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As a teacher of the Christian life, you can't get a much better model than Mary, either. She epitomizes what it means to live by faith through the power of grace. The church has long been mightily impressed that God permitted his plan of salvation to depend on the cooperation of a little Jewish girl in a little Jewish town. Mary's fiat ("Let it be done" in Latin) is an act of staggering obedience. Completely impossible things were happening to her: a visit from an angel, a message that she was going to bear the Messiah of Israel, and the conception of that son without a husband. The repercussions would be terrible: Joseph would want to leave her, the birth would occur in a stable, Herod would try to kill the baby, a flight to Egypt would be necessary, and once the boy had been saved from all that, he would still end up murdered on a cross like a common criminal. It sounds like a rotten deal all around, especially for a mom. Yet she took it, persevered till the end, and trusted God to make it all come out right#151;and, well, it did. That is the kind of faith that moves mountains.

Having finally come to these three very important conclusions about Mary and me, it seemed only right that I should do something to make amends, so to speak. I decided that as part of my Advent devotion I would read every night a section from a book called On the Mother of God, a collection of poems on Mary by Jacob of Serug. Jacob was a liturgical poet and theologian from the easternmost reaches of the Christian world in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He wrote in Syriac, which is a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Syriac survives to this day, used in the Oriental Orthodox churches in the Middle East. Jacob of Serug wasn't trying to establish dogmatic guidelines for beliefs about Mary, but experimenting with different and interesting connections about Mary's role in salvation history that would lead to faith. Some of his poems are quite strange (for instance, that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit entering Mary's ear!), but others are quite compelling. I was especially charmed by his comparison of Eve and Mary. Jacob writes about Mary's meeting with Gabriel:

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49