What Can We Learn From Mary Mother of Jesus? — Tileston on Mary’s Magnificat
⏱ 16 min read
You are being asked to say yes to something you did not choose and are not ready for. The shape of it is yours — the diagnosis, the move, the calling, the role, the carrying — but the timing is not yours, and the timing is what has you sitting up at night with a low panic underneath the rib cage. Why now. Why me. I do not have the structure for this. I do not have the people for this. I am not the right age for this. And somewhere underneath the questions, an older voice you half-remember from Sunday-school is saying Mary said yes, and you are not sure whether that is meant to comfort you or to indict you — because Mary, in your memory of her, was serene and ready, and you are neither. The question what can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus arrives, for you, in that gap between the Mary on the Christmas card and the woman you actually need to find — the young one, the frightened one, the one who did not know yet what she was saying yes to.
This is the slow walk. Not the Christmas-card version. The actual figure — read through Mary Tileston’s Daily Strength for Daily Needs, the late-Victorian devotional compendium that quietly carried the inner lives of women through hard decades — held next to the question your soul actually came in carrying. The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice. For now — read slowly. (The companion essays in this contemplative series sit at a mother’s journal book — for the years that pass too fast and too slow, why pride is the mother of all sin — Augustine’s diagnosis, and what does it mean to believe in Christ — Edwards on true belief.)
Mary was perhaps fourteen when the angel came. She was engaged to be married but not yet married. She lived in a small Galilean town in a part of the world where an unmarried pregnancy was not, in the modern sense, a social inconvenience — it was a thing a young woman could be killed for, by the law of her own community. She had no theological training, no public role, no protection beyond her father’s house, and her cousin Elizabeth lived three days’ walk away in the hill country of Judea. When the angel said thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, the young woman who answered did not answer from serenity. She answered, the text says, troubled. The trouble was the honest first response. The yes came after the trouble — and the yes was not the absence of fear, but the placing of the frightened self into the hands of the One who was asking. The honest answer to what can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus is not a model of feminine compliance. It is a young woman, watched closely, in the interior weather of a yes she was not old enough to fully understand.
The first episode: the trouble before the yes
“Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of Thee; Thou only knowest what I need; Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. O Father! give to Thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. I dare not ask either for crosses or consolations; I simply present myself before Thee; I open my heart to Thee. Behold my needs which I know not myself; see, and do according to Thy tender mercy.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Tileston has assembled this prayer from an older tradition of devotional speech, and the prayer’s first move — I know not what I ought to ask — is the move that the fourteen-year-old in Nazareth had to make before the be it unto me according to thy word could be said. The yes did not arrive from a young woman who knew what she was saying yes to. It arrived from a young woman who had been formed, in the years of her quiet Galilean girlhood, in the kind of psalm-shaped prayer that taught her to simply present herself — to open the heart to the One who already knew the need — and to leave the contents of the answer to His tender mercy.
This is the first thing the figure has to say to you. The yes you are being asked to say to the thing you did not choose does not require you to understand the thing first. Mary did not understand the thing. The text is clear about that. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? The question is not a polite formality. It is the honest response of a young woman who had no biological framework for what she was being told. The angel answered her, and the answer was not an explanation — it was a description of the One who would do the thing. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. And on that — not on understanding, but on the description of the One — Mary placed her yes.
What you can learn from Mary mother of Jesus, here, is the shape of a yes that does not require the situation to be comprehensible first. Tileston’s prayer is the shape. I dare not ask either for crosses or consolations; I simply present myself before Thee. The young Galilean had nothing else to bring. She had no theological apparatus large enough for the angel’s announcement. She had only herself — her young, frightened, unmarried, unprotected self — and she presented that self to the One who was asking. The yes was the presenting. The not-understanding was allowed to remain not-understood. The trouble was not erased; the text records it. The yes was simply the next thing said after the trouble.
For you, this is the part to sit with. The trouble underneath the rib cage is allowed. It is the honest response. The yes does not require the trouble to leave first. The yes can be said with the trouble, the way Mary said it — with the how shall this be, with the unanswered fear, with the not-knowing of what the next nine months would mean for her household. The yes is not a performance of certainty. The yes is the small presenting of the self to the One who is asking. The contents of the answer remain His.
