Rooted in the Christian contemplative traditions, the Daily Meditations offer reflections from Richard Rohr, CAC faculty and guest teachers to help you deepen your spiritual practice and embody compassion in the world.

Week Forty-Nine: Mary and the Power of Yes

Tuesday 2 December 2025 Responding to God’s Yes

Richard Rohr envisions our yeses as a response to God’s first yes to us.

We have in Mary’s story what some call the second creation story in the Bible. It’s a creation seemingly “out of nothing.” Mary is the one quite willing to be “nothing.” God doesn’t need worthiness ahead of time; God creates worthiness by the choice itself. As I’ve often said, God doesn’t love us because we are good; we are good because God loves us. It seems God will not come into the world unreceived or uninvited. God does not come into the world unless we want God. God offers the Divine Presence, “the banquet,” but presence itself is a reciprocal concept. God is the eternal “I” waiting for those willing to be a “Thou.”

It’s no surprise that Mary became the icon of prayer for so many in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and in many religious orders, even though the Bible never once mentions her “praying.” The closest is that lovely line in Luke: “She treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19, 51). Why? Because every time we pray, it’s God in us telling us to pray. We wouldn’t even desire to pray except for God in us. It’s God in us that loves God, that desires God, that seeks God (see Romans 8:14–27). Every time we choose God on some level, God has in the previous nanosecond just chosen us, and we have somehow allowed ourselves to be chosen—and responded back (John 15:16). 194-195

We don’t know how to say yes by ourselves. We just “second the motion”! There is a part of us, the Holy Spirit within, that has always said yes to God. God first says “yes” inside of us, and we say, “Oh yeah,” thinking it comes from us. In other words, God rewards us for letting God reward us. That is worth noticing, maybe even for the rest of our lives.

Are we ever completely ready to echo God’s “yes”? Probably not, but I am convinced that the struggle is good and even necessary. Struggle carves out the space within us for deep desire. God both creates the desire and fulfills it. Our job is to be the desiring. For God to work in our lives, our fiat, like Mary’s “Let it be done unto me, according to your word” (Luke 1:38), is still essential.

We all find ourselves with this surprising ability to love God and to desire love from God, often for no reason in particular. That doesn’t happen every day, truly, but hopefully arises more often as we learn to trust and rest in life. Moments of unconditional love sort of slip out of us and no one is more surprised when they happen. But when they do, we always know we are living inside of a Larger Life than our own. We know, henceforth, that our life is not about us, but we are about God.

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Story From Our Community

After years of intercessory work and searching of Scripture, I think that sometimes God only wants someone to sit with Him. Not to chat, intrude, list, speak, whine, propose, badger, but simply be there in His presence.
—Mary G.

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Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, rev. ed. (Franciscan Media, 2022), 194–196.

Monday 1 December 2025 Expanding Beyond Ourselves

Author Stephanie Duncan Smith writes of Mary’s yes to God as a choice for expansion over contraction, mirroring God’s own yes in creation:

Genesis tells the story of God’s radical choice for expansion over happiness, and the world is born. Advent echoes and reprises this divine choice, and the world is reborn. First, life from the womb of God, now, life from a woman who made a radical choice for expansion, not just over happiness, but over personal comfort, safety, and reputation. Expansion was the call, and against its many risks, the mother of God said yes—stretching her body as well as her imagination for just what kind of hope this might be, growing now within her.

Had she said no, she would not have faced public scrutiny or physical endangerment as an unmarried pregnant woman in her day would have faced. She would have been spared the empire’s hunt for her blacklisted family, driving them to live the life of refugees on the run. And she would have never known the unthinkable loss of watching her firstborn take his last breath.

Her path would have been so much safer, perhaps easier and even happier, if Mary had just not. And yet she chose the growing edge, where our truest self and life will always be found. And this choice made way for the life of the world. [1]

Duncan Smith invites us to consider how we are being asked to expand our hearts in this season:

There are many ways for a life to expand. Some will do so through this particular muscle of women, though pregnancy is far from the exclusive icon of expansion, neither is it the primary metaphor. The stretching of a belly is not sure equivalence to the stretching of the heart, and the heart that stretches may never manifest itself in the body….

