Mary's Wild Tranquility by Archbishop Fulton J Sheen

If a woman played such a role in the fall of mankind, should she not play a great role in its restoration? In the fullness of time an Angel of Light came down from the great Throne of Light to a Virgin kneeling in prayer, to ask her if she was willing to give God a human nature. Her answer was that she "knew not man" and, therefore, could not be the mother of the "Expected of the Nations". There never can be a birth without love. In this the maiden was right. The begetting of new life requires the fires of love. But besides the human passion which begets life, there is the "passionless passion and wild tranquility" of the Holy Spirit; and it was this that overshadowed the woman and begot in her Emmanuel or "God with us".

At the moment that Mary pronounced Fiat or "Be it done", something greater happened than the Fiat lux ("Let there be light") of creation; for the light that was now made was not the sun, but the Son of God in the flesh. By pronouncing Fiat Mary achieved the full role of womanhood, namely, to be the bearer of God's gifts to man.

There is a passive receptiveness in which woman says Fiat to the cosmos as she shares its rhythm, Fiat to a man's love as she receives it, and Fiat to God as she receives the Spirit. There is an undetermined element in human love. The parents do not know whether the child will be a boy or a girl, or the exact time of its birth, for conception is lost in some unknown night of love. Children are later accepted and loved by their parents, but they were never directly willed into being by them.

But in the Annunciation, the Child was not accepted in any unforeseen way; the Child was willed. There was a collaboration between a woman and the Spirit of Divine Love. The consent was voluntary under the Fiat; the physical cooperation was freely offered by the same word. Other mothers become conscious of motherhood through physical changes within them; Mary became conscious through a spiritual change wrought by the Holy Spirit. She probably received a spiritual ecstasy far greater than that given to man and woman in their unifying act of love. As the fall of man was a free act, so too the Redemption had to be free.

What is called the Annunciation was actually God asking the free consent of a creature to help Him to be incorporated into humanity. What God did, therefore, was to ask a woman, representing humanity, freely to give Him a human nature with which He would start a new humanity. As there was an old humanity in Adam, so there would be a new humanity in Christ, Who was God made man through the free agency of a human mother. When the Angel appeared to Mary, God was announcing this love for the new humanity. It was the beginning of a new Earth, and Mary became a flesh-girt Paradise to be gardened by the Adam new. As in the first garden Eve brought destruction, so in the garden of her womb, Mary would now bring Redemption.