The Annunciation

A meditation

You are on the terrace, and it is very early. The city lies far off across the fields, still asleep. She is at her prayer desk with the book open before her — a girl at her morning prayers, in a house so ordinary that nothing has ever happened in it.

And then look up, because something is happening now. He is coming down out of the open sky, robe flying, one hand lifted — not yet landed, not yet spoken. The whole of heaven is behind him and he is in a hurry, and still he pauses, as though even an angel needs a breath before he says a thing like this.

She has turned. Her hand is raised the way yours would be — the way anyone's is when something comes too fast to understand. She is startled, and she is very young, and for this one moment she is the only person on earth who knows that God is waiting for an answer.

Stay here with her. The sky is open all the way up. The red flowers in the vase have not moved. Everything holds its breath — the angel, the morning, heaven itself — while a girl decides.

You know what she will say. But she does not know it yet, and neither, if you are honest, do you when it is your turn. Let her teach you the order of it: first the fear, then the question, then the quiet *let it be*. And let her stay near you, this morning and the next one, whenever something larger than you had planned comes down out of the sky.