The second episode: the Magnificat
You know the song. Luke 1:46-55. The young woman has just walked three days through the hill country to her cousin Elizabeth, the older woman whose own miraculous pregnancy was the only point of confirmation Mary had been given that the angel’s announcement was real. Elizabeth, on seeing her, is filled with the Holy Spirit and speaks the words that the young woman had not yet heard from any other human mouth. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And Mary, in response — standing in the doorway of her cousin’s house, several months pregnant by no human means, exhausted from three days on the road, the trouble still very present — opens her mouth and sings.
My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
The Magnificat is not the song of a serene woman. It is the song of a young woman who has just been received by another woman who believes her. The whole song is built on the kind of relief that comes when one human being takes another human being’s impossible situation seriously without first asking for proof. Elizabeth had not asked for proof. Elizabeth had simply said blessed. And on that one received word, Mary’s whole inner life opened into the longest song in the New Testament — a song that is half her own and half her ancestress Hannah’s, weaving lines from 1 Samuel 2 with lines that are recognisably the Galilean girl’s own, and tracking the inversion of the world the coming child would enact.
“And we shall steer safely through every storm, so long as our heart is right, our intention fervent, our courage steadfast, and our trust fixed on God. If at times we are somewhat stunned by the tempest, never fear; let us take breath, and go on afresh. Do not be disconcerted by the fits of vexation and uneasiness which are sometimes produced by the multiplicity of your domestic worries. No indeed, dearest child, all these are but opportunities of strengthening yourself in the loving, forbearing graces which our dear Lord sets before us.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
Read this one slowly. Tileston is quoting a confessor’s letter, and the address — dearest child — is the same address Elizabeth’s whole posture spoke to Mary in the doorway. Do not be disconcerted by the fits of vexation and uneasiness. The Magnificat was sung by a young woman who had every reason for vexation and uneasiness and who, on being received by an older woman whose own life had been the long preparation to receive her, was suddenly free to take breath, and go on afresh. The song was the going-on-afresh. The song was what came up out of her when the trouble was met by another woman’s calm.
What we can learn from Mary mother of Jesus, here, is the necessity of the Elizabeth in your own life when you are being asked to carry the unchosen thing. The young woman could not have sung the Magnificat alone in Nazareth. She had to walk three days into the hills. She had to sit in another woman’s kitchen. She had to be told blessed, by a person who believed her without demanding proof. The yes was Mary’s. The song that followed the yes required Elizabeth. The two pieces are not the same piece, and the figure is teaching you, gently, that the woman who is being asked to say yes to a thing she did not choose needs, somewhere, a woman three days into the hills who will receive her and call her blessed and let her sing.
If you do not have that woman in your life right now, the figure is also showing you that the finding of her is part of the practice. Mary did not stay in Nazareth alone with the trouble. She walked. The walking was part of the yes. The arrival at the older woman’s house was part of the yes. The being received was part of the yes. The Magnificat was not the first part of Mary’s faith; it was the second part, after the first part had been carried into the room where it could be heard.
(If the loneliness of an unchosen carrying has been the shape of your last year, a mother’s journal book — for the years that pass too fast and too slow sits as the closer companion to the next stretch.)
The somatic that goes with the young yes
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Tileston’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place one hand, lightly, over your lower belly — the place a young pregnancy first registers in the body, the place a fear or an unchosen carrying also registers in the body when the mind has not yet put words to it. Leave the hand there. The belly is likely held — slightly tightened, the small chronic bracing of a woman holding the unchosen thing in a place that was not built to brace. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the belly soften under the hand by the smallest amount. Take a second slow inhale. On the second exhale, let the belly soften a little further. The hand is not pressing. The hand is bearing witness.
Stay with three slow breaths under the hand. Then take the hand away and continue reading.
The belly you have just unbraced by an inch is the belly Mary sang the Magnificat from. The body of the woman carrying the unchosen thing is a held belly. The body of the woman who has said yes to the One who is asking — who has placed the trouble in His hands and is no longer the one responsible for the outcome — is the belly that is, at last, allowed to soften. The softening is not the proof that the thing has lifted; the thing is still being carried. The softening is the body’s small obedience to the One whose tender mercy now holds the contents of the answer. Behold my needs which I know not myself; see, and do according to Thy tender mercy. The belly, prayed from with a soft front instead of a held one, is the body of the yes.
A daily companion for the slow yes
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s walks the kind of slow reading this article is the long form of — one short passage each evening, with room for the honest sentence, a place to bring the day’s unchosen carrying to the page without performing wellness. Built for the woman whose questions about Mary are not academic. The 140-day form gives the practice a shape, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a structure and you do not have to invent one.
