Advent 4: Already Worthy: What did Mary Really Know?

How would we interact in the world if we knew we were already worthy?

The Annunciation-Gabriel and Mary by JESUS MAFA

I hated being pregnant. Yes, I know, some of you may have just recoiled in horror. Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids and wanted to have them, but this whole pregnancy thing is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s tiring and uncomfortable. It makes you sick for months on end, you get a little reprieve in the middle and then you get huge and swollen and achy round the clock. But the thing I hated most was the fact that once I was pregnant, I largely disappeared to society. Questions were no longer about me, just the baby. Total strangers thought they had the rights to my time and occasionally my body as my stomach swelled to that unmistakable roundness and I intercepted many hands reaching for my stomach--a motion that would have been thought of as transgressive at other times was somehow now not forbidden to society. I was no longer me: I was just a vessel for the child that was to come. And I have to wonder how much of that comes from our…