A Theology of Woman

Jean-Marie Guénois:

Holy Father, one question… You have said that without women, the Church grows barren.  What concrete measures will you take?  For example, the diaconate for women or a woman as a head of dicastery?

Pope Francis:

A Church without women is like the college of the Apostles without Mary.  The role of women in the Church is not simply that of maternity, being mothers, but much greater: it is precisely to be the icon of the Virgin, of Our Lady; what helps make the Church grow!  But think about it, Our Lady is more important than the Apostles!  She is more important! 

The Church is feminine.  She is Church, she is bride, she is mother.  But women, in the Church, must not only… I don’t know how to say this in Italian… the role of women in the Church must not be limited to being mothers, workers, a limited role…  No!  It is something else!  But the Popes..  Paul VI wrote beautifully of women, but I believe that we have much more to do in making explicit this role and charism of women. 

We can’t imagine a Church without women, but women active in the Church, with the distinctive role that they play.  I think of an example which has nothing to do with the Church, but is an historical example: in Latin America, Paraguay.  For me, the women of Paraguay are the most glorious women in Latin America.  Are you paraguayo?  After the war, there were eight women for every man, and these women made a rather difficult decision: the decision to bear children in order to save their country, their culture, their faith, and their language. 

In the Church, this is how we should think of women: taking risky decisions, yet as women.  This needs to be better explained.  I believe that we have not yet come up with a profound theology of womanhood, in the Church.  All we say is: they can do this, they can do that, now they are altar servers, now they do the readings, they are in charge of Caritas (Catholic charities).  But there is more!  We need to develop a profound theology of womanhood.  That is what I think.

Press Conference on Return Flight from WYD Rio, July 28, 2013

Reflection – Well, this is why so many of us love Pope Francis. He has such a simple direct style of speech, such a blunt way of saying just exactly what he thinks about a subject – it’s great, really.

I wonder if he is familiar with one of Pope Benedict’s early books, Daughter Zion, though? It is a slim volume, really a retreat young Fr. Ratzinger gave on Our Lady in the wake of Vatican II, but it contains within it at least the germ of precisely the profound theology of woman Pope Francis is calling for here.

Benedict traces the line of women in the Scriptures, the barren women who conceive, the women who are raised up to deliver Israel from its enemies, Israel itself personified as a bride, and the personified figure of created wisdom, all culminating in the Virgin Mary. 

From this emerges a theology of woman as an icon of creation, of humanity, and of the Church—radically receptive, radically looking to God for life, radically dependent yet in this very dependence called forth to be co-creator and co-redeemer with God, ultimately in the very acceptance of dependence and receptivity called to transcend the boundaries of created human existence to be filled with the divine life and glory. Our Lady is assumed into heaven and is queen of heaven and earth; this is the direct result of her total obedience and surrender to God in all things.

In this, the strictly masculine model of activity—initiative, dominance, power—is radically relativized. What is done to us and done through us, our cooperation and submission to the deeper movements of the Spirit in our created and redeemed flesh, is much more important, vital, and ultimately determinative of our life than our own commanding will to power.

I don’t know if that’s what Pope Francis has in mind; as is often the case, he doesn’t spell out everything he has in mind, but leaves lots of room for interpretation and contribution of others. I think that’s deliberate on his part. He doesn’t want to be the only voice in the room. He wants to start a conversation. But this whole question of ‘theology of woman’ is a question of vision, of moving things away from rather superficial questions of power and role and office, of who gets to do what and when and how.

We need something more, and that’s what he’s inviting us to talk about. So… let’s talk about it! What do you think of this?

Home Invasion

The preconception that what is most improbable in the world is also impossible for God conceals the tacit presupposition that it is impossible both for God to reach into earthly history and for earthly history to reach him. His field of influence will be limited to the realm of the spirit. And with this we have landed back in pagan philosophy such as Aristotle elaborated with a singular logic; prayer and every relation to God is, in his view, ‘cultivation of the self.’ If in the final analysis this is reality, nothing but the ‘cultivation of the self’ can remain.

Daughter Zion, 60

Reflection – This passage from this wonderful little book is from a section discussing the virgin birth of Christ from Mary, and the modern scepticism that such a thing could be possible, the ridicule heaped on the idea or the flat refusal to admit the prospect of such a thing happening that is fairly normal today.

