NOTE: Throughout the Advent season, we’ll post a current or “classic” reflection on the readings for the upcoming Sunday in Advent. The reflection will be available on our homepage through the weekend and then archived on our Advent 2025 webpage.
The reflection below was originally written by Pax Christi USA’s 1990 Teacher of Peace Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, for our Advent reflection booklet, Hope awaits its triumph: Advent 1986.
by Joan Chittister, OSB
Pax Christi USA 1990 Teacher of Peace
Originally published in 1986
Isaiah 7:10-14 | Romans 1:1-7 | Matthew 1:18-24
“A virgin will conceive and bear a son; his name will be Emmanuel, God is with us” (Matthew 1:23)
Some years ago one of the pillars of Marian piety was a book entitled, A woman wrapped in silence. Somehow in that approach Mary across as remote and ethereal and unreal and unreachable. She swept on and off its pages suffering, yes, but not like the women who had to bend their wits to live and bear and survive. Mary, it seemed, was simply a pawn in the will of God.
But “a pawn in the will of God” is a contradiction in terms. There simply cannot be a pawn in the will of God. The will of God is something that must be chosen and that costs. The will of God is not a trick played on the unsuspecting. The will of God is always an offer of co-creation. If we understand that, then we begin to understand Mary in a new way. It wasn’t that Mary was a “woman wrapped in silence.” It was simply that her actions spoke more loudly than any number of words could ever do. We need to understand those actions now.
The fact is that Mary is not simply, “Mary, the Mother of God.” No, on the contrary, the Mother of God is Mary, the unmarried mother; Mary, the homeless woman; Mary, the political refugee; Mary, the [woman from the Middle East]; Mary, the mother of a condemned prisoner; Mary, the widow who outlives her child; Mary, the apostle of the apostles; Mary, the woman of our time.
Mary, you see, could withstand and confront every standard of her synagogue and her society and take the poverty and oppression and pain to which that led because the will of God meant more to her than the laws of any system. God, indeed, was with her.
Because of Mary, God is also with us. And we, too, live in a system that dehumanizes and destroys for the sake of the powerful. Can we possibly do less than Mary did in confronting the questions of her time?
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