The Annunciation -- March 25th




Annunciation -- Dante Gabriel Rossetti (C19th British)           Michael Parchment (C21st Jamaican)





Isaiah 7:10-14
Psalm 45 or Psalm 40:5-11 or Canticle 3 or 15Hebrews 10:4-10
Luke 1:26-38



The Feast of the Annunciation -- March 25th -- is celebrated exactly nine months before the Nativity of Our Lord. It is, we might say, the first feast of Christmas. This brief encounter between girl and angel is pivotal to the Christian religion. It is the point at which God chooses to make His astonishing initiative to humanity depend, yet more astonishingly, upon a human response. Moreover, the mystery is intensified by the fact that the human being in question is a very young woman living in circumstances of exceptional political obscurity and social simplicity. That is why Mary cannot be just like anyone else in the faith of Christians. 

The Annunciation is notable for the extent to which it has stimulated artistic creativity. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings of this biblical episode in indefinitely many styles. Mary's hymn of response -- The Magnificat  -- has been set to music by composers in every period. Poets, too, have found themselves driven to verse in the attempt to capture its intriguing 'feel'.

One of those was the Orkney poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959). His poem is entitled simply "The Angel and the Girl"

The angel and the girl are met
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make.
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their grace would never break.