It is both Advent season and the eve of the Immaculate Conception, when we celebrate Mary’s own beginnings in her mother’s womb free from the stain of original sin. It is this whole business that Ratzinger so ably brings out here in a few short phrases: is God acting? Can God act? Does He want to intervene in our human affairs, or does He just let them go, let us go our own natural way?

It is in Jesus and his miraculous conception and birth, and the singular grace given Mary to prepare her for this, that we are asked to believe in a God who does reach down into human history, does intervene, does act in time and space on our behalf.

And this is not just some interesting historical curio—oh, didja hear about that one time a virgin got pregnant? Amazing! It is not just some vague hope on our part that God might some day maybe perhaps you know intervene in our lives, if we really happen to need this at some point.

God is radically intervening in your life and my life today. Maybe not in a ‘miracle’, such as we finite human beings can recognize. But the whole point, the whole order of things, the whole structure of reality—and it is really is only Jesus and his Mother who reveal this to us—is that humanity is constantly responding to the intervention of God, the action of God, the reaching down, breaking in, ‘interference’ of God into our affairs.

A home invasion—from our fallen human condition, that’s what it seems like. God is constantly kicking in the door, surging in on us with power and might, shock and awe. An incursion, an assault, like that strange wrestling match Jacob had with the ‘man’ who was an ‘angel’ who was ‘God’ (Gen 32).

I was a little snarky about Santa Claus yesterday in my post (‘bloated wreck’ was the offending phrase, I believe). But actually there is something about the tubby elf that corresponds to this—the annual burglar coming down the chimney of every home, not to steal and despoil, but to leave gifts and joy. God is the house breaker, the heart breaker, the life breaker—but he comes not to rob and ruin, but to bless and bestow.

He comes to make our homes, our hearts, our lives bigger than they were. We see this so clearly in Mary, the virginal young girl of Nazareth. She becomes Mother of God, Queen of heaven and earth, hailed by a thousand titles and adorned with every honor and blessing the human race can give her and the divine favour as well.

But… God wants to do something similar with you and me, too. Mary is unique and most highly favored, but God is busting in on us today, too. And He busts in on us through the call to love, to pray, to listen, to surrender, to abandon our lives to Him. To abandon all other concerns but to please Him, follow Him, serve Him, love Him, and to earnestly seek the way to do this in the love and service of our brothers and sisters.

God comes to us in all this, and makes it all so much bigger than we could conceive, as Jesus in Mary’s womb was so much greater than what she could conceive. And this is the hope, and the desire, we are to cultivate in Advent, and Mary stands ready to help us stir up this desire, deepen this hope, and open our hearts, homes, and lives to the saving power of God.

Happy the Barren

In Jesus God initiated a new beginning in the midst of a barren and hopeless humanity. This beginning is not the result of mankind’s own history, but a gift from above… in this way, Mary, the barren, blessed one, becomes a sign of grace, the sign of what is truly fruitful and salvific: the ready openness which submits to God’s will.

Daughter Zion, 48

Reflection  - Well, a happy Advent season to you all! It is Advent that is, in our liturgies and hopefully in our homes and hearts, not the secularized version of the Christmas season, and not the annual war-on-Christmas-and-subsequent-protests-by-Christians season either.

No, it is Advent, and we have to strive rather to keep our focus on this. This quote from Ratzinger is a good little Advent beginning for us: Humanity without God is barren and hopeless. How’s that for an Advent thought for the day?

But humanity is not without God. This is the Good News. Jesus has come, and Jesus is coming again. Very good news!

And Jesus is coming today, to you and to me, to everyone. Very, very good news! Advent calls us to stand in the reality of our hopeless barren condition, but in a stance of utter expectancy and hope. And Mary is the great teacher of this. When Ratzinger calls Mary ‘barren’ it is because he has just been analyzing the whole line of barren women in the Bible, and presenting Mary as the fulfillment of this biblical theme. Technically of course, she is not so much barren as virginal, but the idea is the same.

And the idea is that it is God who makes our life fruitful, God who brings life and opens up a future for us, God who fills what is empty in each of us and opens what is closed in each of us.

