ON THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (December 8)

                                       SHE IS THE WORLD OF GOD.

                                      WHEN WE SAY "MARY", SHE SAYS "GOD".  

                

We meet her in St Luke's Gospel when the Angel Gabriel addresses her as, "Full of grace", "κεχαριτωµευη": not a name but a title, the title given to her by God from all eternity. To be "full of grace" means that in such a soul there is no space for anything else... no sin, no tendency toward sin, totally and completely empty of self.

                         SHE IS MARY, THE IMMACULATA, WITHOUT STAIN OR WRINKLE.

                        SHE IS FREE FROM PERSONAL SIN AND MORAL IMPERFECTION.

When she responded to the Angel Gabriel who is the Watchguard of the House of Israel, she described herself as "douly", handmaid. She was proclaiming to all generations and for all eternity that she was the bondslave "of the Lord", not a servant of the Lord, but His bondslave. She made no decisions of her own, had no desires of her own and so no attachments, no property but what her Lord chose to give to her. She was owned by her Lord, her entire identity was in Him to choose whatever He wished to do with her, even to take her life. 

AND JUST AS THE SPIRIT OF GOD 'HOVERED OVER THE WATERS' AND GAVE LIFE IN GENESIS 1, SO TOO DID THE POWER OF THE MOST HIGH HOVER OVER THE WOMAN , OVERSHADOWED HER, THEN IN THE SPIRIT'S SUPREME ACT OF CREATION, HE GAVE LIFE TO THE HOLY ONE, THE SON OF GOD, TO BE FORMED IN HER WOMB (LUKE 1:35), THE ONE WHO WAS THE BONDSLAVE OF THE LORD AND WHO WAS FILLED WITH GRACE.

God poured Himself into her, shared His Being with her, took His Flesh from her, His facial Features resembled hers, His hair color and the color of His eyes. She was His bondslave. Yet He would will to become totally dependent on her for everything in His Infancy. She would read Isaiah to Him and He would hear His mother describe His suffering and death; He would become "obedient" to her (Luke 2:51).

God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit ordained that Mary would be without sin from before time began. Creation, Incarnation, Redemption were one Action of God. Christ's death on the Cross was not a rescue plan. From before time began, God ordained that Christ would come to us to redeem all humanity from the stain of sin. Creation met in the Incarnation as did the Redemption of our souls. 

Yet a question has to be asked... if Mary was free from sin, immaculate in soul and body, she should not have needed to be liberated from sin that her Immaculate Heart did not commit. Being born with original sin, that is our path.

Through the decades, Spirit Lord guided the minds of those who would gradually reveal to our finite understanding the awesome plan of Almighty God. He inspired the mind of the theologian, Blessed Duns Scotus who would passionately explain that God had PRESERVED Mary from sin. We, subject to the sin of our original parents, looked to Christ Jesus to LIBERATE our souls from original sin.

                               Preservation(Mary)/liberation(us). 

After a millennium of seeking Truth, Pope Pius IX formally defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, INEFFABILIS DEUS, on December 8, 1854.

As if to confirm this beauty revealing God's Glorious Action within her, Our Lady herself appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous, at Lourdes. On March 25th, 1858, when Bernadette asked the Virgin Mary to tell her who she was, our Mother replied:

                                    "I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION."

"Mary is God's garden of Paradise, his own unspeakable world, into which his Son entered to do wonderful things, to tend to it and to take delight in it. He created a world for the wayfarer, that is, the one we are living in. He created a second world - Paradise - for the Blessed. He created a third world for himself, which he named Mary. She is a world unknown to most mortals here on earth. Even the angels and saints in heaven find her incomprehensible, and are lost in admiration of a God who is so exalted and so far above them, so distant from them, and so enclosed in Mary, his chosen world, that they exclaim: 'Holy, holy, holy' unceasingly” (Secret of Mary - St. Louis de Montfort).

And yet, this is our Mother who knows in advance when we are running out of spiritual wine (John 2:3) and whose request  encouraged Jesus on to the road to Calvary so that her children of all generations would be won for God; the Woman who "stood" at the foot of the Cross and was given over to one of her adopted children, St John. This same beloved disciple immediately removed her from Jerusalem where the Roman authorities would have arrested her as a great prize after the death of the Nazarean. 

She is the Immaculata of Maximillian Kolbe.

"God the Father made an assemblage of all the waters, and He named it the sea (mar). He has made an assemblage of all His graces and He has named it Mary (Maria). Mary is the safest, easiest, shortest and most perfect way of approaching Jesus” (St Louis de Montfort).

"If Jesus is Life, Mary is the Mother of Life.

If Jesus is Hope, Mary is the Mother of Hope.
If Jesus is Peace, Mary is the Mother of Peace, Mother of the Prince of Peace.

May you guide your children on their pilgrimage of faith, making them ever more obedient and faithful to the Word of God." (St John Paul II)