Hurrah! It's Lady Day!

[tree_and_leaf]

And a very significant day in the calendar, even if you're not interested in the Annunciation, because it is (a) the old calendar New Year - and how much better as a beginning to the year than the gloom and exhaustion of January and (b) it's also the date on which the One Ring was destroyed and the Gondorian New Year (Tolkien, of course, did this deliberately, as a tiny gesture of piety and to offer a sort of typological parallel between the redemptive acts in LotR and the greater, truer story of redemption in the history of our salvation).

The 'point' of the Annunciation, anyway, is twofold: it celebrates the fact that God is with us as one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and it celebrates Mary's readiness to say 'yes' to God's costly and outrageous demands, which is the pattern and prototype for all openness to the love of God and of others, an attitude which is faithful and loving but not naive and unaware. It is an openness which sees both the world as it is, and how God wants to use us to transform it, as Mary sang in the Magnificat.

I just found a rather striking passage in Rowan Williams' book on the desert fathers, Silence and Honey Cakes:

"Only the body saves the soul. It sounds rather shocking put like that, but the point is that the soul (whatever that is) left to itself, the inner life or whatever you want to call it, is not capable of transforming itself. It needs the gifts that only the external life can deliver: the actual events of God's action in history, heard by physical ears, the actual material fact of the meeting of believers where bread and wine are shared, the actual wonderful, disagreeable, impossible unpredictable human beings that we encounter in and out of church. Only in this setting do we become holy - in a way entirely unique to each one of us."

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I always forget about the Gondorian. Some Tolkienist I am...

I like the Williams passage.

[tree_and_leaf]

++Rowan is a very good writer, even if sometimes rather dense.

You can probably be excused not having the whole book off by heart, I think...

[esoterica1693.livejournal.com]

Mind if I link to this?

[tree_and_leaf]

Of course not - I've fixed the typos, and everything! *g*

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Heavens, I'd forgot all about it being today. It's a pity that the Annunciation isn't a bigger day in the calendar, although I suppose even if it were it would've mostly been today a day for me to desperately try to squeeze in Mass between getting the train in and going to class and winning home again. (I live forty minutes from the best train station and an hour on the train from my university, so.)

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who'd sort of like to go back to having New Year's Day on the 25th.

And thanks for the Williams quote, which is lovely.

[tree_and_leaf]

I have no chance of forgetting it, not just because I'm That Sort of Anglican, but because the 25th is also the birthday of a close relative.

Your commute sounds - unpleasant. I'm very spoiled where I live, I can go everywhere I need by foot, never mind a bicycle, even.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

For that matter, it's a quarter day; have you paid your rent yet? ;-)

[tree_and_leaf]

Of course, what do you take me for?