Advent calls us to this emptiness, to a certain silence of mind and heart, to a certain entry into the reality of our poverty, our utter need for God. This is why, as tired as we get of having to do this every year, we do need to reclaim Advent from the shrieking hype and clamorous noise of the ‘Christmas’ season which begins some time in November and ends December 25.

What is lost is not just a pretty liturgical season with some nice songs and a wreath or a Jesse tree. We lose the whole reality of God entering our darkness with his light, entering our despair with his promise, entering our dead-end humanity with his new beginning.

Perhaps Mary is enough to help us get there. She is the one who shows us what a human being looks like who is open enough to God to receive Him, needy enough of God to welcome Him fully when He comes, empty enough of self to be filled with the life of the world.

We have an icon of Mary in our chapel called ‘She who is wider than the heavens’. Mary is so empty, so needy, so hungry, so poor, that she opens up to receive the one who all the heavens and all the earth cannot contain. And because the mystery of Mary is so beautiful, so radiant, so gracious and joyful, she helps us have the courage to touch our own poverty and emptiness, our own profound need and our hopeless condition, knowing that the God who filled Mary wants to fill us, and that Jesus has come, is coming today and will come at the end of time to fill the heavens and earth with his radiant glory.

 

Happy Advent to you – happy silence, happy poverty, happy emptiness, happy darkness, happy hunger. Happy the barren one, filled by God. Happy those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, for on them a light has dawned. Happy are those who hunger, for they shall be filled.

The Meaning of the Assumption

Happy Feast Day! This is truly one of our biggest celebrations in Madonna House, next to Christmas and Easter. A day of joy and gladness in the company of the Mother of God, radiant in God’s glory.

I thought today I would simply give you an excerpt from my book She is Our Response, on the Virgin Mary in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger, the book that was the genesis of this blog in the first place. It’s a bit long, but hopefully not too technical. Enjoy!

The Power and Strength of Woman

In the women of Israel, the mothers and the saviors, in their fruitful infertility is expressed most purely and most profoundly what creation is and what election is.

Daughter Zion, 23-4

Reflection – Daughter Zion  is one of my favorite books by Ratzinger and was one of the principal sources for my thesis. Oddly, I hardly ever quote from it on this blog – not sure why that is.

I have recommended this book far and wide, and am happy to do so again here—in particular, Ratzinger develops here a biblical theology of ‘woman’ that has really been helpful to women struggling with what the Church teaches about women and its perceived anti-feminist stance.

This brief passage is from a long and detailed and very beautiful analysis of the feminine line in the Old Testament. As the masculine line passes from Adam to Noah to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua and down through the kings and prophets of Israel, so there is a feminine line, less prominent perhaps, but of deep significance scripturally and theologically.

These women, like the men, fall into basic categories. There are the barren women made fruitful by God’s grace and kindness—Sarah, Rachel, Hannah. There are the warrior women who, against any reasonable possibility of success, deliver Israel from its enemies (Deborah, Judith, and in a different manner, Esther). Both the barren woman who conceives and the ‘weak’ woman who triumphs in battle manifest the power of God to save and redeem his people, and the fundamental truth all of us, male and female, live in as His creatures.

Namely, creation and redemption (which in the Old Testament is one with the election of God’s people) are essentially received. God acts; we receive. God is the one who gives life, who makes us fruitful, who chooses us for Himself, and who brings us to victory in the battle of life. The feminine line in the Old Testament reveals the basic structure of created reality before God.

Ratzinger goes on to develop the final revelation of the feminine in the Old Testament in the personification of Sophia as created wisdom, working alongside the Uncreated Wisdom of God to create and delight in all that He has made. And of course the second half of the book applies this all magnificently to the Virgin Mary as the real historical figure who shows us the path of receptive creativity and joyful participation in love with the creative and saving work of God.

This is so crucial. We are conditioned in the modern world to associate strength, power, dignity, freedom, status with being the one in charge, being on top, being the boss. To be a fully human, fully adult, fully alive person entails an ever-expanding control of one’s world. This has many implications extending into areas of human sexuality, economic activity, intellectual inquiry—a whole anthropology of dominance and mastery that flows from a certain concept of freedom.

