4th Sunday Advent C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

A lot of us Catholics, and other Christian believers, and Muslims, too, surprisingly, honour Mary.

We call her “Blessed ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God”. But I suspect we sometimes don’t stop to ask why we honour her as ever-virgin and as Mother of God. Sometimes we focus only on her physical virginity, and on her physical maternity.

With regard to her maternity, Jesus set us right there. Remember that incident in Luke’s Gospel where a woman in the crowd shouted out: Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked. Jesus said No! you’ve missed the point; you’ve seen only her physical motherhood. Rather: Blessed are they who hear the world of God and keep it.  Or, as Elizabeth put it in today’s Gospel: Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.

Blessed is she who heard the word of God and kept it – who let the Word of God, the whole mystery of God, of God’s will and of God’s Kingdom  - the promise of God - gestate within her and come to birth through her.

Something similar could be said of her virginity. It is not her physical virginity that is the context of her blessedness, but her spiritual virginity.  God saw to her being mother, life-bearer, God-bearer. She saw to her own being perpetually virgin.  Spiritual virginity, the virginity that matters, the virginity that we are all called to strive for: men, women, married and unmarried, means being empty... being empty towards God, being empty in order to make room for God.

What might being empty before God involve? Remember another saying of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel: Those who love their lives will lose them; those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Kingdom will find them. Being empty before God means surrendering all focus on ourselves and on our self-interest, dying to every pre-occupation with ourselves.

Becoming ever-virgin, like Mary, means emptying ourselves of our false (small g) gods, of those instinctive substitutes for (capital G) God: security, control; acceptance, respect; comfort, possessions; and the fears, doubts and anxieties that drive them.

I don’t know how you pray. I’ll tell you how many of the early monks used to pray –and an increasing number of people today are praying (most of them laypeople like yourselves). They simply sit – in faith – for a reasonable period of time, and try to empty their minds of thoughts, of feelings, desires, anxieties, etc., and of planning ahead.

And, because they believe that God really is mystery beyond reach of our thoughts or feelings, they try, in their prayer, to empty their minds even of thoughts about God, of trying to feel loved by God or loving towards God, of trying to feel God’s presence (as if they could!). As they sit there, they try to let go, too, of trying to live better, or of planning how to love God in practice.  They simply empty their minds and do nothing, other than be who they are, as they are, before the God they believe loves them.

I don’t think you ever quite succeed. You can even feel a bit of a fool - and that you are wasting your time - but the desire is  to do what you can: to be empty, that is, to be virginal, towards God. That you become life-bearer is then up to God.

Mary managed it: ever virgin, ever life-bearer. That is what is great about her.