Pure, Unadulterated Faith (Luke 1:26-38)

I am obsessed with the British TV show Grand Designs. In each episode, the vaguely snarky but also weirdly kind host, Kevin McCloud, journeys with someone building or restoring or failing to build or failing to restore some of home of architectural or historical significance. He’s covered literal castle conversions, multiple people desiring to live in Victorian era water towers, and a never ending parade of glass and concrete modernist boxes. By the nature of who builds ambitious structures, the show tends to focus on fairly wealthy people. The whole genre of home renovation shows is designed to give us the vicarious joy of watching someone else spend money that we couldn’t. It’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs with a thin veneer of “instructing” us how to and how not to attempt these projects for ourselves.

To my incredible shock, as I sat watching a 20 year old episode of Grand Designs, I learned something about Mary, the mother of Christ. In the early seasons, Kevin would take an occasional break from ambitious, modernist, rich people, and cover equally ambitious social housing experiments. In season two, Kevin went to the outskirts of Burmingham, where a group of folks living below the poverty line, without adequate housing, had an opportunity to build and live in a house, where they would have equity. Ten families worked together to build each other houses. They came in with little previous building experience, and to earn the house, they had to put in 30 hours or more per week on the build. They gained job skills and a home but suffered through nearly two years working on the site. They pulled it off, and the episode concluded with Kevin interviewing the builders as they sat on the verge of moving into a home of their own. A bachelor displayed his bean bags and giant stereo. A father of five pointed out that he’d saved to spend a grand more to have the best kitchen in the development. A young woman, not from Egypt, laid out a detailed plan for her Egyptian themed home. For each, their lives had progressed because of the project, so the conclusion radiates warmth.

One young woman stood out and absolutely broke me. She was in her mid-20s, raising a couple of kids by herself, and never had the steadiest employment history. She’d borne a ton of hardship for one just starting out in adult life, and before the project, steady housing, much less home ownership, felt inaccessible. Standing in her nearly finished kitchen, she showed Kevin the bags and bags and bags of cheap decorations that she’d accumulated for her new home. Even for the time, they lacked taste and were kind of tacky: wall hangings of smiling farmers, a plastic bread loaf, plastic fish. It was as if someone, who had never known actual fancy houses, imagined what fancy houses must look like. She’d been acquiring stuff for years, squirrelling them away for when the project completed, and she could decorate her own home. She told Kevin, “I probably have too much stuff, but I’ll find somewhere to put it. I want every room to be nice – like a show home.” For a show focused on the height of design, nothing that she had qualified, but in that collection of dollar store home décor, she radiated a level of hope and love that grabbed me through the screen and reduced me to an emotional puddle. She loved her children so much, found hope for maybe the first time in her life, and wanted her home to show it. Those vinyl decorative objects represented something much more profound for her than any of the fine art and sweeping staircases of the grander designs. She saw in those bags an arriving joyous, previously unimaginable future, and she was going to make the most of it.

I’ve directed many stagings of this scene from Luke 1, where the angel appears to Mary, and she moves from questioning to acceptance with astounding rapidity. I thought that I knew how to coach the actress playing Mary. She should adopt a combination of grit and hope. Her face should say, “this is going to be hard, but I get to do something amazing.” Look at the angel. Sigh. Look to heaven. Turn back to the angel. Say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

I wanted to communicate the determination and strength of this young woman and her extraordinary willingness to serve God at great personal sacrifice. All of that is true about her. Bearing a child, while not married, that didn’t belong to one’s fiancé, in a world without any of the benefits of modern medicine shows a degree of faithfulness that cannot be overstated. I’m daunted by it. I’ve been daunted by the much lesser things that God’s asked me to do. When I get those requests, I have those moments of pausing, gritting my teeth, and then accepting. I contemplate the difficulties and dangers. However, to put those steps onto Mary is me projecting onto her my own faithlessness.

Mary’s words here, in her meeting with Elizabeth, and in her grand prophecy known as the Magnificat only show joy and wholehearted acceptance. Her only doubt is purely biological – never theological. Her serving in this way never fazes her. She just needed help seeing how a virgin could have a child. Mary’s own words give off the near painful levels of hope and joy that our friend the new homeowner from Birmingham did. Both of these young women only thought about hope, love, and joy and how they could be a part of bringing it into the world. As a director, you always seek emotional analogues to help actors find their characters. The next time that I have someone portray Mary, I’m cueing up the end of a Grand Design’s episode. Mary’s level of hope and joy at serving God and at what God’s doing in the world should reduce us to tears. She’s a 16 year old young woman purely excited and overjoyed. Her Magnificat is phrased in the past tense because she sees so clearly what God has done and is doing. I got the portrayal wrong because I can’t comprehend that level of faith.