But listen: in this week’s Gospel Mary sings a new song. The Magnificat (so named from the first word of the text in the Latin translation called the Vulgate) follows Mary’s astonishing encounter with the angel Gabriel, and her running to Elizabeth as an evangelist to share the good news.
           It is, of course, profoundly unsettling news: Mary doesn’t need a man to have a baby. She isn’t going to follow worldly social norms. In fact, she prophesies the overturning of the whole social order, proclaiming that the lowly will be lifted up, the rich turned away empty. She doesn’t ask permission of kings or family to step off the precipice into unprecedented experience. Her proclamation that God is at work in her body shows us, even before Jesus does, what it means to truly submit––not to the world but to God.
           Today, in America, truly submitting to God—surrendering yourself body and soul, womb and lungs, heart and mind and hands—remains a profoundly transgressive and unworldly act. Submission isn’t something we talk about a lot in this culture unless we’re talking about sexual kink. Or about coerced obedience to armies and laws, powers and principalities.
           Mostly, though, our systems, religious as well as secular, work on the principle of individual gratification: self-awareness, self-improvement, self-esteem. We believe in “being true to yourself,” “ finding your own way,” “ standing up for yourself,”  buying or willing your way into an identity. The defended, defined, individual self, along with its purportedly individual salvation, is at the center of most American theology—theology that echoes the perspective of the ubiquitous market that rules our secular lives. Why be a servant, when you could polish your own soul the way you shape your body through exercise and surgery? Why be weak and helpless when you could be powerful?  Why not choose your own beliefs, why not will your own sins away? Why surrender to God, when you could be a self-made man or woman?
           But the prophet Mary stands among us, breathing quietly and humming under her breath. Now, as then, she addresses the emptiness of the pretense that we’re in control of our lives.
           Mary proclaims that after the annunciation and everything that follows, all generations will call her blessed. But Mary’s obedience to God doesn’t yield the kind of blessing most of us ask for when we pray. She has said yes without knowing what God will do. She is submitting to humiliation, physical pain, dislocation, terror, loss. She loses her self to become Theotokos, literally, "the bearer of God."
           It is really hard to bear God. It is, in fact, unbearable. . . . without God. Any woman who’s borne a child, any man who’s fathered a child—any person who has truly loved another person—has been in Mary’s position, a God-bearer carrying love through this violent and dangerous world that we are unable to control.
           And, like Mary, we cannot choose how God will bless us. We might receive a blessing as terrifying as having a child tortured and killed,  as impossible as having the hungry filled. We are not passive in this process, any more than Mary was. We must work and pray and imagine and act as bravely and intelligently as she did. But, like Mary, we must say yes without knowing what will happen next.

- Sara Miles, guest columnist for Journey With Jesus for December 16, 2007. (Click on date for link.)