To understand the deep meanings of the Annunciation (such that we can), we must first grasp certain unbreakable principles.

I diverge for a moment. How often do we hear statements like, "How could God have let this happen?" or "Why does God permit a world like this?" or "What kind of God is this?!" But, you see, God will not take over human history. For to do so would bring about a police state like no other ever seen. How different God's thought police would be from our present relationship with Him: love, patience, forgiveness.

When God does interact with individual humans, for example, Abraham or Moses, He asks them to sacrifice for Him, not the other way around. Here are two men who were virtual princes in their storied civilizations, two of the greatest civilization in history: Babylon and Egypt. For God's sake, they emptied themselves of worldly glory and lived like Bedouin vagabonds.

Now, let us consider a twelve-year-old girl who has spent her life living as a Temple virgin on Mt. Zion. She has been fed by angels. Her holy fingers have been entrusted with weaving the veil for the Holy of Holies. And now an angel, Gabriel, approaches. She is told, "the power of the Highest will overshadow you," and you will bear a child called the Son of God. Terrifying. Terrifying in its scale and otherworldly character but also terrifying to imagine herself bearing a child without an earthly father, whose penalty is death by stoning. (And we know that Mary was dogged by filthy rumors all her life.)

God interacts with individuals in secret (Mt 6:5-6) and will act in secret .... we say, "in mysteries." He will not take over history. He will not subject mankind to external control exercised by force and power. This is the lesson of the twentieth century. He did not intervene through world wars and unspeakable carnage. He did not intervene when weapons of unimaginable power, able to destroy the world, were developed. He did not intervene when en masse attempts to exterminate His own people were in progress.

The great psychiatrist and Nazi death camp survivor, Viktor Frankl, related a story of guards who one day accused an unnamed man in their stalag of stealing bread. "Who stole the bread?" they demanded. "Come forward or we will choose one of you." Finally, they selected a boy, and before all present, who were forced to stand at attention, they hung him from a gallows. One Jewish man whispered to the rabbi standing next to him, "Where is your God now?" The rabbi replied, "He's up there, with the boy."

The Lord is with us, for He has ceded all control to us:

But He does not. Instead, He asks us, and, mysteriously, should we cooperate with Him, He helps us. He is with us.

This has been the story from the beginning. He is our Author, we say, but He does not intrude on His delicate masterpiece — a living art of interlaced creativity and freedom, for how else could he bring about the magic of our becoming like Him?

As we have noticed many times, the first verb in the Sacred Scriptures is to create. He has created our world, presented in a book. In a sense the Holy Scriptures are a book within a book ... actually a narrative spanning many books. Physically, we have the individual books — the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels, and so forth. And then there is the inner narrative, the story we call "salvation history." The "outer book" God has also authored in the sense that He has inspired individual writers. He was "with them" we might say, as He had energized them and led them, not as robots or men in a trance, but as men exercising godlike faculties, which we find in the lines of the Bible: creativity, love, and freedom. The result is an outcome far beyond human capacity. Who in the world could have "written" the Bible.

The poet T.S. Eliot called this principle "the intentional fallacy." That is, it is a fallacy to say that the sum meaning of a work of great literature is the author's intention. The nominal author could not have reached those highest heights and deepest depths as a mere human, not in a masterpiece. The case is analogous to birthing a baby (as Sir Philip Sidney points out) — through a holy struggle a miracle appears, far beyond the capacity of a human to design or make or write. The elderly and blind John Milton would awaken from slumbers reciting the greatest epic poem in English, Paradise Lost, letter-perfect, in its iambic pentameter lines, while his daughters feverishly wrote them down. Letter-perfect. The ancients knew this phenomenon in terms of the "vatic poet," in Anglo-Saxon translated as "madness" and in Old Irish translated as the "seer poet." That is, these writers had God with them; they were touched by Divinity.

In the nineteenth century, the poet-philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote that human art is of the same Divine stuff as our Maker's art, being

Yes, of course, God answers our prayers in His nearly silent mysterious way. And, yes, angelic influences surround us, protect us, and guide us. We see miracles at the Hermitage from time to time (more often than you might think). And there are those who have seen angels (among us). All of this is to inspire, assist, guide. But God does not "take over." He does not do what He has called us to do.

We might think of this principle as being analogous to a novelist. When I was a college freshman, the yet-to-be-famous John Irving told our class that he didn't really craft every aspect of a novel. He said that he brought characters into being and then recorded what they did, how they interacted with each other, and what would come of that. You see, it must be true. I have heard John Updyke say the same thing. To do otherwise, to wrest control from the characters and have it your way, Updyke said, is to lose the novel's spark of life. Either art lives, or it is dead.

The cost of this gift is a hazard all novelists must risk: a novel spinning out of control. The natural trajectory of the living characters simply led into situations the writer could not have foreseen. He might try to "write" his way out of it, letting out more line (so to speak), but in the end, perhaps after a thousand pages, it all becomes an impossible tangle, an intractable mess, and must be thrown onto the fire. Perhaps every serious writer has encountered this.

