"Spring Is Here Today! Winter's Gone Away!"

I brought out my vintage 1953 copy (second printing - it was originally published in 1945) of Lois Lenski's adorable SPRING IS HERE to show you, as I gather some things for our upcoming annual Annunciation Tea at church.

The Feast of the Annunciation, on March 25, falls close to the first day of Spring every year.  I find it a happy irony that in the midst of Lent, as we are saying goodbye to winter, the Annunciation is an event that reminds us to look forward to Christ's birth in nine months on December 25!

The women and girls of our parish always have a Lenten tea in March in honor of the Virgin Mary, celebrating the day she said "yes" to God when the Archangel Gabriel visited her.

The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you!"

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.

But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.  You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.  He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.  The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob's descendants forever; his kingdom will never end."

"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God..."

"I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered.  "May your word to me be fulfilled."

I love what our Bp. BASIL said in his essay, Mary Our Cause Of Rejoicing:

"In a very real way, she [at just age fourteen] became the first to receive Jesus as her Lord and Savior. She alone among all humanity can say that she not only received Jesus into her heart spiritually, but she housed Jesus in her womb, in her body."

 
(This essay originally appeared in The Handmaiden, Vol. 1 No. 1, published in the winter of 1996 by Conciliar Press. Bishop BASIL [Essey] is Bishop of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America, Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese. You can read his essay in its entirety, here, on the Antiochian.org website.)

 Scripture above quoted from Luke 1:26-38 NIV