Vigils Reading – Memorial of BVM

MARY AND THE MYSTERY OF

CHRISTIAN FREEDOM

From “The Handmaid of the Lord” by Adrienne von Speyr1

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From the moment Mary said Yes and gave her consent, her whole life has

the conscious and explicit form of assent, upon which everything depends. This

perfect assent is the giving of human freedom to God, final and so complete that

by virtue of the humble and confident gift of our freedom and our life, God owns

everything from then on and can therefore “whether gradually or all at once”

use, transform or reform all that we have deposited with him. The life of faith,

love and hope, the Christian life, is turned towards this form, so that everything

we have may be deposited without hesitation in the hands of Providence…

Mary’s assent was assent of that kind from the beginning.

Mary’s freedom, like all forms of freedom, is indivisible, as may be seen

from her word of assent. She bound herself to God by a single, completely free

act leading into perfect freedom. With that act Mary enters the Christian life for

the first time, and in its most perfect form. And since she gave her assent to all

that was to come, she gave her assent to Christianity and all it concealed, all that

was new, unexpected and beyond expectation. In doing so she gave Christian

assent its form, its perfect and essential form: complete self-surrender.

In a certain sense one might say that Mary’s assent is a vow of obedience,

of chastity and of poverty. Its single renunciation contains a threefold

renunciation. For by her one word of assent the Mother of God divested herself

of everything for God’s sake and for humanity’s sake. Her assent and her

obedience coincide; choosing assent she chose obedience as her form of life.

And by the same token renounced all claim to her body. Like everything else she

gave it to God, and could no longer dispose of it herself or give it to man. She15

could not have served God completely with her body had she not placed

everything unreservedly at her service. Her task demanded everything she

possessed, as the completeness of her assent required it.

As little as it is possible to do penance inwardly while living a life of ease,

so it is impossible to give up everything inwardly without giving up the outward

as well. There is a unity in the offer on God’s side and a unity in the answer on

the human side, and that unity constitutes assent.

Assent is essentially grace: a grace that, like all grace, comes from God,

working itself out in human nature and its mission, with the possibility of

returning to God as our answer, enveloped in the all-embracing mission of the

Son who received the power to come on earth as a human being, through the

assent of a human being. All Christian assent participates in the same essence,

and Mary’s assent is the pattern and definition, indeed the font and origin of

every subsequent Christian assent, because the mystical marriage, the eternal

bond between our human assent and God’s assent was made manifest, for the

first time, through her. The fruit of that union is the Savior of the world. Though

the Mother of God did not say Yes without the Son’s grace, the Son did not

become man without his Mother’s assent.