God given to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “fiat, yes, let what you have in store for me happen, I trust You.” For it is only then that God can truly work with us as He truly wills.

Our small monastic foundation has a vision and hopes and plans, and we seek to ensure that they conform to the Will of Almighty God. But He has more than ‘a’ vision: He sees all, He knows all, including much if not most that we do not. That His holy will may be realised here, in us, we need to embrace and integrate the virtue of the Blessed Virgin in her unhesitating and faith-filled response of “fiat” to the Angel Gabriel. If we do that, His plan will unfold unimpeded by our own limitations and bear fruit in ourselves and in others that we cannot presently imagine.

It may be that the falling of the feast of the Annunciation in Lent does us well this year, for our Lenten discipline may serve to strip away worldly or other distractions and enable us to listen more attentively to the voice of God. As we pray daily in the invitatory psalm (94) of matins: “O that today [we] would hearken to His voice,” that we would “harden not [our] hearts...”  It may be that the sharper focus that Lent affords us may enable us to respond to Him more generously, so that the plan of Almighty God might indeed bear fruit in us and through us.
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For the grace of an unhesitating and fruitful acceptance of God’s will let us continue to pray, particularly on this feast of the Annunciation. And when, on Sunday, we come to sing the introit “Laetare Jerusalem...” may we have reason to rejoice indeed at God’s holy will being done in and through us, if even in ways that as yet we do not fully understand. +

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