The third episode: she kept all these things
“Whatever happens, abide steadfast in a determination to cling simply to God, trusting to His eternal love for you; and if you find that you have wandered forth from this shelter, recall your heart quietly and simply.”
— Mary Tileston, Daily Strength for Daily Needs
This is the third passage. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
Tileston is naming the long shape of Mary’s life after the Magnificat — the decades the New Testament barely records, the years in Nazareth raising the boy, the years of watching him grow up and slowly become someone she could not fully follow, the years that ended at the foot of a Roman cross. Twice in the Gospel of Luke the text tells you what she was doing through those years. Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. The keeping is the long practice. The pondering is the slow private re-reading of what the angel had said, what Elizabeth had said, what the shepherds had said, what Simeon had said in the temple, what the boy had said at twelve when he was found in his Father’s house. Mary did not write a gospel. She did not preach a sermon. She kept things in her heart and pondered them. That was her ongoing yes.
The figure has something to say to you about that. The yes you are being asked to say is not a one-time yes at the angel’s announcement. It is a thirty-year yes of keeping things in your heart and pondering them. The carrying that is asked of you now is the carrying of a thing whose meaning will only become clear over decades — the diagnosis whose role in your life you will not understand for years, the move whose purpose you will not see for a decade, the role you have been asked to take on whose fruit you will not pick up until a later season of life. The yes at the moment of the angel is only the first yes. The longer yes is the keeping. The keeping is what Mary did from Nazareth through Bethlehem through Egypt through the temple through Cana through Calvary. The keeping is the figure’s whole life.
If you find that you have wandered forth from this shelter, recall your heart quietly and simply. Tileston is naming the soft return that goes with the long keeping. Mary too will have wandered, in the inner sense. The decades were long. The boy did things that confused her. The crowd around him grew, and her relationship with him changed shape, and the text records moments — the wedding at Cana, the visit to Capernaum — where her own understanding lagged behind what he was becoming. Recall your heart quietly and simply. The figure shows you that the wandering, when it happens, is not the end of the yes. The recalling is. The simple coming back. The quiet return to the same shelter the angel had first asked her to step into. The yes is reaffirmed not by a second angel but by the small daily turning back of the heart, by an older woman whose original yes is now the underground river of the rest of her life.
For you, this is the part to sit with. The yes you are saying now is the first yes. The yes you will keep saying, over the decades the unchosen thing slowly becomes part of your life, is the longer yes — the pondering, the keeping, the soft recalling of the heart back to the shelter every time you find you have wandered out of it. What can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus is, finally, this: that the carrying of the thing is the practice, and the practice is decades long, and the One who asked is the One who holds the contents of the answer the whole way through. (The sibling essays in this Bible-figure series sit at what can we learn from Hannah’s prayer — Spurgeon on the praying woman and what can we learn from Ruth — Tileston on Ruth’s loyalty.)
What can we learn from Mary mother of Jesus
Three things, at the speed of the angel, the doorway, and the kept heart.
The first is that the yes does not require understanding first. Mary did not understand the angel’s announcement. She asked how shall this be, received not an explanation but a description of the One who would do the thing, and on that description placed her yes. The trouble was not erased. The yes was said with the trouble still in the room. Your yes is allowed to be said the same way.
The second is that the song that follows the yes requires the Elizabeth. The young woman could not have sung the Magnificat alone in Nazareth. She walked three days into the hills, was received by an older woman who believed her without demanding proof, and sang from the relief of being received. If you do not have that woman in your life now, the finding of her is part of the practice. The yes will be lonelier without her than it has to be.
The third is that the yes is not a one-time yes. It is a thirty-year yes of keeping all these things and pondering them in your heart. The carrying becomes the practice. The pondering becomes the prayer. The meaning becomes clear over decades. And when the heart wanders — which it will, repeatedly, over the long carrying — the recalling is the soft return to the same shelter the angel first asked you to step into.
This is what we can learn from Mary mother of Jesus. Not a saint on a Christmas card. A young woman, watched closely, in the interior weather of a yes she was not old enough to fully understand — and a God whose tender mercy held the contents of the answer the whole way through.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the soul in proximity to the shelter Tileston describes, until the proximity becomes the rest.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Tileston’s slow vocabulary — the shelter, the simple presenting, the kept and pondered heart — into a daily companion built for the woman whose questions about Mary are not academic, but personal.
