What we know of Mary’s life is fragmentary, and yet her story holds the power to illumine and grace our lives.

When we first meet Mary in the Gospels, she is being offered an invitation. Here is how the Irish poet John O’Donohue imagines the scene:
Cast from afar before the stones were born
And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,
The words have waited for the hunger in her
To become the silence where they could form.

The day’s last light frames her by the window,
A young woman with distance in her gaze,
She could never imagine the surprise
That is hovering over her life now.

The sentence awakens like a raven,
Fluttering and dark, opening her heart
To nest the voice that first whispered the earth
From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;
Her untouched life becoming wild inside.
Where does our story touch Mary’s? Where are the meeting points? What are the words waiting for the hunger in us “to become the silence where they could form”. This might be a question to ask in our daily contemplative time… when our hearts open, will they also become a nest for a new birthing of the Holy?

From Jean Houston, I have learned that now there is no time for us to modestly refuse any call that smacks of greatness. The urgent needs of our time require a “yes” to the conception, followed by the birthing, of newness.
Here are Jean’s words, reflecting upon the call of Mary, the call of each of us:
Just think of the promise, the potential, the divinity in you,
which you have probably disowned over and over again
because it wasn’t logical, because it didn’t jibe,
because it was terribly inconvenient (it always is),
because it didn’t fit conventional reality,
because… because… because….

What could be more embarrassing than finding yourself pregnant with the Holy Spirit?
It’s a very eccentric, inconvenient thing to have happen.
(Jean Houston in Godseed p. 38)

Eccentric. Inconvenient. Perhaps. But nonetheless it is our call. Mary’s story gives us the courage to say “yes” without knowing where that “yes” may lead. It is enough to know that certainly our own life will become, like Mary’s, “wild inside”.

Like Mary, we are called to birth newness for our time. The beautiful image from Christine Lore Weber, to be “a cup to catch the sacred rain” is like Mary’s call. We respond, as Mary did, with a commitment to be actively engaged in this “catching”. Each day we make a time, choose a space, and open ourselves to be recipients of the sacred rain. Rain which will be drawn into the earth of our being where it might bring about miracles of new growth.
We hold ourselves in readiness for the more that will be asked when the time is right. That “more” is compellingly described in the teachings of Jean Houston:
“We are godseeds planted in a space/time vehicle….always yearning, and questing, and drawn by the lure of becoming until we reach the destiny that has been guiding us all along.”

This requires us “to present the availability of an unobstructed universe both within and without”.

And Jean promises: “When you do this, you become a beacon, an evocateur of new patterns, new relationships, new discoveries, bringing new mind and new matter to an old world and serving as a catalyst of change, a pathfinder of deeper realities.” (Jean Houston in “The Holographic Butterfly Retreat” December 2012)