After Annunciation
by Madeleine L’Engle
“This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child.”
Jesus, Emmanuel, God-With-Us, was not a rational solution to the world’s problems in the 1st century Roman empire. Today, in our own time of struggles for power and crushing inequity, it is just as irrational. Everything about God’s love for us and this world defies all rationality. We cannot comprehend such a love. We fail at every attempt to wrap our minds around it, and in our clumsy efforts to do so, we often find ourselves trying to make it smaller than it really is. We want to define it, to categorize it, to place boundaries on it so that it won’t expand beyond the grasp of our understanding or the limits of our comfort concerning who we think should receive it.
But Mary recognized God’s love for exactly what it was. Why else would she risk such scandal as a teenage woman, in a time when it would likely have cost her own life? It seems to be the irrationality and joy of deep faith rather than the rationality of a “what might this cost me” mindset. Mary seems to understand L’Engle’s poem. She understands about love blooming “bright and wild.” And so she makes room for God’s wild and uncontainable love, no matter the risk.
How will you risk being the bearer of God’s wild, irrational love this week?