We stretch by reaching toward each other—by reaching out from the solo act into the plural “we,” the pronoun God loves most. Life is long, the feast is wide, and we are meant for keeping it together. Our hearts are a muscle made in the image of God, made for connection. And there are so many ways of being kindred.

We enact our own advents every time we brave reaching beyond the borders of the self toward each other. Expansion is the anthem of anyone who is “brave enough to break your own heart.” [2] Every time we reach toward each other—considering the risk, compelled by love—we sing its anthem anew….[3]

Advent is nothing if not the story of beginnings, revealing a God who dares to expand, who chooses enlargement over happiness, no matter the chaos. This season shows us the astonishing view of a God gone radial, one who will never stop reaching toward his beloved, no matter the risks. And so, in the true spirit of Advent, we find our courage to chance. [4]

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[1] Stephanie Duncan Smith, Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway (Convergent Books, 2024), 16.

[2] Cheryl Strayed, “Dear Sugar, the Rumpus Advice Column #64: Tiny Beautiful Things,” The Rumpus, February 10, 2011.

[3] Duncan Smith, Even After Everything, 19–20.

[4] Duncan Smith, Even After Everything, 32.

Sunday November 30 2025 First Sunday of Advent A Grace-Filled Yes

Father Richard describes Mary as a model of faith:

In the Gospels, the Book of Acts, and throughout the Epistles, a whole new dimension of faith becomes available to those who accept it. It’s a way of living in the Spirit, which some of the Hebrew prophets anticipate. The prophet Joel speaks of this most clearly:

In the days that follow, I will pour out my spirit on everyone. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions. In those days I will pour out my spirit even on your servants and your handmaids (Joel 3:1–2).

We see the Spirit descending upon Jesus after his baptism in the Jordan, and we see the Spirit again filling the apostles with power on the day of Pentecost. But the very first person who incarnates this new faith was Mary of Nazareth, who said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me” (Luke 1:38). It was Mary who responded with an unconditional yes to the angel’s announcement that she was to give birth to the Messiah. Mary is the model of the faith to which God calls all of us: a total and unreserved yes to God’s request to be present in and to the world through us.

God desires to love others unconditionally in and through us. Those who live with such a faith can truly be called God’s instruments. God wants light to shine through us, and so our first response to this call is simply to heed it and remain open to divine grace, so that God might shine. Mary understood this completely. She said her yes to God, and God was able to become incarnate in her. She gave birth to Jesus by being so totally open to God’s Spirit that the Christ child could be born. [1]

The soul does not proceed by contraction but by expansion. It moves forward, not by exclusion, but by inclusion. It sees things deeply and broadly, not by saying no, but by saying yes, at least on some level, to whatever comes its way. If we are paying attention, we can feel those two very different movements within ourselves. Don’t take my word for it; we must experience it for and within ourselves, or we will never be able to move beyond it.

Mary’s kind of yes doesn’t come easily to us. It always requires that we let down some of our ego boundaries, and none of us likes to do that. Mary’s kind of yes, as it is presented in the Gospel, is an assent utterly unprepared for, with no preconditions of worthiness required, that is calmly, wonderfully trustful that someone else is in charge. All she asks is one, simple, clarifying question (Luke 1:34). It’s a yes that is pure in motivation, open-ended in intent, and calm in confidence. Only grace can achieve such freedom in the soul, heart, or mind. [2]

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Story From Our Community

“An Advent Poem”: In the darkness before dawn, the yearning heart lies waiting. / Not asleep. / The dark night speaks of emptiness. Of solitude. / Waiting for He who is to come. / For nine months, the Lady waits, wondering…. / Each moment pregnant with unknown possibilities. / We wait, wondering, yearning. / The Sun rises, incrementally. The Child grows, day by day. / Slowly, oh so very slowly, that which is hidden becomes more clear…. / The way before us opens up…. / To the Presence in which we, all unknowing, are immersed. / We step forth now, in increasing radiance, no longer quite as blind.
—Christina V.

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[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1987), 125–126.

[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press, 2014), 67.

Image credit and inspiration: Pranish Shrestha, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Not knowing what comes next yet still saying yes is courage rooted in a framework beyond the practical—like Mary holding the small light of her yes in the midst of a dark night.