Come to Call Sinners

We must say also that it means a growing closeness to God and therefore the recapturing of a primal innocence, with the special wisdom, strength, trust, and joy which that innocence carries with it.  And so it becomes quite clear what we must do if we wish to imitate Mary in her twofold richness of life.

First, we must ponder these things in our hearts: to try to understand more deeply what God does to share in and cure man's sorrows and sins, and what we, for our part, have done so differently; and so to find true creative sorrow and the love and the wisdom that spring from it.

But then, secondly, we must begin to say, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord": and this is something we can say no matter what history of accumulated evil may lie behind, provided only that now we begin to know and acknowledge our nothingness and helplessness, and destroy all the self-fashioned and self-imposed masks we have presented to ourselves and to the world, and stand naked under the creative and recreative hand of God.

Be it done unto me: done from the very beginning, for there is nothing here but the negation of light and life; nothing therefore that can give any direction, have any rights, form any pattern; no power, no entity, no I, but only the dark chaos of a nothingness out of which God, but only God, can create a real man.  Belt done unto me.  Mary shows us how to let love conquer fear then, in order that now, at long last, there may be an I, and all the old falsehoods and fictions of pride and vanity may be swept away.  And so the new I is indeed something new, newborn, a beginning of life.