SOLEMNITY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Balancing Devotion to, with Imitation of, Mary
(Gen 3:9-20; Ps 98; Eph 1:3-12; Lk 1:26-38)
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Diego Velázquez
The Immaculate Conception
1618-19
In November – December of 2016 and again in 2018, I was chaplain for a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land and was privileged to preside at the Eucharist commemorating this feast of the Immaculate Conception. The celebrations took place in the cave-grotto where St. Jerome spent 35 years translating the Hebrew and Aramaic texts into the Latin Vulgate.
The Word of God Jerome translated invites us to balance devotion to Mary with imitation of her, especially in doing the will of God. Fr. Cantalamessa, the papal preacher, stresses that imitation of Mary is just as important as devotion to her.
The first reading of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve reminds us of the reality of temptation to put our faith in the false gods of possessions and pleasure, prestige and fame, power and control. Their failure to obey the will of God led to what we call original sin, a woundedness that affects our world to this day. Some would say that we all have an original wound, or core grief, that underlies our addictions and our wrongdoing – our own original sinfulness.
The psalm reassures us that there is one who is victorious, who has done marvelous things, and so we should sing to the Lord a new song to celebrate this reality.
St. Paul, in his words to the Ephesians in the second reading, identifies this victor as Jesus Christ, who is holy and blameless in love, and who has adopted us into his own divine life as sons and daughters so we could live to the praise of his glory.
Our pilgrim group also visited the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth and went down to the grotto of the Annunciation where there is an altar inscribed with the words, “Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est” – “Here the word was made flesh.” It was difficult to describe our feelings as we stood in awe facing that mystery.
The familiar story of the annunciation in the Gospel reminds us that Mary shares in the victory of Jesus, her son, over sin and death. As such, she was sinless from the moment of her conception, holy and immaculate, filled with grace, with no original sin or wound, for nothing is impossible with God. We are invited to venerate her, and above all, to imitate her qualities of faith, compassion, justice and genuine caring.
The Old Testament intuits this holiness of Mary, especially in the Song of Songs: “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you” (4:7). “My dove, my perfect one, is the only one, the darling of her mother, flawless to her that bore her. The maidens saw her and called her happy” (6:9). To whom else would these verses be referring to?
Richard and Danelle Borgman, in their book Searching for the Beautiful Garden, point out Mary did not receive grace when the angel greeted her. She was already “full of grace” and had been from the moment of her conception. The Greek word for “full of grace” is kécharitôménê, the perfect participle of the verb, meaning that the act of becoming “full of grace had been completed in the past before the angel spoke. Every grace that we need is already in abundance in the heart of our mother, Mary”.
The late Gerald May, a Catholic psychologist, in his book entitled Will and Grace, points out a choice we have regarding the great gift of free will that God gave us: we can be stubborn and willful, resisting God’s grace and landing ourselves into all kinds of trouble, or we can be willing and open to God’s will, becoming like Mary, full of grace and obedient to how God wants to use us to build up the reign of God here on earth.
Step 11 of the 12 Step program invites us through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, seeking only the knowledge of God’s will for us, and the power to carry it out. That Step fits the feast of the Immaculate Conception like a glove, especially Mary’s radical openness to God’s will, even if she did not understand all that would entail.
Today is an important feast day for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Our founder St. Eugene de Mazenod, had a great love for Mary, a strong devotion to her, and prayed to her for approval of our new congregation named after her. Like Jesus, who was born into poverty, and like Mary, who in all her apparitions showed a preferential option for the poor, St. Eugene also taught us to always go out to the poor, the marginalized, the overlooked and forgotten. In that way, he balanced devotion to, and imitation of, Mary in his life and ministry.
The Eucharist is a celebration of how Jesus, like Mary, did the will of the Father, at the cost of his life. May our celebration deepen our faith in Jesus, Son of Mary, and empower us to balance devotion to Mary with imitation of Mary in our lives.
