The Annunciation (luke 1: 26-38)

Christmas...Cristesmessa -Festival of Christ-old english derivative- God becoming Man. God chose to be born of a Woman. The same God who chose a simple poor person to bear Him amid the squalor and shame of pre-marital birth. may the same canticle reach the lives of people everywhere who struggle with abandonment, confusion and possible loss on their journey this time of the year.


Cast from afar before the stones were born
And rain had rinsed the darkess 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 the 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.

by john o' donohue