Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007

Homily for the Eve of the Assumption 14 August 2007 Many years ago I was teaching at a Church of England school for girls in Westminster, where the Headmistress was a formidable woman, Dorothy Stephenson- it had been a grammar school in its heyday, and the saying was that it wasn’t anymore but no-one had dared tell the Head. She used to give little sermons at morning assembly and I remember one feast of Our Lady when she began like this: “Now the Virgin Mary was a young girl, not much older than some of you, but there was one big difference”- and she fixed the girls with a hard stare at this point- “she was obedient!” The Virgin Mary is indeed like us, a human being like us, but there is a difference, and Miss Stephenson was not so far wrong in her view of what that difference consisted of. We know what it was, essentially, and we remind ourselves of the difference every time we say the Hail Mary, when we call on Our Lady and say “Hail Mary, full of grace”. Our Lady was full of grace. Now the text of the first part of the Hail Mary comes as you know from St Luke’s Gospel, the greeting that the angel Gabriel gives to Our Lady, sometimes translated as “full of grace”, sometimes as “highly favoured one”. The Greek word is very important, it is kecharitomene, and actually this is not an adjective, “full”, it is a passive, and literally means “the one who has been filled up, or if you like, the one who has allowed herself to be filled right up to the brim with grace. She is completely filled with the grace of God, so that there is no corner of her life that is not covered by it, there is no area which she has reserved to herself- and hence, of course, no room for any sin, no possibility for God’s will for her to be blocked in any way. She herself acknowledges this when she says to the angel “let it be to me according to your word”. That is where the difference between us and Our Lady lies- we all receive grace from God, grace to enable us to respond to his will for us, but, unlike Our Lady, we restrict the action of that grace in our lives. We hold back bits of ourselves from God, we want to hang on to various areas of our lives, and so grace cannot permeate us to the full, we do not achieve the fullness of grace that was Our Lady’s special privilege. Nevertheless, that is what God wills for us, that is the destiny he had in mind for each one for us- to be like Our Lady, completely conformed to his will by our total acceptance of his grace flowing into every part of ourselves. The point was forcefully made by none other than our dear lamented Cardinal Lustiger, who died in Paris ten days ago. In a homily on the feast of the Assumption in Notre Dame a few years ago, the Cardinal said that God wants each Christian to have his or her own version of the destiny of Mary. Mary was the vessel chosen by God to bring into the world Our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that actually, when you think about it, is our vocation too. After all, each of us is in a sense the servant, the handmaid of the Lord. He says “C’est la volonté de Dieu que son serviteur soit dans le monde celui par qui la vie est donnée - It is the will of God that his servant should be in the world the one through whom life is given”. May each of us strive to realise in our lives this high vocation, to bring the life of Christ to our world, and may our blessed Lady help us to achieve this, by encouraging us to respond – “sans réserve” as Saint Claude used to say, without holding back- to the graces that God will surely send us. Amen.