...When Mary answers the angel, she answers God. She knows that the angel appears as God's messenger and that and that when she delivers her Yes to him, she is in fact giving it to God. Her seeing and hearing the angel at all already depends on an obedient subordination of her senses to the supernatural life, the life of God's grace. She has senses like every person, but she does not use them as other people do, to adorn herself, to win something for herself and make it her own. Instead of closing off her senses for hrself, she opens them up for God; she uses them only to serve a better comprehension of the divine will, to its greater honor and glorification. She surrenders to God the purpose and and end of every act of her senses. so her senses are an open space in which her in which God can manifest himself at any time; they are ready for the angel. She regards her senses as a mere loan from the Father, so that, in what her senses perceive, she always recognises at once the gift of the Father. She sees and hears the angel, but in such a way that at the same time she knows that what enables her to see and receive something which God has placed in her, something which therefore allows her to see God himself in the angel. And just as she knows that in the angel she receives God, so also does she understand that the angel accepts what he recieves from her only in order to carry it to God...
from Handmaid of the Lord
By Adrienne von Speyr
