Immaculate Birthday

Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Readings for Friday
Gospel of the Nativity of Mary (Unknown early church father)

Reflection:

We celebrate the birth of only two saints of the Catholic Church. The Solemnity of the Birth of John the Baptist (June 24th) and the feast we celebrate today, the birthday of Mary, the Mother of God. The esteem in which we hold Mary is a rational that has been forgotten by many of our protestant brothers and sisters. The amazing devotion many of our great predecessors had for Mary seems foreign, almost blasphemous to them (I might interject that, while I do not wish to go down that path of the deification of Mary, there was a similar contention in the early church with regard to the creedal formula regarding the Trinity.).

Today we celebrate Mary’s Birthday. The scripture we have does not really go into the circumstances of her birth (that is almost certainly why many of the newer Christian faith communities do not understand the Marian Tradition) rather she springs, full grown into the beginning of the Nativity of the Lord. Yes, we heard today the scripture from the Gospel of St. Matthew on the genealogy of Jesus, which was necessary to demonstrate how the Lord came in fulfillment of the scriptures, being of the house and line of David. But even that focused on Joseph, his father, not Mary.

It is a great sadness that when the Reformation took place (it is an odd name for such a disastrous event in the history of Christianity), many of the schismatic groups took Gutenberg’s Bible and walked away from the 1,500 years of reflection, discernment, and tradition that had followed the Lord’s passing from death to life. They threw away almost all of the thought and careful study of people like St. Augustine, Origin, St. Polycarp and St. Thomas Aquinas. All this they rejected saying that the Holy Scripture, the Bible as they chose to interpret it, was their sole guide. And even the Bible could not be left as our fathers had established it. The found it necessary to remove portions that they rationalized, could not be demonstrated to be holy writ.

We can therefore shake our heads in sorrow as our brothers and sisters who agree that Jesus was born of a virgin and her name was Mary, but refuse to look past what was recorded in the scripture we heard today to try to understand the roots of how such a miraculous event could take place. They refuse to examine the logic that, in her passionate search for understanding the intentions of God the Father, lead the Church to proclaim the Immaculate Conception of the one whose birthday we celebrate. Because how could God entrust himself, his only begotten son to one who bore any semblance of sin. And, just once, because God only gave us that one Son, the Father touched Anne, the mother of Mary and created in her one pure soul, free from blemish, pure love to contain He who is love.

Today we celebrate the gift of that love, embodied in the Mother of God, Mary most holy. As we remember the gift God gave us in her today, let us remember her example of sacrifice and faith in her son. Let us try to emulate that faith and love in such a way that all we meet will know our devotion to her, the Mother of our Lord, Jesus Christ, to whom she steadfastly points us.

Pax