What follows aspires to echo, with my personal elaboration, some of the suggestive themes in "The Spirituality of Baron von Hugel" by Joseph Whelan S.J.
Fiat...Let it be...Amen...Yes!
Mary's response to the angel was the defining, climatic event in the history of creation.
Since Eve's turn away from God, all of creation, heaven and earth both, awaited this encounter.
With this consent, the quintessential creature, the very high point of creation, Mary, welcomes into her womb the very Creator, The Word, the Light of the Word.
With that singular reception, the anxious, jealous, suspicious, ungrateful grasping agency of Eve (and her passive, complicit, finger-pointing husband) was overcome with a simple Yes, Fiat.
And so the creature was restored, in that very moment, to its original constitution as recipient, admirer, guardian, partner and companion of the Creator, giver of thanks and adoration.
The creaturely identity of the human person is always first to receive: to be receptively passive; to be gift; to rejoice in Being; to give thanks; to worship; to delight the One who delights to give.
The human person...body, emotions, heart, spirit, intellect, will...is the recipient of the Real...in all Beauty, Truth and Goodness...and so the guardian, the gardener, the responsible, the appreciator, the respecter, the craftsman and artisan, the knower, and the lover.
Mary alone is the perfection of creatureliness, unwarped by sin as distrust, envy, anxiety, irreverence, ingratitude and violent, disobedient grasping.
To be creaturely is to be...ever receptive; grateful; reciprocally generous; appreciative; reverent; joyous.
To be creaturely is to be small, finite, concrete, modest, firmly planted in "the little here and now." (Hugel)
To be creaturely is to be the beggar, "protagonist of history"...to be contingent, precarious, needy, dependent, hopeful, trusting.
To be creaturely is to respond...firmly, quickly, compassionately, lovingly, joyfully...to the beggar who presents...the lonely, sad, suffering, poor, anxious...and to contemplate and respond to the Great Beggar, who from the Cross thirsts for our love.
To be creaturely, as human, as person, is to live always in time and eternity, in place and in infinity, in humility and in grandeur, in the secular and the sacred. To be "angimal" (West) as enfleshed spirit, in a happy marriage of the heavenly and the earthly.
To be creaturely, as sovereign person, in the image of God, is to receive but always actively...to engage, combat, push against and forward, to create, to penetrate with intellect...lovingly, reverently, gratefully...to echo in graciousness and generosity.
To be creaturely, as knowing/loving person is to treasure, admire, engage all that is secular in its marvelous particularity: the flower, the competition, the garden, the beloved, the child, the task presented however big or small, the moment of rest, the gratuitous smile, the delicious morsel, the good nights sleep, the fierce argument, the book, the worthy adversary, the unworthy enemy, the loyalty and the betrayal, the combat whether physical, cultural or spiritual.
To be creaturely, as an agential person, to to work, to transform, to create, to order, to restore, to beautify the world...this physical, social, natural, institutional, historical world...in ways small and large...and in that effort, especially against resistance, inner and outer, to have ones character formed, consensually but not always deliberately...in patience, humility, steadfastness, loyalty, hope, faith and love.
To be creaturely, as a person in history, a specific (little) here and now, is to embrace with open arms all the givens, the afflictions, injustices, insults, inequalities...not in passive victimhood, but as the raw materials with which to grapple in the transformation of the earth and the journey to personal holiness.
To be creaturely, as a person, is to suffer desires...endless, successive, obsessive, consuming, never fully satisfied desires...because of the underlying desire for the Infinite, for unbounded-extravagant Beauty and Goodness and Truth.
To be creaturely, as a person, is to enter into that Desire...receptive and grateful...rooted in memory, history, tradition...joyful in always-responsive agency...hopeful, hopeful, hopeful!
To be creature, as human person, is to surrender, as finite-mortal-weak-needy, to this boundless desire for God...in Trust...renouncing the disordered desire to be God...envious, suspicious, angry, rivalrous, despairing, violent.
To be creature as human is to be male-relating-to-female or female-relating-to-male...a hard, absolute binary...in longing, torment, grief, gratitude, mutuality, asymmetry, reverence, tenderness, generosity, adoration, fecundity, nature interdependency, confidence, humility, trust, receptivity...renouncing control, lust, resentment, jealousy, covetousness, manipulation, infantile dependency, sterility, fear.
To be creaturely, as person, is to cherish, protect, admire, engage, delight in every single creature...in its finitude, fragility, mortality, historicity...as fleeting...and to grieve its passing in Joy...as it presages a Joy that will be unending. And the Good, the True, the Beautiful of that passing moment is not lost but somehow dwells eternally within the heart and intellect of the Creator.
To be creaturely, as a person, is to rest in the Eucharist, the Act and the durational, quiet presence...and to act always out of that rest.
To be creaturely, as a person, emulating that perfection of Creation, is to say Yes, Fia...to image the Triune God in the modest specifics of the "little here and now"... to accept...incompletely, imperfectly, slowly, patiently, zealously, ambitiously, durationally...the invitation to companionship with the Person and Event...of Love, Absolute Love...present right here...and eternally, the Alpha and the Omega.
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