A Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God
Readings: Numbers 6:22-27 Galatians 4:4-7 Luke 2:16-21
I have them all in a book. Eight volumes, really. They are in prayer books called breviaries. I treasure my friends their pages.
Priests and religious promise to pray what is called “The Liturgy of the Hours.” Five times a day, we follow a course of psalms and biblical canticles, along with readings from Scripture and the saints.
Typically, monks chant these; religious communities recite them; and diocesan priests pray them silently, though, like the rosary, I find the experience is richer when they are said aloud.
A year’s worth of prayer requires four volumes, each much more than a thousand very slender pages. For months, I feel like praying the Liturgy of the Hours in Latin. Then I suddenly decide to return to English. Hence my eight volumes rather than the typical four.
Inside those books are my favorite holy cards and so much more! There are memorial cards from teachers who taught me. My own days on seminary faculties are also well represented.
For example, there is a small name card, which I retained from a college seminarian’s graduation announcement. And there is a Christmas card, sent by another seminarian from Rome, assuring me that I was missed. He later committed suicide as a young priest. I see the card every Christmas season; I cannot always reopen it.
There’s a thank-you note from a fellow university faculty member. She signed it, “Princess.”
My father died while I was doing doctoral studies. A priest friend in Rome sent a condolence card to Kansas.
Another dear priest friend of many decades died this past year. I took two of his memorial cards, putting one in each language set.
I treasure my own in these books, though I typically do not make a fully conscious decision to put someone in them. Lots of people who are terribly important to me are not there. I just happen to be praying when some slip of paper catches my eye, tugs at my heart. In it goes.
My breviaries of remembrance are not much removed from the practice of my grandmother and older parishioners whom I have visited over the years. They also have prayer books filled with their own dear ones. They bring them to the Lord each day in prayer.
As he closes his Christmas scenes, St. Luke tells us,
And Mary kept all these things,
reflecting on them in her heart (2:19).
The Virgin of Nazareth did what we must do. That is how she became the woman we now call “Mary, the Holy Mother of God.” She knew what had happened to her and to her child, and in the quiet of prayer, she constantly asked herself what it meant.
Her heart doubtless pondered more than Bethlehem. In the space of little more than three decades, it made its way to Calvary, and no one knows how much time on earth followed that. Mary must have asked herself so many times:
What is God doing in my life?
What does God want in response?
Thus, through the years, Mary became who she was always meant to be in God’s eyes.
At the beginning of each new year, while still in the glow of Christmas, we ponder the Blessed Virgin Mary as our great cause of joy and hope. Look at what the grace of her savior accomplished in her! She is a creature, just as we are. But she has been raised so fully into the divine life of God. Grace triumphed in her, but it did not run roughshod over her. Mary responded to God’s graces, just as we must.
We must never allow who she became to obscure the process by which it came to be. Otherwise, we fail to take seriously what God is seeking to do in our own lives.
What is God doing in my life?
What does God want in response?
As I said, I do not really decide to put someone into my breviaries. Maybe I simply know that I must spend more time pondering who they are, what they have meant to me. Or perhaps—better to say—what God does in my life through them.
I choose the present tense for that last sentence because those who matter to us, even when claimed by distance or death, are never removed from our lives. We are who we are because of them.
We rightly stand in reverent awe of who Mary is, but we must never forget how she became God’s dream for her life.
Mary kept all these things,
reflecting on them in her heart.
Everything that the church celebrates in Mary proclaims the saving identity of her Son. His grace triumphed, but not without her fiat, her “let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). She became God’s dream for her by pondering what God was doing in her life. And that is how you and I become God’s dream for us as well.
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