I maintain, Ratzinger maintains, and the Bible maintains that there is an entirely different model of freedom, dignity, power, and life that God reveals to us and beckons us to live by. Mary shows us this, and the women of the Bible show us this. Joyful receptivity, active participation, the surrender of love, the abandonment of self into the loving plans and providential dispensations of God, obedience coming out of the free disposition of one’s own person and being—this is what it means to be a human creature.

We are all ‘brides of Christ’, male or female. The soul is feminine in relation to God. This has nothing to do with ‘sex’ in the common understanding of the word; it is a matter of the fundamental terms of our relationship with reality, and with Reality. First comes receiving, then comes responding. God initiates; Christ leads. God is the author; we are under His authority. We are His. And the women of the Bible show us that this is the path to a fruitful, triumphant, and joyous life; Mary shows us that this is the path to glory, honor and power beyond our wildest imaginings.

It's Not a Competition

The doctrine of the immaculata testifies accordingly that God’s grace was powerful enough to awaken a response, that grace and freedom, grace and being oneself, renunciation and fulfillment are only apparent contradictories; in reality one conditions the other and grants it its very existence.

Daughter Zion, 71

Reflection – Happy Feast Day to you all! It is the feast of the creation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the awesome grace God gave her from the very beginning of her life, to be preserved from original sin, so as to be a fit vessel for the Incarnate Word.

It is one of the most common complaints against Catholics by Protestants that we exalt Mary at the expense of Jesus. To give honor and praise to the Mother detracts from the Son, goes the usual drill.

If we look carefully at this feast and this mystery of the Immaculate Conception, though, especially in light of this passage from Ratzinger, we see that this is not true. In this mystery, we see that Mary’s very being was itself a gracious gift of God. There is nothing about Mary, from the first moment of her being, that was ‘hers’, that she had as her own apart from, over and against God.

Her soul magnified the Lord, and her spirit rejoiced in God her savior. Mary was all God’s, from the beginning. So, nothing that is said of Mary, no matter how exalted and fulsome it may be, deprives God of any glory, since Mary is entirely his creature, his work of art. To praise the painting does not detract from the artist, obviously.

Deeper than the immediate concern with Our Lady is what this reveals about all of us. And this is what Ratzinger meditates on above. God and man are not in a competition. God’s gracious gift and human freedom are not opposed to each other. So often the modern world ‘illuminated’ by such thinkers as Sartre or Nietzsche considers it thus: if God exists, man is not free. For human beings to attain full freedom and dignity, we must shed the burden of God. In traditional Protestant theology the same idea is expressed alternately; to preserve the awesome majesty of God, any goodness or dignity in man must be denied.

God in his action of creating Mary shows us that neither is true. His gift to her from her conception makes her freely able to consent to being the Mother of the Redeemer. The entire action of grace is not meant to override our freedom, to make us slaves of God, but to awaken in us the response of faith and love: let it be done to me according to thy word… my soul magnifies the Lord.

So this is the great joy of this day, the great joy Mary brings to us who honor her. Human life is not essentially tragic or all grubby and soiled or a nasty brutal struggle for survival. Human life, in its divinely mandated essence, is an encounter with love, an encounter with grace, an encounter with God who fashions us, refashions us, pours mercy upon us, comes to our assistance in every turning, and who promises to see us through to the completion of our journey.

Happy Feast day to all, and may our joy in it bring us a little closer to that happy completion.

Unmarred

Preservation from original sin… signifies that Mary reserves no area of being, life, and will for herself as a private possession: instead, precisely in the total dispossession of self, in giving herself to God, she comes to the true possession of self. Grace as dispossession becomes response as appropriation. Thus from another view point the mystery of barren fruitfulness, the paradox of the barren mother, the mystery of virginity, becomes intelligible once more: dispossession as belonging, as the locus of new life.

Daughter Zion, 70

Reflection – Deep stuff here, deep, deep stuff. It is worth, as a preparation for tomorrow’s great feast of the Immaculate Conception, to simply go through this short passage from Daughter Zion and meditate on it.

Original sin as reserving some part of our being, life, and will as a private possession: the woman took the fruit and ate it, and gave to her husband, and he ate it. My life is my own, and I will do as I please. This is the one thing Mary never said, never did.

