For the remaining Fridays of May, this month that is given over to Our Lady, we will reflect with Mary through three moments in Scripture where her life meets uncertainty, truth, and grief.
At the Annunciation, Mary hears words she could not have prepared herself to receive, and her first response is a question: “How can this be?”
In the Magnificat, she speaks from inside the knowledge of her own people, naming hunger, power, and the reversal God brings into the world.
At Calvary, she stands near the cross and remains with her son through the most unbearable hour of his life.
These three moments draw us close to Mary as a woman whose faith is not emptied of fear, blood, doubt, anger, and astonishment. We look at a faith that lived in her being, in her endurance, and in the choices she made without being able to see the whole road ahead. They also open a way to reflect on vocation, mission, and the many lives given to God in uncertainty, courage, and love.
How Can this Be?
The moment in the Annunciation before Mary says yes feels almost too human to bear.
Mary hears the greeting, and something in her body tightens as the room changes around her. Whatever she had been doing before the angel came, whatever small task had her hands occupied, is interrupted by words she could never have prepared herself to receive.
The Gospel tells us she was troubled. Troubled is not disbelief. We have all felt troubled at times, an awareness that life has tilted, that something has changed and will not return to the way it was a few moments earlier.
“How can this be?” Mary asks.
She does not rush to agreement or smooth over the impossibility of what she has heard. She does not pretend the message makes sense simply because it has come from God. Her question rises from the reality of her life, her body, her age, her circumstances, and everything she knows to be true. She asks the question from within her reality.
Mary allows bewilderment to have a voice. She seems to know, even before the life ahead of her is revealed, that consent without truth is too thin to hold what will be asked of her.
For many of our Sisters, the first movement towards Religious life, that first nudge, carried something of this same trembling. A call to Religious life does not always come with clarity. Sometimes it begins as a thought that will not leave, a restlessness in prayer, a pull towards something that makes no practical sense, or a sense of being addressed followed almost immediately by the instinctive human recoil from what such an address might require.
There may have been years of questioning, days when the call was pushed away, and moments of denial, bargaining, fear, or embarrassment. A young woman may have looked at the life in front of her, her family, her home, the expectations placed upon her, and the ordinary future others imagined, and felt the same impossible question rise inside her.
How can this be asked of me?
How can I leave what I know?
How can I trust a road I cannot see?
These questions belong inside vocation. They are part of the flesh and breath of a life being slowly given. They are part of discernment and faith.
They belong, too, inside many of the choices that alter the course of a life: marriage, parenthood, a path of work, the care of someone who needs us, the decision to stay, the decision to leave, the commitment made before its full cost can be known.
The yes that eventually comes is rarely simple. The wedding day, the birth announcement, the new job, the move, the decision spoken aloud: beneath each of these, certainty may have vacillated, fear held in the throat, hands trembling, held back tears and second thoughts, the old life still warm in our hands.
Mary’s question gives dignity to that threshold.
She stands in the space between the message and the response, and she lets the question be heard. The angel does not shame her for it. God does not withdraw the call because she needs to understand as far as understanding is possible. Something sacred happens there, in the small distance between fear and response.
The Annunciation is often remembered through Mary’s yes, and rightly so. Yet the yes deepens because the question came first. It came from a young woman whose whole future had just been disturbed.
“Let it be with me according to your word.”
Those words do not make the path easy. They do not tell her how Joseph will respond, how the journey to Bethlehem will feel, how exile will hollow out the early years of motherhood, how public misunderstanding will gather around her son, or how she will one day stand beneath the cross and remain there when everything inside her must have wanted to tear the world apart.
Her yes is given without the comfort of knowing the full cost. This is faith.
So too with every life handed over to God in Religious profession. The words are spoken once, then lived again and again in kitchens, classrooms, clinics, parish rooms, community houses, hospital corridors, mission stations, airports, gravesides, and all the hidden places where faith becomes daily practice. The first yes is only the beginning. It has to be returned to when the work is hard, when prayer feels dry, when community requires patience and when the world’s suffering feels too large.
The same is true of the promises that draw any life beyond itself. A vow, a child, a vocation to work, a responsibility taken on in love: each may begin with words spoken aloud or a decision made in silence. Then life tests it in the body, in grief, in exhaustion, in repetition, in the thousand ordinary returns to what was once chosen without knowing its full cost.
Vocation lives in bodies that age, hands that serve, feet that cross thresholds, and hearts opened by the people and places we learn to love.
Mary’s question does not weaken her yes. It gives it humanity.
The Annunciation gives us a woman standing in the shock of divine interruption, asking what any one of us might ask when something enters our life that we know will disrupt everything.
There are times when “How can this be?” is the only honest prayer available. It may come before a decision, after a diagnosis, at the edge of grief, in the face of change, or in the recognition that God is drawing us towards a life we had not imagined.
Mary does not teach us to silence the question. She teaches us to bring it into the room where God is already present.