Is this not what happens in the opening section of the Sacred Scriptures? God has created His characters. He grants them free choice. But then things get off track. The first time it happens in a beautiful Garden. In this case, the setting is preserved, protected by angels with flaming swords, but the characters are pushed out, into a new setting. This new scene, East of Eden, produces greater challenges, however: idolatry, murder, entrenched disobedience and insolence.

As generations pass, we enter a new section, which we might name the "Antediluvian World," in which the characters make choices that threaten the entire artwork:

Whether the dilemma is the novelist's or God's, we ask, what is the writer to do when his novel has spun out of control? He cannot unwrite what has been written. He cannot wrest control from His characters. What has been written implies its own internal laws and rules. The characters developed but in unexpected, even subversive, ways. Control has been lost. So He tosses His beloved work into a deep, deep sea of seemingly endless rain.

The rain does end though, and God begins again with the generation of Noah's family. Things get off track almost right away with Noah's drunkenness and His son's sin of incest with his mother. God remains undaunted, though. These are but two men .... disappointing men, but only two. There is still a whole world ahead to build. In time, two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, must be blotted out.

Much later, though, God's masterpiece threatens to spin out of control again. The People of the Promise are exiled to Babylon. Their homeland has been razed to a field of rubble. Most important, their religion has been abased. In the words of the great scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,

We discussed just a few days ago: this unlocks the secret of the outrageous scene in the Temple of Jesus whipping men, in a rage, turning everything over, because .... they are selling animals for sacrifice.

Moreover, the people, having suffered military occupation from the time of Alexander the Great are now oppressed by a Roman Empire, which made bondage in Egypt look like child's play .... with no end in sight, for the Roman Empire continued to expand to the corners of the known world, growing ever larger and stronger and impossible to resist.

In any case, God's aim had never been merely to free his people from Egyptian servitude; He had sought to restore intimacy with Himself in a wilderness setting, a kind of second Eden. Surely, left on their own, the Jews of the first-century Levant and Dispersion are hopelessly distant from that. Hopelessly distant from real communion, soul-to-soul communion.

Thus does the Master Artist survey the scene: the largest military force the world has ever known holds the principal characters in thrall. Right leadership is so conspicuous in its absence that universal prayer goes up for a messiah. The people sink into spiritual deadness and sectarian strife: Pharisee vs. Sadducees vs. Essenes vs. Zealots .... He looks ahead and sees that, given the present conditions, all of this will lead to the destruction of the Land of Promise. What is He to do? Start again? Burn it all down? Discard Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle? The Egyptian and Arabic mathematicians? Blot out Abraham, Moses, Esther, and Ruth? For ten righteous people He would have spared Sodom. Shall He not now spare the whole world for all of history's righteous and their generations?

But there seems no way out. Every angle is blocked. So, our God, unable to blot out his creatures again, does something completely unexpected: He sets down his pen, and He enters history as a character — Jesus of Nazareth. And instead of destroying the world, He destroys Himself submitting to a cosmic sacrifice so great and a release of energy so potent, that it transforms the entire human lifeworld. In actual fact, that cosmic shock was released at His Incarnation, the Divine God intermixing Himself with human nature. But it would be His death and resurrection which would reveal this fact to the world in its aspect of transcendent glory and power.

Against all odds, this cosmic act begins a movement which would become the largest religion on earth. I say "against all odds" — a nameless beggar dies on a cross, leaving no teachings, with His Apostles and disciples all fleeing and hiding and disowning him. And this becomes the greatest movement in the history of the earth?!

A new way of life begins. An indwelling and communion which intermingles God's Nature with human freedom and creativity, which repeats and commemorates what had taken place when "the power of the Highest overshadow[ed]" the twelve-year-old Mary.

It all began with two faithful people: a man and woman in their obedience. Perhaps it is not too much say that they are a new Adam and a new Eve: Joachim and Anna. They are blessed with a child so pure that she will preserve the goodness we all receive at birth but for the rest of her life, the Ever-Virgin Mary. She will become the holy vessel, the gate, through which God will enter history. And this world-transforming, life-saving act begins with a word, whispered in her ear, which we call the Annunciation. Truly, these are among the most sacred words ever spoken ranking along side, "God said, Let there be light" or the Ten Words given on Mt. Sinai. For it opens on to a most sublime sentence: "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."

Let us meditate today on the faithfulness of an intrepid twelve-year-old girl and consider a most sobering fact. God continues to speak words of power. But do we listen? Do we set aside time for silence and prayer to hear Him? Do we watch for His messages encoded in the events surrounding our daily lives? Angels continue to inspire, to protect, and to guide, and, yes, to announce.

Look at the world around us! Consider the Great Author's need for faithful characters today. For only these men and women and, yes, twelve-year-old girls are able to avail in a world, which He has pledged to us, for "the earth He has given to the children of men."

On this great feast, let us pray to the Most Holy Theotokos asking her to intercede that we might have the grace to open our eyes that we might see and to open our ears that we might hear (Mt 11:15 et passim). For our God and all His world depend upon it.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.