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Homily of the Day
| Title: |
She Was Almost Invisible, but She Gave Birth to Him! |
| Author: |
Monsignor Dennis Clark, Ph. D. |
| Date: |
Wednesday, December 8, 2004 |
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Genesis 3:9-15, 20; Ephesians 1:3-6 11-12; Luke 1:26-38
As we look across the span of recorded history, we find the exploits of leaders, scholars, adventurers, inventors, and explorers whose achievements changed forever the world that we live in. And we wonder how they rose to greatness, as often as not from humble beginnings. More often than not, our wonderings go unanswered, because there is rarely a useful record of their formative years, and even less useful records of those invisible people who did the forming and shaping of their intellects and their souls.
The feast we mark today celebrates that simple peasant girl whose heart was so open to God that she gave birth to God's only Son, whom she then tended and guided for the many years that followed. What an extraordinary privilege that was, and with what grace Mary lived up to her special calling at every moment. At the very first moment of it all, she said to the angel, "I don't understand how this can be, but my answer to God is 'Yes.'" And so it was all her life long.
That is why we celebrate this and all the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because she, a human being just like us, had both the ability and the willingness to say "Yes" to God at every moment. In doing that, she made the right home and formed the right heart in God's Son and her son, Jesus.
Mary is the almost-invisible woman in the Gospels, but her gift to Jesus was beyond calculation. The gifts that we have to give will in the long run also be almost entirely invisible except to those who can read the fine lines of cause and effect from generation to generation.
Give your gift as Mary did. History may never notice, but God will, and so will many of His children.
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Pope Blessed Pius IX instituted this solemnity when he proclaimed as dogma the truth of Mary's Immaculate Conception on December 8,1854, formally affirming the traditional belief of the Church that she was conceived free from the stain of original sin. This feast has been celebrated in the East and also in many places in the West since the eighth century.