Sermon for the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Apolonnia Perri

Delivered in the King’s Chapel by Apolonnia Perri on September 8 2025

“Fear not Mary, for thou hast found favour with God”

For this feast day I want to focus on two themes, or guiding ideas: paradox, and surrender. I want to start our meditation on these topics in the context of the Nativity of the Blessed Mother, to clarify why we are invited to feast on her birthday.

Mary, on the one hand, is characterized as the gate, the root of salvation, the receiver of the Godhead… As the Theotokos, the God bearer, she is an essential figure in demonstrating the unity of Christ’s divine and human natures. As the mother of Christ, she is the source of the incarnation.

In the incarnation, humanity partakes in the divine nature. In the birth of Christ, divine nature and human nature are reunited, and reestablished together — the Word was made flesh. These two natures are united without mixing, a holding together of opposites. In this way, Mary is a living paradox.

Mary also always gives recourse to God at every turn. In the Magnificat, she praises only God, rejoicing in his mercy for reuniting humanity’s destiny with the history of salvation. In the icon of The Way, Mary points to Christ, who is seated on her. (The Theotokos always points to Jesus rather than herself.) When we pray to the Blessed Mother, or venerate an icon and ask for her prayers, her intersession points us to her son, who is the true root and source of salvation — or the unity between the world and the kingdom of God.

When a woman interjects Jesus’s teachings (Luke, 11) to praise his mother, he says, “Blessed are they that hear the word and keep it.”

When Mary receives God’s message and Gabriel announces the conception, Mary says, “be it unto me according to thy word.”

At the wedding at Cana, Mary tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

When Martha supposes Mary ought to help her wait on Jesus (Luke, 10), we hear, “Mary was at his feet, and heard the word.”

Mary keeps the word and bears fruit. In these instances and countless other ways, Mary not only represents a living paradox, but a sure faith and surrender to the power and love of God. In this surrender, love bears fruit. Anna and Elizabeth were both barren women, who gave birth. Living paradoxes, miracles of unseen and immaterial fruit.

In her book, Waiting on God, Simone Weil describes this paradox of spiritual birth, in the context of education:

 If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so that at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer. Moreover, it may very likely be felt in some department of the intelligence in no way connected with mathematics…

Weil describes a quality of attention — which she calls negative attention— that I would like to correlate with this theme of surrender. Understood in this way, surrender is an essential aspect of faith, it holds together opposites, takes comfort in paradox, softens absurdity with grace and love— a love that takes recourse to God, listens to his word, and rejoices in his mercy.