Luke 1:43. "Mary said to the angel, 'How can this be, since I am a virgin?'”
In
the innermost courts of the temple in Jerusalem, a veil separated
humanity from the Holy of Holies, where the Spirit of God rested upon
the Ark of the Covenant. An ancient, non-biblical story says that the
Virgin Mary was one of the young women chosen to weave a new veil for
the temple and that she was doing so when the Angel Gabriel arrived to
announce his strange and beautiful message. One way to interpret Mary’s
question to Gabriel is that she sees her virginity as a veil separating
her from the reality of Gabriel’s announcement.
We
all have veils that separate us from God—veils of fear, shame, and
guilt. We live behind the veil of what we have done and left undone. We
are veiled in logic and rationalism, unable or unwilling to abandon
ourselves to Mystery. Often, our veils are the lives we have created for
ourselves, what we see is what we get.
We
may offer excuses and hide ourselves behind all the veils we can find,
explaining and exclaiming why Gabriel’s announcement cannot be true for
each of us, and the angel will proclaim in our own ears: “Nothing will
be impossible with God.”
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