The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
In his work The Great Divorce, a great allegory about Heaven and Hell, C.S. Lewis demonstrates the drama of attaining eternal life through various happenstances of ghosts (representing human beings). There is one particularly captivating scene where one of these ghosts struggles with a troublesome red lizard attached to his shoulder. Seeing the weight of this lizard (representing sin), the angel offers to remove the lizard, and initially the ghost agrees. But upon experiencing the pain of removal, he starts to insist that this removal can wait—that the lizard is really not so bothersome after all. He pleads to put off this decision to a later time. The angel replies, “This moment contains all moments.”
When I reflect on the idea of a moment containing all moments, I think of the Annunciation, of Mary responding with her fiat, “Be it done unto me according to thy Word.” The entire fate of humanity rested on her response. God put our destiny into the free will of this young woman. And Mary was not just saying yes to the glory, to the greatness of being the Mother of God. She was saying yes to all of the pain and suffering that would accompany her on earth and even saying yes to the burdens of her Motherhood for the rest of time. She was agreeing to accompany you and me in our sorrows, to untie our knots. And she embraced the Lord, rejected all sin, without Gabriel needing to say the words, “This moment contains all moments.”
On this Solemnity of the Annunciation, I am reminded to respond to each and every moment with a fiat reminiscent of Mary, for after all, each moment is a chance to choose the will of God, the will of God that very much leads us to the glory of Heaven, but the will of God that, right now, can bring about great suffering, great sorrows. Instead of being disheartened by the difficulties in our own lives, let us be encouraged by Mary’s continuous yes to the will of the Father.