Say yes

Say yes to the difficult.

Say yes to the challenging.

Say yes to the improbable.

Say yes to the absurd.

Say yes to love.

Say yes to peace.

Say yes to hope.

Say yes to mercy.

Say yes to God.

Buck the trend, upend the world as God’s radical partner, God’s unlikely choice, God’s mysterious candidate, unknown to the world, but made for great things.

Be the gateway to promises kept. Be the portal to astonishment. Be the opening to wonderment. Be the way to passage to love. Be the door through which mercy flows.

On this Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, look from one side to the other, by saying yes to sin and death, by saying yes to a clean heart and eternal life.

On this opening of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, say yes, even if it means an almost imperceptible shift of your inner being, barely a crack where light can pass through. Say yes to it all, however timidly and however small.

Say yes today.

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Yes

Happy and Blessed Feast of the Immaculate Conception!

What, you may ask, does this Grace Hopper quotation have to do with the Feast of the Annunciation?

I do not know why this struck me this morning, but it did. Today’s Google Doodle is for Grace Hopper, and it derailed my original post, which was almost complete and ready to go. That post was about interruption and grace… so I will take this interruption and redirect as a gift of grace as well.

The thing that hit me when I saw the Google Doodle was this – Mary, because of her nature, understood inner authority and the authority of God. She never paused to consider that she might want to talk to her parents about this or bring them in. Yes, that is a contemporary cultural overlay, but aren’t we called to understand catechesis in that context?

Anyway, Mary says yes, without apology. Mary did not ask permission from her parents, she may have been startled, but in the end she simply said yes.

In today’s readings today’s readings, we can take note that Adam and Eve did not understand inner authority nor hearing the voice of God as well as Mary did. My hope and prayer is that we can get ourselves to a different place in regard to the long-standing exegesis that makes all of this about sex alone. This day is about the deeper, wiser, understanding of how God interacts with us, and about who we are in responding to God. Saying yes isn’t the thing alone, it is knowing who to say yes to and when to do so.