Hail Mary, full of grace

Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God

A week after Christmas, most shopping malls are already over the hype that led up to that celebration. But our own Christian celebration of Christmas, however, has not ended. Though, it is the shortest liturgical season in our Church’s calendar, the Church does not hesitate to pull out all the stops to surprise and entice us with a slew of celebrations. While the world celebrates the threshold of a new year, the Church invites us to pause to consider one of the major implications of Christmas and the Incarnation: the woman who gave birth to Emmanuel – God with us. The Mass of today salutes her who in her womb bore the King of heaven and earth, the Creator of the world, the Son of the Eternal Father, the Sun of Justice. By virtue of her relationship to Jesus Christ, the Church honours her with the loftiest title possible for any human person, “Mother of God.”

And so on this first day of the New Year, the Church speaks of her the greatness of the Ever-Virgin Mary, the Holy Theotokos, the Mother of God, because she carried God within her. Perhaps, due to attacks from Protestants, we have become embarrassed of such titles being accorded to Mary or to any other human person. How could a creature be deemed as the mother of her Creator? How could a mere human give birth to God? And yet, it is precisely this preposterous belief that forms the basis for our celebration of Christmas. God did not become man in a vacuum. He did not beam himself down from the heavenly heights and materialise in human form. At Christmas, we celebrate how God chose to be born of the Virgin Mary. In order for Him to assume our humanity, the Blessed Virgin Mary truly had to give birth to God. Since Mary is Jesus’ mother, it must be concluded that she is also the Mother of God: If Mary is the mother of Jesus, and if Jesus is God, then Mary is the Mother of God. There is no way out of this logical syllogism.

Saint Anselm presents this argument in the following fashion – “To Mary God gave his only-begotten Son, whom he loved as himself. Through Mary God made himself a Son, not different but the same, by nature Son of God and Son of Mary. The whole universe was created by God, and God was born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary gave birth to God. The God who made all things gave himself form through Mary, and thus he made his own creation. He who could create all things from nothing would not remake his ruined creation without Mary. God, then, is the Father of the created world and Mary the mother of the re-created world. God is the Father by whom all things were given life, and Mary the mother through whom all things were given new life. For God begot the Son, through whom all things were made, and Mary gave birth to him as the Saviour of the world. Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed.”

Mary as an image of Christ, in the same way that today’s feast of the Feast of Mary, Mother of God, is less about the Mother than it is about the Son. Though, this feast seems dedicate to her, note that she is in the background not in the foreground of our celebration. Both the icon and today’s feast shows the traditional view of the Church concerning the place and essential role of Mary in God’s divine economy – his plan of salvation. She is indispensable because without her, Christ’s birth could not have taken place. The pre-existent Word could not have become flesh if not for her fiat. Christ could not have been born without her free consent. 

Therefore, whenever we offer fitting praise to Mary through Her glorious titles, we imitate the Blessed Trinity in a very concrete way. According to the gospels, each Divine Person of the Trinity has bestowed a particular title of honour on the Blessed Virgin. God the Father, through His messenger Gabriel, gives her the title "Full of Grace." God the Son, addressing the Beloved Disciple from the Cross, publicly recognises her title of "Mother", "Behold your mother". And, again, God the Holy Spirit, through her cousin Elizabeth, enshrines forever her title of "Theotokos", Mother of God. If such is the honour paid directly to our Blessed Mother by God, how can we even dare to suggest that our own poor human praises can ever be either sufficient or over-abundant? And so at the beginning of a New Year, we join our voices to Christians of every age as we lovingly invoke her titles and seek her intercession, “Pray for us O Holy Mother of God … that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ”

Beauty Restored

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception - December 8

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Perhaps, this is one of the Marian dogma that is often mistaken by many, including catholic themselves. Many think that the Feast of Immaculate Conception celebrates the conception of Christ in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The feast occurs only 17 days before the Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) should make the error obvious. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was conceived without original sin. 

Although the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was only promulgated in the 19^thcentury, our story begins at the very beginning, in fact, in the Book of Genesis, where we hear the story of man’s origins and also the origin of sin. God had created the whole universe for the benefit of man that man may discover his primary vocation, to live his life entirely in the service of God. God placed order in his creation; He imbued it with his own personal qualities of goodness, truth and finally beauty. Thus, by contemplating the beauty of Creation, man may come to recognise the beauty of God. In the early fifth century, St Augustine of Hippo asked "Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not one who is beautiful and unchangeable?" To know God is to know beauty; to know beauty is to know God. Just as God is the source of all truth and goodness, God is also the source of all beauty. Thus, everything that is beautiful reflects God’s artistry. Indeed, God is Beauty itself.  St Hilary of Poitiers, wrote: “Surely the author of all created beauty must himself be the beauty in all beauty.”

