Devotion to Mary

The Immaculate Conception is not well understood.

In fact, that’s why it took until 1854 for the Church to declare it a dogma.  Christians believed that Mary was sinless from the very first, and from pretty early on, the faith of the people had an intuition of something like the Immaculate Conception.  But what was it?  What did it mean?

Just as the Immaculate Conception backs up from Jesus to his mother, some people who tried to articulate this intuition of faith backed up yet another generation, and proclaimed that Mary’s parents, Sts. Joachim and Anne, had a special sexual experience.  “Conception” can refer to what the parents do, and some people thought maybe what we believe about Mary is that Joachim and Anne had an act of Immaculate Conception.  But that’s kinda weird, and not right, and the Church could not “define” the Immaculate Conception until theologians made a clear distinction that we are only saying something about Mary, not something about her parents and their sex life.

Another way of articulating the intuition of faith was that somehow Mary didn’t need Jesus, or his redemptive act on the Cross.  Sometimes when people are trying to say superlative things about Mary, they get carried away.  But to say that Mary doesn’t need Jesus is to turn the whole point of Mary upside down.  The Church said, if that’s what you mean by “Immaculate Conception,” if you’re trying to minimize the work of Jesus Christ, then no, we absolutely don’t believe that.  The Church could only define the Immaculate Conception when it was clear that this was the greatest redemptive act of Christ on the Cross, not an exception from it.

In fact, a saint like Louis de Montfort, in the early eighteenth century, maybe the greatest Marian preacher of all, is brilliant precisely at showing that when we’re talking about Mary, we’re always talking about the awesomeness of Jesus.  It’s not zero-sum, as if you have to choose either Mary or Jesus.  Rather, it’s a package deal: the more we appreciate Jesus, the more we appreciate Mary, and vice versa.

***

There are other misunderstandings that still get preached, even after 1854.  Some people try to make the Immaculate Conception a constraint on God’s freedom.  Sometimes they say that Mary had to be immaculately conceived in order for her to bear Jesus.  Others, appealing to an extraordinarily bad metaphysics, say that since God could exempt Mary from original sin, he had to do it.  Poppycock.

It can be hard to get the intuitions of faith into clear theological statements, and we can have mercy on those whose statements are poor.  But those are poor statements.  The holiness of Mary is an expression of God’s freedom, not an exception to it.

***

The last misunderstanding of the Immaculate Conception, and perhaps most important, is that it makes Mary fundamentally different from the rest of us.  Sure, too many Catholics say, Mary could be holy, and avoid sin.  But Mary was immaculately conceived, and I’m not!  She’s hardly even the same species as I am!

To the contrary, the second reading for our feast, from the beginning of Ephesians, makes it all clear.  The key phrase is “for the praise of the glory of his grace.”  If you haven’t gotten to know St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, you really should.  Her letters are out of this world.  She’s a young French Carmelite nun, a lot like St. Thérèse.  And she takes this as her nickname.  I want to be Laudem Gloriae, she says, quoting Ephesians 1: nothing but “the praise of his glory,” or “the praise of the glory of his grace.”

What we are talking about with the Immaculate Conception is “the praise of the glory of his grace.”  It’s not about how great Mary is on her own, apart from Jesus.  In fact, the wonderful thing about pushing her “immaculate-ness” back to her conception is that it emphasizes that she did absolutely nothing to earn it.  When we call Mary “full of grace,” we don’t mean that she tried really hard, and after enough of a spiritual workout, she got to be great.  We mean that God worked his miracle in her soul, the greatest miracle of all: holiness.  The reason we talk about the Immaculate Conception—the only reason—is to praise the glory of his grace.

***

But Ephesians says too that the Father “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.”  What happens to Mary is not unique to Mary.  In Christ, he has blessed all of us, “to be holy and without blemish before him.”  Do you want to guess what the Latin is for “without blemish”?  “Immaculati.”  That’s “immaculate” (“immaculata” is the feminine singular, and thus a name for Mary), but the “-i” makes it plural, because we are all called to be “immaculate.”  (Protestants who have a problem with us calling Mary immaculate need to start reading St. Paul.)

Or rather, not “called,” that is not the language of grace.  What Ephesians says is that we are “chosen”—“he has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world,” it is his eternal plan, in and through Christ—so that his grace can make us, too, immaculate.  “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will”—that is, in the freedom of his love, because he can but he doesn’t have to—“for the praise of the glory of his grace, that he granted us in the beloved.”

St. Paul is amazing for his ability constantly to tie things to Jesus.

The Immaculate Conception is something we say about God’s grace: his free acts of love, transforming Mary just as he promises to transform all of us, to bring us to the glories of heaven.  The feast of the Immaculate Conception is nothing but a celebration of his grace, the praise of the glory of his grace, which he granted us in the beloved, Jesus Christ.

