Originally published 5/18/19
I was 14 years old in 9th grade. In 1984, we were the oldest at McCracken Junior High School, the most mature, reigning over and not caring much about little 7th and 8th grade kids. We had outgrown our awkwardness and become comfortable in our perms, double-wrapped belts and add-a-bead necklaces. Social groups had been established, and we settled into friendships that would last a lifetime.
Laura, Liz and Bianca. Laura was my college roommate, and we stood in each other's weddings. Liz was recently voted one of the most successful businesswomen in Charlotte. We get together regularly. Bianca moved back to Germany, but continues to visit stateside. She and Liz are in close touch.
Harrison, left, me, right, at Brevard Music Camp, summer 1984. We played viola together year round, and were in dozens of Youth Theatre plays. She stood in my wedding, too. Rayban Wayfarers, the kind Tom Cruise wore in Risky Business, were sooooo cool.
MTV was coming into its own, forever changing the lexicon of music; we begged our parents for cable just so we could watch it, because we no longer listened to music, we watched it. Boy bands wore more makeup and hair products than girls did, and we scraped together $14.95 for tickets to their concerts. Movies like The Outsiders, Footloose and The Karate Kid mirrored our lives. They were about kids becoming themselves, figuring out who they were apart from and along with who their friends were, and nesting in a group that provided assurance and support that we were, indeed, OK.
Left: Me and Shelly. We went to Lan-Yair Pool as kids. We were co-editors of the yearbook, from which this photo was taken. Her mom took us to see Duran Duran in 1984. Shelly's first wedding was on my 21st birthday. I got really drunk. When I got divorced, she did my taxes. She's brilliant at math. We went to the Duran Duran reunion tour in 2003.
At 14, you stand on the cusp of everything. Not yet an independent driver, but desperately working to discern who you are as a person, and who you will be as an adult. I was in the orchestra, co-editor of the yearbook with Shelly, and always involved in a play at the Youth Theatre with my friend Harrison. A cursory glance at the report cards stored in my scrapbook reveal school was not the most important thing. Classes begin to get hard in 9th grade, and Mrs. Crane's legendary biology class almost broke me. I had several crushes, whom I will not embarrass myself by naming here, mostly on boys who didn't know I existed. That's ok, I had a bevy of girlfriends who had banded together in an Outsiders kind of way and forged our own path. We had been together for three years of junior high school, many of us since elementary school.
We knew the next year - at the gargantuan Spartanburg High School, which boasted more than 2000 kids in grades 10-12 - was likely to change us and separate us, so we unknowingly clung to our last days together in 9th grade. Notes in my yearbook echo that: Liz wrote "Please let's keep together at SHS." "We better have some classes together next year," Laura wrote. "I'm worried about homeroom cause I feel it in my bones - mine's gonna suck!" Shelly feared!!
Those were common schoolhouse fears: not knowing who's going to be in our class, hoping to see a familiar face, sitting with a friend at lunch, being able to get to the lockers regularly to exchange books, having a group to fit in with, yet becoming an individual that gets you noticed while still tethered to the group that provides security. It's a strange, exciting, scary, formative time.
Mary was 14 years old when she was visited by the Angel Gabriel, and told she was going to give birth to a son and that she was to name him Jesus. Furthermore, this angel told her:
"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” Luke 1:32-33. Imagine, being 14 years old, trying to figure out who you are, on the cusp of womanhood, mostly worrying about your hair and what other people thought of you, just getting a handle on what that might be, and, as Mary was, already set to marry a guy named Joseph, and an angel...yes, an angel....comes and gives you this news.
She has only one question:
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” Luke 1:34
Admittedly, I got a C in Mrs. Crane's biology class. Perhaps Mary did better in biology. Still, I don't think it's the biological part that I would have questions about.
She's not worried about the fact that an angel, essentially a stranger, flew into her cave, and started speaking. She's not worried about the fact that this angel just said that her son will be a king, and that his kingdom, in fact, will never end. Mary lived, as a reminder, in Nazareth, a small town not near regular trade routes, in an obscure region of Galilee, in a cave. This would have been an odd message to receive about one's future.
The angel distracts her with more biological miracles, following her train of thought: The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.” Luke 1:35-37
Perhaps Gabriel would have struggled in Mrs. Crane's class, too.
The Catholics are much more in awe of Mary than mainline Protestants. Protestants really give little credence to this moment, when a 14-year-old was visited by an angel who told her that the Holy Spirit got her pregnant and that she would give birth to the Son of God, and that her older cousin Elizabeth would also have a baby, all of which she believed with little question. Except for the one biological clarification, the non-answer to which she accepted in total faith.
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her. Luke 1:38
Left: An altar in the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, built over and on the cave where it is believed that the Angel Gabriel visited Mary.
When I was 14 years old, the only apparition I was seeing was Ralph Macchio, in my dreams and on the silver screen. Shelly, Laura and I went to Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) together, but we weren't exactly focused on receiving messages from angels and the Holy Spirit: ski trips and haunted houses were as close as we came to looking for the presence of God, whom I'm sure was there, but hidden behind our 14-year-old self-conscious constructs of individuality and the group dynamic.
I know Mary's 14 was different from my 14. The year 1 BC didn't have pouty movie stars and boys with big hair playing synthesizers on TV, and Mary probably didn't have to suffer fitting in at a junior high school. She was getting ready to be married. None of us did that until well into the next decade. Mary grew up faster than we did. There were no colleges, careers, or independence to be lived out before settling down and starting a family. After all, she had to give birth to the Son of God.
I am in awe of Mary, the 14-year-old who worried little that she had been chosen to do this odd thing, and who in fact glorifies the Lord in what we now know as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).
Michael and I now stand on the cusp of change again, not sure where we're going to go or what we're going to do. Rather like a 14-year-old. Except when you're closing in on 50, the unsureness and unknowing turns into anxiety and worry. There are bills now, and mortgages, college tuitions and adult children who still need guidance and cash. How I yearn for the days when my biggest worry was who was in my homeroom, or what the class snob thought of my belt.
Mary simply said "May your word to me be fulfilled." She was lucky to have the clarification of an angel who, even if he spoke around it a little bit, laid out her path. She heard, she understood, she believed. (I don't doubt that totally eased her worry, as there was the little matter of explaining herself to Joseph. They got over that hump, though, which was no doubt a little awkward.)
It would be nice if an angel could visit us, and lay out the path in some sort of poetic way. So my new millennium 14-year-old self could confidently straighten her hair, listen to Pandora's smooth jazz channel on her phone, and write her next blog for the internet to read.
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