The Ave Maria, A Prayer of Defiance

Here is a translation of it: 

Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

For me the Ave Maria is:

A commemoration of one of the first steps in one of mankind's greatest adventures, an adventure which would make a poor and very young person the mother of God Incarnate.

A reminder of how our God invariably picks the supposedly weak for servants and intimates.

A reminder of my own arrogance and that without humility I am unable to draw closer to Reality.

A reminder of the fact that our God is an outrageous God. Consider the almost gross sensuality of the prayer with its "the fruit of thy womb." God as the fruit of something so vulgar as a woman's guts! "Guts?" Yes, at least for the French. Here is their version of the phrase: "le fruit de vos entrailles," which translates literally as "the fruit of thy guts." Does not the phrase scream out, "All is sacred which I, your God, have made!"?

A reminder that we are a sensual people, a people of a God Incarnate.

A prayer of defiance of all those who would make God separate from the material world: the Deists, the Gnostics, the body haters, and the rest of them.

A reminder of my long period of separation from the Church, during which Benedict Spinoza was my principal teacher, a teacher who kept before me the human Christ and the reality that God and the material world are inseparable, that the material world is, in Spinoza's words, God's Body.