Fourth Sunday of Advent:

With all due respect, I don’t find many artistic portrayals of the Annunciation to Mary to be very engaging or very real except for one by the eighteenth-century African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner. In 1897 Tanner created an unconventional painting of the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God. Mary is shown as she most likely was, a young adolescent dressed in rumpled Middle Eastern peasant clothing, without a halo or other holy

attributes. She is not kneeling at a prie-dieu, rather she is shown just waking up, seated on her messy bed. She looks at Gabriel, who is portrayed only as a shaft of light, with a confused look on her face. Mary looks appropriately like someone who just woke up and was given some amazing news that would radically change her life.

I find that this painting reflects the mysterious reality of Mary’s experience of God’s call. As such, it helps me to understand how God works, guiding me in my own life. Mary is a young girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, who has not been intimate with a man, as she says. She is told that her child will be the son of God. Her experience of God’s call is unique and not very clear. And it all appears to happen quite unexpectedly, like most of our experiences of God do, in the ordinary moments of her life.

When you have a chance, Google Tanner’s painting of the Annunciation. Share prayerfully in Mary’s surprise at God’s mysterious power. It may help to ready you to recognize God’s saving power at work in your life, calling you, like Mary, to a particular way of faithfully following Him.