Immaculate Conception chez the Norbertines

Homily for the Immaculate Conception 8 December 2009
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate Chelmsford

I must say I always find the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady a difficult subject to explain – am I alone in this? As Catholics we understand the special nature of Our Lady almost instinctively, it is all part of the great reverence in which we hold her, but how to put this into words! The first thing we have to remind ourselves of, is that although only formally defined as a dogma of the Church in the 19th century, the idea that Our Lady was somehow always preserved by God from sin to fit her for her role as the one who would bear Divinity in her womb, and bring the Second Person of the Trinity into the world, the Theotokos, was present, at least implicitly, in the thought of the Fathers of the Church from the first centuries. Perhaps the earliest reference to this belief we have is in the “Letter to the Priests and Deacons of Achaia” – this may or may not be late 1st century, scholars worry about these things, but already this ancient document claims that God willed that “from an undefiled Virgin should be born the perfect man.” To move on to the fourth century: as your dear Community has a devotion to your holy father St Augustine, may I remind you of some lines of his? “How in fact could we know” he asks “the degree of grace given to her to conquer sin in every way, for she who was worthy to conceive and bring forth him who certainly never sinned?”
The Bible affords us examples of people who will have a special mission in life being prepared for it already at the moment of conception or in the womb. We think straightaway of the prophet Jeremiah, who tells us that “the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.’” (Jer 1:4-5) And of course we have the Psalmist saying “Thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb….thou knowest me right well, my frame was not hidden from thee when I was being made in secret.” (Ps 139:13-15) And then there is John the Baptist, of whom the Angel Gabriel said “he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” (Lk 1:15) The monk of Canterbury, Eadmer, writing in the 11th century, friend and biographer of St Anselm, was one of the first to compose a treatise on the Immaculate Conception – St Anselm of course introduced this very feast into the calendar of England and Normandy; Eadmer calls Our Lady “the gentlest cradle of the only Son of Almighty God”, and again “the palace where the Christ in person would assume human nature” and having reminded us of this text about John the Baptist asks “who would dare say that the Virgin….was deprived at the very instant of her conception of the grace and right of the Holy Spirit?” We would be here all night if I went through all the sources- I just have three more writers to quote! That great Oratorian Cardinal de Bérulle in the 16th century explains the Immaculate Conception in this way: he says “God exists and acts in her more than she does herself” “She has no thought but by his grace, no movement but by his Spirit, no action but by his love”. In a similar way, St Maximilian Kolbe writing in the 1930s says “there was not found in her the least distancing of herself from the will of God”. To come right up to our own times, the French theologian and new auxiliary bishop of Lyon, Mgr Patrick Le Gall, when considering the Immaculate Conception, homes in on the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians: what St Paul is saying here of the destiny of all Christians, is particularly true of Mary: he says God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him”. (Eph 1:4) Mgr Le Gall says that this destiny of Our Lady, which we call the Immaculate Conception, makes us admire the power of the redemption that Christ achieves in one human being: “capable….of opening a space of fantastic freedom to recognise and respond to the call of God in all its richness”.
And now I come to what I think! Well, the explanation I like best, anyway. I got it from the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For me, as for him, the way in to this dogma of the Immaculate Conception lies in approaching it using the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato. Now don’t go to sleep, this is easy to understand I assure you! Plato had this idea that the world around us, and everything that we can see with our senses, is not real. Things in this world are in a constant state of flux, everything is changing all the time, the best idea we can get of anything using our senses is just a snapshot of the state it’s in right now. Plants are forever putting forth new leaves and shoots, flowers come into bud, open and fade – as the French say, “tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse”. It is only with the mind that we can really understand things, in the mind that we can hold the idea, what Plato calls the “form” of a thing, the idea of a thing in its essence, in its perfection, in its accuracy. No flower in any of its stages will be as perfect as the picture of what a flower should be that we have in our mind’s eye. Now when all these platonic ways of thinking were taken up by the first Christian thinkers- no surprise that they were, it was how they had been educated –you can see how useful they are as a way of thinking about our Christian destiny. Which is the real me? The picture of me at 20 with raven hair, the one of me in my forties in my Oxford gown? The one of me naked on a hearth rug (age 9 months I hasten to add! I’m not speaking of any recent indiscretion!) the ageing deacon in his late prime you see before you? Plato would say none of them are the real me, because the real James cannot be seen by the naked eye- the real James exists only in the mind of God. Now God, we can say, has in his creating of us as individuals, in his bringing of each one of us into the world, a form of us in his mind, an idea- the ideal version of me, that is my ultimate destiny, the me that God wants me to become. This is what St Paul means when in Sunday’s reading from his Letter to the Philippians he speaks of us reaching “the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces in us”, the version of ourselves that is “pure and blameless”. (Phil 1:10-11) And we, insofar as we co-operate with God’s grace or not, embark in our Christian living on the process of trying to align our version of ourselves, the work that is always in progress in our souls, with this perfect version of us that is in God’s mind, that is God’s will for me, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ” as St Paul has it. Alas, for most of us, poor frail human beings that we are, so easily deluded and derailed, the version of ourselves that we bring to our deathbeds is still some way off from the ideal of us that is in God’s mind! The best we can hope for, perhaps, is that there will at least be some points of resemblance between the two! Now to return finally to Our Lady- she is the exception of course. She is the one human being who fits the picture completely, with no discrepancies- as Fulton Sheen says “there is a perfect conformity between what he wanted her to be and what she is”. “Most of us” he says “are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfil the high hopes the Heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign….the Ideal that God had of her, that she is.” She is the one who is “pure and blameless”, “holy and blameless.”
Dear friends, when St Bernadette saw Our Lady in the grotto, she asked her who she was. “I am the Immaculate Conception” came the astounding reply. What Our Lady is giving us in these words is the explanation, the key, to her whole existence: conceived, brought into being by God as each one of us is, a human being made in the image and likeness of God, and yet immaculate- so at one with God and his will for her that she was brimful of his sanctifying grace, with no room for the slightest iota of sin, and could therefore only be what he had always had in mind for her to be. The explanation, in fact, of every Christian destiny, the ultimate aspiration of every human being: “holy and blameless before him”,as St Paul says. May grace be given to us all this evening to co-operate ever more readily with God, so that the gap between who we are and who he wants us to be narrows and goes on diminishing. May Our Lady aid us by her prayers, so that we come ever closer to fulfilling the high hopes that Our Heavenly Father has of each one of us, so that on the Last Day we too may appear in our humbler turn “holy and blameless before him”, “pure and blameless for the Day of Christ”. Amen.