Ratzinger calls us here to a deep reflection on what it means to be a person, what it means to be a ‘self’, an individual. The world shaped by original sin says that it means precisely that attitude: I will do what I will do. Mary, as immaculately conceived reveals something entirely different. She opens up for us, or rather God by working this grace in her opens up for us an entirely different picture of what it means to be human. ‘In giving herself to God, she comes to the true possession of self.’ That is a sentence we could meditate on for the rest of our lives. Self-possessed usually means for us someone who is in total control of themselves at all times. God offers us a different path of self-possession: one who is giving himself or herself away at all times.

And the next one: ‘grace as dispossession becomes response as appropriation.’ As Mother Theresa put it, ‘God cannot fill what is already full’. And to be filled by God with God is the whole substance of our humanity, its divine purpose, our glorious human destiny. All these realities in human spiritual life that we find so painful and messy: loss, purification, grief, death to self, humiliation—they all are about emptying that inner space that God means to fill with Himself. Mary, immaculately conceived, shows us that the truth of our humanity, our unmarred nature, is precisely this mystery and this glory. To be filled with God – this is Mary’s one role, her one purpose, her vocation. As is ours.

And so Ratzinger links all of this to what most of this book is about: the long feminine line in the Old Testament of barren mothers, of women made fruitful by the action of God, of Israel held in being by the action of God, of all creation opening up to receive the action of God with joyful response. In Mary all of this is brought to perfection: what God did in the history of his sinful people he now shows forth in the very being and person of this one little girl who He preserves from that terrible mysterious ‘drift’ of original sin, and so makes her into a living icon of creation, of the human person, and thus of the Church, humanity made into a living temple of God.

The Immaculate Conception, which we celebrate tomorrow, is utterly relevant and important to your life and mine. It shows us who we are, really, by showing us what humanity looks like when all the distortions and lies are removed from it. And so we see who we are, what we are meant to do, what our already glorious present and still more glorious future holds for us, and how we are to get there: let God empty us of self, so we can be filled with Himself.

All wrapped up in the most delightful and charming thing God ever made: a truly beautiful woman. So we don’t have to be theologians or philosophers or any sort of rubbish like that: we just need to go to our Mama and say, “Teach me what you know.” And she does.

Cosmic Drifters

Original sin is the collapse of what man is, both in his origin from God and in himself, the contradiction between the will of the Creator and man’s empirical being. This contradiction between God’s ‘is’ and man’s ‘is not’ is lacking in the case of Mary, and consequently God’s judgment about her is pure ‘Yes’, just as she herself stands before him as a pure ‘Yes.’

Daughter Zion, 70

Reflection – Well, the great feast is coming! Hope you have all your preparations done – all the decorating and special food and shopping… After all, it’s only two days away!

Oh, you thought I meant that other feast – whatchamas! No, no—I mean December 8, the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The great feast, the feast of the prelude of salvation, the feast celebrating the immediate work done by God to prepare the whole cosmos for the grace of his Incarnation, his saving act in Christ.

The term ‘immaculate conception’ is widely misunderstood. Many people—even educated people—seem to think it refers to the miraculous virginal conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary. It does not.

It refers to Mary’s conception in the womb of her mother. Mary was conceived according to the natural human way, through the sexual union of her parents, who tradition tells us were named Joachim and Anne. The ‘immaculate’ quality is that, by a special and unique dispensation of God, in view of the merits of Christ’s redemption, Mary was preserved from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her existence, so as to be a fitting vessel to receive the Incarnate Word by the Holy Spirit, and pass on to Him our human nature in an unblemished form.

OK, that’s all a mouthful, and very theological and precise. So, who cares? All very nice for Our Lady (we might say) but what difference is it to you and me? Well, that’s what we’re going to spend the next few days discussing on this blog, helped by Ratzinger’s magnificent little book Daughter Zion.

We see in the above passage a reflection of something we all know from bitter experience. This ‘original sin’, which I don’t think anyone really understands (we have doctrinal formulations for that, too, which I will spare you at this moment): it’s something we all know in our bones, even if we don’t always use the Church’s vocabulary for it.

Simply put, we are conflicted creatures. Part of us wants God; part of us does not. Part of us wants to love; part of us does not. Part of us opens up to life, to beauty, to joy, to everything good and holy and true; part of us caves in on ourselves and clings to selfishness, rancor, spite, jealousy.

