How humanity had been prepared for the Incarnation

The Incarnation would not have been possible without the concrete human nature that the Word was to receive being first purified: He needed to find a perfect and immaculate virgin (Homily 52,6) (1).

Mary was the end point of a purification process throughout history and all generations. Everything had been prepared with Mary in mind: All divinely inspired Scriptures were written with the Virgin Mother of God as a goal (homily 53,8).

Mary herself had her own path of ultimate preparation, which St Gregory Palamas, a monk on Mount Athos and later Archbishop of Thessalonica, describes from his own monastic experience:

Mary chose to live hidden from view, spending all her time in the sanctuary, where she remained free from all material ties ... thus she unified her whole being in her spirit, by being attentive and praying to God continually. By concentrating on her interior life, she rose above the diversity of forms that reasonings represent... She had the intuition of a new path to Heaven that we could call the silence of the spirit.

By uniting her spirit with this silence, she rose above all creatures and saw the glory of God in a more perfect way than Moses; she saw the divine grace that cannot be perfectly understood with the senses but is a holy sight, reserved only for souls and angels who are pure: and because she accomplished this, she became ... the water of the true life, the dawn of the mystical day, and the chariot of fire carrying the Word. (Homily 53, 59).

And in his homily 53,12, St Gregory Palamas delightedly makes this observation: What Christ is by nature, the Virgin is by grace.

(1) All quotes are from the homilies of St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359)

Marie de Nazareth Team