Announcement is a very different word than annunciation. The connotations of the first are workaday, bureaucratic, while the connotations of the second are grand, even–in the poem excerpted below–sacred. Yet Denise Levertov wants us to undersand that the distinction obscures rather than illuminates. God is forever annunciating His presence, offering to be born in each of our lives. We may not get the angel, but we get the invitation.
from Annunciation
by Densire Levertov
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
You can find the whole poem here. Or in The Stream and the Sapphire.
(Thanks to the New York and New Jersey dioceses of the Orthodox Church in America.)