On and on and on. We all know this. There is some strange spirit in us that turns away from what will make us happy, some strange energy at work in every human heart that leads to misery and ruin. It is a universal thread running through all human history and every human story. Good is only attained by struggle and effort; evil, we fall into. As Mae West put it, “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” We drift, we human beings. We are conflicted, marred creatures, all of us.

Almost. The Immaculate Conception means that one little word. Almost. Without Mary, we would have a terrible problem, you see. Without Immaculate Mary (whose praises we sing), we would have to conclude that this horrible conflicted reality of humanity is in fact the essential truth, the essential story of the human race. We just are a race of failures, misfits, nogoodniks, drifters. A bunch of cosmic troublemakers: ‘everything was just fine until they showed up,’ one could hear the angels and the stars saying.

Almost. We have this one little girl, you see. And God was able to preserve her from this terrible burden of original sin, not so that she could have a wonderful life (I strongly suspect Mary suffered deeply all her life—imagine being wholly one, wholly ordered to goodness and love, and wholly immersed in the world as we know it), but so that we could see in her, and in God’s action in her, what human beings really are.

Not what we’ve made ourselves to be, not what this strange mysterious wound in our nature has wrought in us, but what He made us to be, and what His work desires to fashion us into. Mary is immaculate, and we are not. But what we see in her immaculate nature is what God wishes to do in each of us, to make us that ‘Yes’ to Him so that His ‘Yes’ to us can find a response, an echo, a true reflection of the love that comes from Him and is in Christ.

And that’s what humanity is, and that’s what the Immaculate Conception reveals to us. And we will continue the next couple days to reflect on this mystery. Now go do your Immaculate Conception shopping and baking and decorating and…

Sophia's World

The figure of Wisdom (Sophia) attains central significance [in the late Old Testament]… ‘Wisdom’ appears as the mediatrix of creation and salvation history, as God’s first creature in whom both the pure, primordial form of his creative will and the pure answer,  which he discovers, find their expression… creation answers, and the answer is as close to God as a playmate, as a lover… ‘Sophia’, a feminine noun, stands on that side of reality which is represented by the woman, by what is purely and simply feminine. It signifies the answer which emerges from the divine call and election. It expresses precisely this: that there is a pure answer, and that God’s love finds its irrevocable dwelling place within it.

Daughter Zion, 25-6

Reflection – Before I jump into reflecting on this passage, I want to give my most enthusiastic plug for this little book by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger. It is one of the most profound and beautiful reflections on the Mother of God I have ever read. It is small (100 pages or so), and hence cheap, and just one of the best things ever. Buy it! Or, rather BUY IT!!!!!!!

Ahem. Sorry – I didn’t mean to shout at y’all. The first part of the book, and I’m sure to be quoting bits and pieces of it all over this blog, is a tracing of the feminine line of the Old Testament. We all know by heart, if we know our bible at all, the masculine line: Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and so forth.

But the feminine line (Sarah, Deborah, Hannah, Esther, Judith, etc.) is very important, for reasons that will become clear as I blog about other bits of it. And in this passage, Ratzinger highlights the last movement of this feminine presence in the Hebrew Scriptures: created Wisdom, personified in several places in the Wisdom literature as a woman.

And this Woman, this Sophia, works alongside God in his creative work. Remember, this Sophia is a creature, not God – that is very clear from the Wisdom literature texts. But she accompanies God in his work, and in this participation with God there is joy, delight, intimacy.

A whole theology of creation emerges from this revelation of Sophia. We tend to either think of creation as standing autonomous from God, somehow left to fend for itself, to make its own way, or as being a wholly passive lump of clay being shaped by God without (or even against) its will.

Here we see that creation is made to be in a sort of intimate partnership with God, a marriage, if you will, in which the Uncreated Wisdom, which will be revealed as the Logos of God, incarnate in Jesus, meets the Created Wisdom. Wisdom, for us human beings, becomes not mastery or cleverness, but perfect response to our Father in heaven. And wisdom, far from being ponderous or dry, is joyful, laughing, playing, delighting in Him who made her, happy to give her whole energy to this ‘making’ together with God.

As God’s Uncreated Wisdom is revealed to us in Christ, Sophia, created wisdom, is revealed to us in the face of the one who gave Herself to God’s plan for the world with joy and exaltation of the One who chose Her.

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”