Numberless

Mary is called full of grace, as Bernard says, because four kinds of grace shone in her spirit: the devotion of her humility, the reverence of her modesty, the greatness of her faith, and the martyrdom of her heart. She is told, The Lord is with thee, because four things, as the same Bernard says, shone upon her from heaven, these being Mary’s sanctification, the angel’s salutation, the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, and the incarnation of the Son of God. Moreover she is told, Blessed art thou among women, because, according to the same author, four things also shone in her body: she was the Virgin of virgins, fruitful without corruption, pregnant without heaviness, and delivered without pain.

–Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, tr. William Granger Ryan, “The Annunciation of the Lord.”

O numberless, crammed into calculations,
intelligence may claim it has sufficed
but you are orders more than our equations:
one god, three persons; two natures in one Christ.
Yet magnitude to finitude is spliced,
nine months contained, like one of your creations.

Too great for me, this knowledge. It encumbers
my soul, this greater sum than all its parts,
and so I come to you by rote and numbers.
I seek you out in tables and in charts.
Fool’s errand, for you dwell in trackless hearts
and give to your beloved as she slumbers.

Yet come, O endlessness: Spite all my efforts
to fit your greatness to my clutch and clasp,
and dwindle of yourself to human presence,
your mystery made small enough to grasp.
Where I have locked the door, oh, break the hasp
and enter, Lord, as streams into my deserts.

You who are greater than the mind can fathom,
see all my mind’s fractured geometries
and fill each gap, suffusing every stratum
with fractions of undreamt infinities
‘til I inhabit your eternities
and see you in the fragments of the atom. Amen.