Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
The birth of a baby is a joyful event, for it inaugurates a rejuvenated future full of promise. However, it is also full of mystery, since we simply do not know what the newborn will become. The Church celebrates three nativities, those of Our Lord, Our Lady who had no original sin and the Baptist, who was purified of original in his mother’s womb. For the Church what is most important is not being born in the flesh but being reborn in the Spirit.
The liturgy for the birth of Our Lady offers a number of texts that resound with unrestrained joy, and this is appropriate, for she is indeed the dawn of salvation, the morning star who announces the Sun of Justice, the Immaculata who will crush the head of the ancient serpent. While most of the texts of this feast give forth an atmosphere of juvenile, if not infantile, mirth, the mysterious passage from the book of Proverbs which serves as epistle, and which is also used on the feast of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, is of another tonality altogether. With this text we are taken, as it were, into the mystery of God before the ages, and with Him we contemplate the sublime plan which was revealed in the fulness of time with the coming of His Son.
The passage is one which, in the face of a rationalistic evolutionary age, shows that far from things coming to be by accident, everything was planned down to its finest details. God made everything in His eternal wisdom, and wisdom is here portrayed as working in unison with God for the creation of all things. This is why the text applies primarily to the Eternal Word, Wisdom of the Father, Our Lord Jesus Christ, but also, because of her intimate role in the restoration of all things, to His Mother.
By reading this text on the two feasts of Our Lady’s conception and nativity, we are led to perceive that, from all eternity, just as God had ordained a second Adam to restore what was lost by the first, so He also ordained that there would be a second Eve who would make reparation for the sin of the mother of all the living.
Two expressions of this magnificent text will hold our attention today. The first are the opening words: Dominus possedit me. All things belong to the Lord. Domini est terra et plenitudo eius, orbis terrarum et omnes qui habitant in ea – The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof: the world, and all they that dwell therein, we sing in Psalm 23. There is nothing that exists that the Lord does not possess as His own. For all irrational creatures – minerals, plants and animals –, this belonging to the Lord does not admit of any exceptions. If these things exist, it is that they are the Lord’s entirely. Not so with rational creatures gifted with free will, angels and men. For these, the Lord’s possession is going to depend on the extent to which that creature allows Him to hold the reins. For many, alas, there is total rejection of God’s rights over us. Lucifer was the first, and in his wake countless others continue to follow. For many others, there is a time when we run away and seek to make our own little world outside of the divine dominion. For some, happily, His grace calls us back and we come home, and we allow the Lord to take possession of our lives, more or less. For the saints this is realised in the most perfect surrender of all their being. They become possessed by God as others are possessed by the devil.
For Our Lady, however, this possession was total, complete, absolute, for the first moment of her existence. There was never a moment when she did not allow God to hold the reins and guide her life even in its most minute details. God was the driving force behind her every thought, word and deed. She lived her life continually at the summit of the mountain of holiness. As we say in psalm 86: Fundamenta eius in montibus sanctis. Where the other saints end their course, she begins and runs like a giant, going from virtue to virtue, loving God ever more and building up a quasi-infinite treasure of graces that the Church will distribute to souls until the end of time.
The question we need to ask ourselves is this: to what extent do we allow God to have full control over our lives? To what extent does He possess us? Are we His entirely? Or do we live with a divided heart, giving Him a bit of time here and there, but reserving much more time for ourselves and what pleases us? Let’s ask Mother Mary to share with us her secret, and may she help us get to the point where we can say in all truth: The Lord hath full possession of me, of all that I am and have.
The second expression we can reflect on is : Cum Eo eram – I was with Him. From all eternity, Mother Mary was in God’s mind. Nothing that He achieved in creation was done without reference to Her. When Mary says: I was with Him, she is pointing out her unique place in God’s mind, but also, in some mysterious way, God’s place in her mind. As an eternal thought, Mary has always been there in God’s mind, and so we must be able to say that in some way she has always thought of God, she has always been with Him.
But the I was with Him, from our perspective, is a reminder that in all our intentions and desires, we should be continually turned towards Him. And here too we can ask ourselves: to what extent are with with the Lord? As we go about our daily duties, are we focused in being with Him in spirit? Are we conscious that, ultimately, He is the one at work – I work and my Father works Our Lord will tell us, Jn 5:17 – and we are only coworkers with Him (cf. 3 Jn:8) ? Or on the contrary, is it all about us, maybe giving Him a bit of attention every now and then, but ultimately working for ourselves. In the lives of the saints, this I was with Him becomes more and more a reality, and the closer they come to saying it at every moment in all truth, the holier they become, until they are entirely consumed by the Godhead, as we sometimes see in the lives of exceptional saints such as Elizabeth of the Trinity, whose only desire was to be consumed like the wax candle before the altar, completely burnt up and and emptied so as to be lost in God.
All that we have said till now we can apply to ourselves individually. But we must also ask the same questions about our community. This community exists because Our Lady has willed it. It is her making. She possesses it. And yet, the extent of that possession is going to depend on the openness of each of its members to her guidance. We are with her, but alas sometimes we are not. Like babes who love their mother when she offers her breast, we love to be cuddled by her and to drink the milk of her consolations. But then when we are filled, we run off and get ourselves dirty and soil our pants. The sanctification of the community depends on the degree to which each member is always with Her, in mind, in heart, in loving attentiveness to living the way She lived, without a moment to ourselves, always given over, abandoned to her maternal guidance, consumed with the passion of being always with God.
As we wish Mother Mary a happy birthday, let us be sure to offer her the present that pleases her the most: may she take full possession of our lives, and may we be always with Her, and through Her with God Eternal. Amen.
