In his book, Denial of Death, Ernest Becker muses that a child’s first experience of God is the baby’s mother. I personally do not recall my first experience of God’s presence in my mother’s arms. I am sure I did later in my older years, but she probably experienced the opposite of God’s presence in my own younger years and certainly in my brothers and sisters.

There is a principle that the more physical a revelation is, the more perfect it is. It is also true that a person’s psychological health is revealed in the harmony between the inner self and the outer gesture. What we are celebrating in today’s Eucharistic liturgy is God’s inner being revealed in the perfect physical revealation in the body of a blessed child who’s first experience of God’s love was in the arms of Anne and in the care of her father, Joachim.

God had been creating, in time, in words, gestures, persons and events a history of revealing God’s very being, Love. The more physical, the more perfect which is Mary by birth and name. Her parents were physical in their love for each other and their inner truth was revealed in a most healthy manner in the sinless conception of their human daughter.       

Now I am sure that my dear mother never, ever, imagined my being a Jesuit priest, maybe a Jesuit, but never a priest. I am also sure it took her years to forget my unpriestly childhood. Anne and Joachim had no idea either of who Mary would become as a person of God’s revealing God’s redemptive plan. She did not complete that plan, but the gestures were over and the physical human play was coming to perfection.

At the angel’s arrival in her life, Mary was, in a sense, reborn so as to birth the Final Physical Revealation of God’s inner reality, Salvific Love.

Time takes time and so does God. Mary grew up with God’s history in mind and heart, then took into her body the Perfect physical presentation of her faith and God’s care. Mary’s being born is the end of ambiguity or question mark. It is the birth of the definite, the exclamation mark. Perhaps what I am attempting to say is that Mary was born into time as we were and she played out her part in the revealation of God’s love as we were. We each are the healthy revelation, as Mary was, of the interior Love of God made flesh in Mary’s Body through whom the final display is made in the Perfect Body of Jesus the Christ. Happy eternal Birthday always, The Mother of the Church.

lines from
The Blessed Virgin Mary
Compared to the Air We Breathe
By
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

”If I have understood, she holds high motherhood towards all our ghostly good, and plays in grace her part, about man’s beating heart.”

“of her flesh
He took flesh, He does take fresh and fresh, though much the mystery how, not flesh but spirit now, and makes o marvelous! New nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive, Him, morning noon and eve.”