Mary, Mother of God - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2012

I like Luke’s comment about Mary: She treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.  It offers a window into the source of her greatness and gives us something we ourselves can imitate.  She treasured these things … She was open to experience; she was receptive.  She pondered her experiences in her heart… In her receptivity she was open to explore meaning and to learn.  Specifically, she was searching for the presence of God, there in her experience, and was ready to cooperate with the invitation of God.

To me, this is the deeper meaning of her virginity.  More than a physical state, it is a spiritual orientation.  Virginity is essentially pure potential, receptivity, and possibility of cooperation.  In its turn, the potential of virginity strains forward eagerly to the fulfillment of maternity – the giving and nurturing of life.

As spiritual orientations, we can all imitate both Mary’s virginity and her maternity, whether we’re male or female, married or unmarried.  Like Mary, the virgin, we can be open to experience, and receptive to reality, seeking there the presence, the call and the empowerment of God.  Like Mary, the mother, we can cooperate with God in giving birth to and nurturing the growth of God’s Kingdom.

Being sensitive and responsive to the presence and call of God in our lives calls, from us, as it did from Mary, for the discipline of pondering - pondering in our hearts.  It means observing our inner reactions to experience: and noticing the deeper hopes and fears, the deeper desires and the angers, stirred by our experiences.  It means learning to discern, through a growing familiarity with our inner world, where God is working in our lives.  It leads in time to our being able to draw on the power of the creating God and cooperate effectively with God.  The Mary who pondered her unfolding life in her heart was the Mary who was able to say: Be it done unto me according to your word.

And here [I believe], in this unreserved cooperation, lie the fullness and the fulfillment of all love.  A mature love moves beyond even the deepest and most beautiful intimacy to a whole-hearted sharing  of vision, of values, of priorities, and of commitments which, in turn, lead on to willing and eager cooperation with the beloved.

Like Jesus, with Jesus, Mary’s spirit exulted in the God… who raised the lowly, who filled the hungry with good things, and who showed unconditional mercy to a world whose only hope for salvation is always forgiveness and the conversion that forgiveness awakens and empowers.  Even at the foot of the cross, Mary said “Yes” to the determined love of her Son that led him to accept his own brutal murder.  She did not talk him out of his determination but supported him in it.  Mary shared with Jesus his total commitment to exposing to us and saving us from the endemic mutual destructiveness that scars our world.

Our world would be a better world if we got to know Mary better, if we shared, with her, God’s vision for our world … and, if we, like her, committed ourselves wholeheartedly to God’s project for the world’s salvation – whatever the cost.  As I have said: That would mean for us, as it meant for Mary, a genuine readiness to ponder our life-experiences in the deeper recesses of our hearts, to learn to be receptive to the presence of God in our lives, and to find ourselves empowered and eager to say, like Mary: Be it done unto me according to your Word.