Are there ways you push away Mary’s “full of grace” too distant from yourself?

I haven’t gotten to write much this Advent, and now I’m going to write about dealing with anger.  Please don’t draw any connections – it’s just been a busy time.

Advent is a time of preparation, a reminder that our whole life is preparation for the coming of Christ.  We prepare for our annual celebration of his first coming: by decorating and making cookies, by prayer and perhaps some fasting, by meditating on the mystery we will celebrate in the busy whirl that is Christmas.

We recall, perhaps in the Jesse tree, certainly in the readings from Isaiah and about John the Baptist and Mary, how through all of history God prepared for that first coming.

And we remind ourselves, by our annual observance, that our whole life is a preparation for his final coming, when at last we too shall meet Jesus face to face.  Every time we prepare for communion, we prepare for that ultimate communion, on our last day and on the Last Day.

***

A voice is calling,

“Clear the way for the LORD in the wilderness;

Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God.

“Let every valley be lifted up,

And every mountain and hill be made low;

And let the rough ground become a plain,

And the rugged terrain a broad valley;

Then the glory of the LORD will be revealed,

And all flesh will see it together;

For the mouth of the LORD has spoken” (Isaiah 40).

But a hymn reminds us, “make straight the way for God within.”

All the external preparations point to our internal.  How do we prepare the way within?

***

This Advent I’ve been thinking about meekness.  I’ve been thinking about the beatitudes in general for a couple years.  A traditional reading notices three kinds:

The first three are about emptying ourselves of obstacles (the purgative way):

Poverty of spirit

Weeping

Meekness

The next two are about discovering who God is (the illuminative way):

Justice

Mercy

And the next two (or three) are about becoming one with him (the unitive way):

Pure in heart (who see God)

Peacemakers (called children of God)

(Those who are persecuted for him)

The illuminative way prepares the way for God within – but I’m thinking now especially of clearing the path.  Like Mary, we have to become poor with him, to set aside all our earthly distractions.  We have to weep with him, setting aside our worldly pleasures and embracing the pain of a fallen world, refusing to flee or cover them up.  And we have to become meek with him.

***

I’m thinking about meekness partly because I recently, finally, discovered Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of meekness.

One way to understand the beatitudes is by their rewards.  Blessed are the meek | for they shall inherit the earth.  What are the meek?  Those who inherit: those who don’t fight for riches, but receive everything from their Father.

Still, what does meekness mean?  Thomas points out that Aristotle, that great observer of humanity, discuses the same word used in the Greek text of Matthew: praüs.  Aristotle says (in IV Ethics) that   praüs, meekness, is moderation of our anger.  Thomas sees it as a kind of self-restraint: just as we have to control our desire for food and alcohol and sex, so too our anger.

We can go a step further: clemency is self-restraint in regard to punishment.  It is closely related to meekness, but it’s worth noting the difference.  Clemency is about our external actions: we need to control ourselves when it comes to acting on our anger.  But meekness isn’t just about lashing out.  It’s about our interior life.  It’s the virtue that moderates our anger itself.

Mercy, we should note, goes a step further: mercy is the desire to help another person in distress.  Clemency just doesn’t hurt him; meekness doesn’t feel angry with him; but mercy goes out to help him.

***

And meekness too is a beatitude, a way of clearing the paths for God to enter into our hearts.  I have been pondering Mary’s meekness in the beatitudes.  Meekness isn’t everything, but Mary has room in her heart because she is not full of anger, even as they scourge her beloved.

How do we cultivate this meekness?  It’s interesting that it’s a virtue, not an action.  These days we talk a lot about forgiveness, but two problems.  First, forgiveness is darned hard to do.  We can say the words, even repeat them internally – but have we really let go of our anger?  Second, it’s interesting that forgiveness isn’t in the Summa.  Thomas doesn’t think it’s the most helpful category.  I think he might be right.

Meekness is a virtue: not a single act, like forgiveness, but a way of being.  Virtues are cultivated by practice, by continually restraining our anger – just as you cultivate sobriety by not getting drunk, over and over again.

Meekness is also a fruit of the Spirit, in Galatians 5.  (In English, this spot in the list is “humility,” which is of course even greater.  But in the Greek and Latin of Galatians, and in the Latin Catechism, it’s meekness.  Letting go of our anger, of course, has a lot to do with letting go of our pride: meekness and humility go hand in hand.)

How do we cultivate meekness?  By not acting on our anger.  And by asking the Holy Spirit to pour his fruits and his gifts into our hearts – by asking, that is, Jesus to take our heart and make it like unto his, by begging Mary, full of grace, to pray for us sinners, that we may be holy as she is, including meek and mild as she is, and so make room in the inn.

How does anger keep Jesus out of your heart?  What do you do about it?