While studying this week, I read something by someone who was trying to make the point that an unmarried pregnant girl would not have been such a scandal in Jesus' time. The writer posited that "an empty womb in a healthy young woman" would have been considered a tragic waste of that young woman's real estate. The writer lost me there. Mary. The Annunciation. An unmarried woman. An empty womb.
An empty womb. What if the empty womb, Mary's empty womb or any empty space in our souls, craves fullness?
The 17th century mathematician Blase Pascal wrote of this in his work Pensees when he mused:
There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing,
but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus. - Blase Pascal
The empty womb.
Mary set aside all social conventions and correctness when she said, "Yes."
What would Joseph say? What would her own parents think? What about the other townspeople?
Often, it is those empty places inside each of us that God longs to fill with goodness and mercy.
Dare we allow God to enter in?
It's a risk.
