Mary Sang Before She Knew Who She Was

Mary is somewhere between thirteen and seventeen years old. She has just said yes to an angel, and her body has begun to do something she did not ask it to do. Her clothes will not fit much longer. The story she had imagined for her life, the small ordinary one with Joseph and a Nazareth kitchen, has been quietly closed and a stranger one opened in its place.

She goes to see Elizabeth. The text says she went with haste, into the hill country, which is to say she ran. A pregnant teenager runs eighty miles to a kinswoman's house because she needs another woman to look at her and tell her she is not crazy.

Elizabeth opens the door and the baby in her own womb leaps. Before Mary can explain anything, Elizabeth names her: Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Mary has not yet spoken a word about what happened. Her body is not yet showing. And already, in another woman's house, she is being called by a new name.

Then Mary opens her mouth.

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.

For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for he who is mighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

This is the Magnificat. Read it slowly and notice what she is actually doing. She is not waiting until the baby comes to know who she is. She is not waiting until her body settles, until Joseph decides, until the neighbors stop whispering. She is naming herself in the middle of the change. Servant. Blessed. Lifted. Filled. The Greek word behind "servant" is doule — bondservant, handmaid, one whose whole life belongs to another. She picks the word up and wears it as a crown.

Notice also what she does not do. She does not apologize for her body. She does not minimize the upheaval. She does not say once everything goes back to normal, because nothing is going back to normal and she knows it. She sings of a God who pulls down the mighty and fills the hungry, a God whose work in her body is part of a much larger overturning. Her stretched skin is theology. Her changed life is gospel.

The song lasts ten verses. Then Mary stays with Elizabeth for three months — long enough to hide a little, long enough to be fed by a woman who already knows. When she finally goes home, she goes home a different woman than the one who left. She left as Mary of Nazareth. She comes back as the mother of the Lord. The naming happened in the hill country, in another woman's kitchen, with no man present and no village watching.

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The Magnificat is a song sung by a body in the middle of being remade. That is its first miracle. The second is that she sang it before anyone congratulated her, before the baby was born, before she had any evidence at all that this would turn out well.

You are three weeks in. Your body is not yours in the way it used to be. Your hours are not yours. Your voice in a room of people sounds, to you, like someone else's voice — quieter, or louder, or further underwater. You have caught yourself in mirrors and not recognized the woman looking back. The question forming in you, maybe at 3 a.m. with a baby on your chest, is who am I now?

Mary did not wait to feel like herself again before she sang. She could not. There was no old self to go back to, only a new one being formed in real time, and so she opened her mouth and named what God was doing in her while it was still happening. Servant of the Lord. Blessed among women. The one he looked upon. She spoke her identity out loud before her body finished its work, before her future clarified, before anyone outside that kitchen could confirm a single thing she said.

You are allowed to do the same. You do not have to wait until your jeans fit, until the fog lifts, until you sleep through the night, until you feel like a person again, to know who you are. The woman holding this baby is not a diminished version of who you used to be. She is a named one. Mother. Beloved. Looked-upon. Vessel of a life God himself wove together in your body. Those names are true at 3 a.m. with spit-up on your shoulder. They are true on the days you cry in the shower. They are true the first time you laugh again and feel guilty for laughing.

The naming does not have to be loud. Mary's song was sung in one woman's kitchen, with one witness. Yours might be a sentence whispered over the bassinet. I am his. This child is his. I am held. That is a Magnificat. That counts.

You are not waiting to become someone. In God's eyes the becoming has already happened, and the new name is already yours.