Nine Months until Christmas

And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High. Luke 1. 26 - 38

The calendar created to mark the Christian year seems so secular...the birth of Christ was designated as happening during the festival of the winter solstice to take advantage of the celebrations already happening at that time. Therefore the conception of the Holy One had to happen nine months earlier, and that is what we celebrate today. So be it, but what really matters is the holy mystery, the glorious impossible, as Madeline L'Engle called it, of the entire story.

Every year as I read this passage from Luke, I wonder, wonder, wonder...what was it like for Mary...a young teenage girl, already engaged, alone in the night, greeted by an angel who immediately said "Do not be afraid!"

My favorite artistic depiction of this scene is The Annunciation an 1898 painting by the African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. There is an aura about this painting that expresses the holy mystery of the event. There is awe in the face of the young woman that expresses her disbelief, "How can this be?" And the powerful light makes figurative the presence of the Angel Gabriel rather than a literal depiction of a human figure. This painting aligns beautifully with Madeline L'Engle's gloriously impossible description of the Annunciation. As she says, "Possible things are easy to believe. The Glorious Impossibles are what bring joy to our hearts, hope to our lives, songs to our lips."

This painting does just that for me. And so the countdown begins for "nothing is impossible with God."