But this wonderful story of creation, though perfect in all aspects as far as God was concerned, was damaged though not completely destroyed by the ugliness of sin – man choosing to rewrite the story of creation by removing God, the Creator, from the equation. Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains the reality of original sin in this manner: “In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully "divinised" by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to "be like God", but "without God, before God, and not in accordance with God" (CCC #398). Ugliness entered the world through sin. It is aptly symbolised by Adam and Eve’s sudden realisation of their own nakedness, now seen as something bad and ugly which required masking. Thus, through the disobedience of our first parents, mankind became infected with the pandemic malaise of original sin. With original sin came the ugliness of every depravity, ignorance, and malice known to man. The beauty of Paradise was lost.

This earthly Paradise was never completely forgotten. But, it had been reduced to a mere dream, a flicker of hope that would sustain man’s search for the good, the true and beautiful. Man would attempt to rediscover it through works of his own creation. But the story of the Tower of Babel is lesson that man is only capable of imitating, and as long as he refused to submit to the authority of God, would continue disfiguring the works of his Creator. Thus his creativity would often be subjected to curse of narcissistic self-fulfilment. However, there were those who remain faithful to the dream. The holy men and women of ancient times were burdened by the raggedness of the sinful world. But they longed for a fresh start, for a new birth, for another Garden of beauty, freshness and promise. They realised that Man was incapable of conceiving such a reality. Only God could answer their longing. Beauty itself had to return to creation in order that the universe may be restored to its original harmony and man returned to his original state of grace. But for Beauty to enter into world disfigured by Sin, a garden preserved from the ravages of sin would have to be found, for Holiness and Sin were absolutely irreconcilable. God planted the new Garden in the womb of St. Ann. God made a new Eve, untouched by the sin of the world, to be the mother of the new Adam.

As much as secular humanism may continue to push and sell optimistic lies to the contrary, Christians recognise that we human beings cannot refresh the world. We cannot make the world clean and promising and new. In spite of our best innovations and inventions, we cannot restore the world to its original beauty. But God can. And this is the powerful message of hope contained in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the Solemnity we commemorate in this morning’s celebration.  God can bring good out of evil. God can turn the cross, which was an instrument of inhuman torture, the symbol of mankind’s abject sinfulness —God can turn the cross of agony and death into the tree of life. God can turn the sin of Adam into the Happy Fault proclaimed at every Easter Vigil. God can give the world a new Eve, a new mother. And He did! He made the Blessed Virgin Mary.

By affirming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, we too are restoring something fundamental that has been lost to modern man – the Truth concerning the sovereignty of God. It is not only Beauty which is restored, but also the True and the Good. By promulgating the dogma in a time when rationalism attacked the foundation of the faith, Blessed Pius IX raised the voice of the Church to defend and to glumly reaffirm the existence of the supernatural order. Against the lie posed by humanism that God does not exist or even if he did, He was indifferent to our struggles and problems, the Church proclaims this Truth – God is Real. He is very very Real and He has not forgotten us. We don’t need an image to appear on a window to tell us of this. We already have the real thing – the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception, the New Eve, the Beautiful Icon of the Church.

Coinciding with this feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary would be the unveiling of our sanctuary, with its beauty restored. Against the enemies of beauty who argue that beauty is useless and serves no utilitarian purpose, we must disagree and affirm together with Mary that we need beauty. Let me reiterate - to know God is to know beauty; to know beauty is to know God. Beauty attracts us, provokes adoration, and invites us to adorn ourselves with its lustre. If nothing else, we deeply feel the absence of beauty in a world disfigured by original sin. Without beauty, our faith loses its lustre – it’s very glory, its sacred aura. We must, therefore, recover the beauty of holiness, and re-experience the holiness of beauty or our religion will become nothing more than dry and dusty truth encrusted with overly-demanding morals. We recover the beauty of holiness through our love of our Blessed Mother, the love of God our Father, Jesus her Son, and the Holy Spirit who preserved her from original sin. And we express our love most perfectly when we adorn our lives with the beauty of divine holiness and the light of sacred glory, so that one day we may take our place among the saints in the heavenly Jerusalem. It is there that Beauty, now prefigured in Mary, will be perfectly restored!