Alice was a precocious three year old with a large family who surrounded her with love.
Maybe ten years ago now, Alice came to Mass on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. In the homily, I invited us to reflect on what Mary must have been like
… conceived without sin, never knowing the inner conflict we so often experience between our ideals and our weaknesses, our desire to be good and our temptations that tug at our hearts.
I described how Mary must have seemed to those around her: inspiring for her sincere and unalloyed faith in God; her consistent goodness; her gentle and confident focus on God. Mary was reliable, serene, peaceful. She had a balance and poise even when things went wrong and problems and sorrows visited. She was wise but not preachy, a genuinely interested good listener, a hard worker who did not draw attention to herself.
After Mass, her mother told me Alice tugged on her sleeve and said: “He’s talking about me!”
(Note: this is the same Alice who saw her reflection in a store window and announced to her family with irrepressible awe: “I’m adorable!”)
At age 3, Alice certainly had a good healthy self-image, and it reflects too on the positive love around her in her family.
But sooner or later, for all of us, that self-image is colored with an awareness of our weaknesses, imperfections, and failures from time to time. We recognize that we don’t always live up to our own ideals, and that the world around us is also flawed. We know all too well St. Paul’s experienc in his Letter to the Romans:
What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want,
but I do what I hate. … I do not do the good I want, but I do
the evil I do not want. … when I want to do right, evil is at
hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but
I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my
mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my
members. Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from
this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our
Lord.
Paul says nothing here about Mary or the grace we celebrate in her Immaculate Conception, but his words explain it in an unexpected way. Mary did not ever have that “law of sin” – our human weakness because of the original sin that has become part of our history. And she too was saved by Jesus Christ, our Lord.
This gift was given to her, not because of her goodness, but for the sake of the goodness to come in her life. It was a preparation for her role as Mother of God in the flesh. Yet precisely because we observe her freedom from sin from her very conception – from the first instant of her human life, still in the womb of her mother Anne – it assures us that the grace of God given to her did not make her radically different from us. Rather, she is radically the same. She is our sister in our common human nature; but she is our Mother in the order of grace.
These are hard concepts to put in simple words. Mary is full of grace – full of God’s life and goodness. But we also can be filled with his grace. If Mary could share in the redeeming work of her Son some thirty years before he came to live among us in time, so we can share in that redemption 2000 years later. God’s grace is not bound by place or time.
If it all still seems opaque, think back to three-year-old Alice. The innocence of a child at the beginning of life is the holiness we aspire to in glory. God desires us to know his love so deeply that reflecting on Mary's faith, hope, and love, we can also say: “He’s talking about me!” And some day, we pray that we can see ourselves through Jesus’ gaze of saving love and know in words free of all ego and pride: “In that love, I’m adorable.”
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