"God is greater than that which can be conceived.” - Saint Anselm

     In translation, no matter how much we praise God, and bless Him, and adore him, and glorify Him, and give Him thanks for His great glory, we still fall short in our ability to imagine God, who is inconceivable, as in not able to be taken into the mind.
     What makes the Christian faith so remarkable is that God transcended this boundary by conceiving of himself in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The God-who-is-beyond-us became the God who is our Emmanuel, meaning,  God is with us.
     "Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you”.  Those words by the Angel Gabriel ushered in the story of the Annunciation, celebrated on March 25th,  nine months before Christmas.
     Mary's response to all of this?  The Latin word is FIAT, which means let it be done.  Her choice will stand forever as the reason she is considered the greatest of the saints.
     In St. Joseph Church,  there are at least two features on her statue worth noting.  She stands upon the moon, a symbol of the vision in which a woman "with the moon under her feet" gives birth to her child, as stated in Revelation 12:1.  This moon is often accompanied by twelve stars, which represent the Old Testament tribes of Israel or the New Testament apostles.
     Mary is adorned in her traditional blue robe. In the Book of Numbers, God directed Moses to cover the Ark of the Covenant with a blue cloth.  Mary cloaked in blue is a symbol of her role as the 'Ark of the Covenant.’ This new covenant was taken into her when the Angel Gabriel proclaimed, " Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus."
David Palmieri, author of this story, is a parishioner and chair of the Theology Dept. at Xaverian Brothers High School.