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Sunday
John Donne, who believes that God loves for us to use our imaginations—especially when we engage in playful paradoxes and witty wordplay—brings the full power of his intelligence to celebrate St. Gabriel’s visit to Mary, supposedly on or around March 25. (After all, March 25 is nine months before December 25.) In Donne’s poem “Annunciation,” the paradoxes include:
–Jesus “cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear”;
–Jesus “cannot die, yet cannot choose but die”;
–Jesus is at once son and brother to Mary;
–Mary is her “Maker’s maker” and her “Father’s mother”;
–in the darkness of her womb she has light:
–cloistered in the smallness of that womb is immensity
Donne also has fun with the double meaning of the word “conceived”: God conceived that this moment would happen (“In the beginning was the Word”), which led Mary to conceive the baby Jesus. And the poet goes crazy with the word “all” in the first two lines.
Annunciation
By John DonneSalvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He’ll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;
Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.
I’m struck by how Donne’s sonnet (iambic pentameter with an abba-cddc-efef-gg rhyme scheme) can’t easily accommodate words like “salvation” and “immensity”– just as Mary’s mortal womb can’t contain Jesus’s immortality.” Donne at once locks his subject into a tight verse form and has his subject explode the container.
The lesson? God is always bigger than our attempts to reduce Him/Her/It to the measure of our understanding. When people attempt to employ God to advance their own narrow agendas, God won’t play along. After all, God is “that All, which always is all everywhere.”
Oh yes, and God is also accessible “to all.”
