Receiving and Learning From Mary’s Spiritual Maternity, Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, January 1, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Annunciation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Suffern, NY
Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
January 1, 2019
Num 6:22-27, Ps 67, Gal 4:4-7, Lk 2:16-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, which occurred in a Mass that began at 11 pm and stretched past midnight, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Mary and the Fullness of Time

Tonight as we mark the transition from one year to the next, raising a Te Deum to God for all of the graces he’s given us in 2018, asking for his forgiveness for the ways we, the Church and the world haven’t received or responded to those gifts, and begging his help that 2019 will be a true “year of Lord,” the Church has us turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary and celebrate in particular the ongoing mystery and reality of her motherhood.

Her maternity, and the passing of time, are intimately connected, as we see in tonight’s epistle. St. Paul tells us, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … so that we might receive adoption as sons.” The fullness of time is precisely the moment when her fiat allowed the eternal to enter into time, when the Son of God took on her humanity and entered our world, changing human history into salvation history. As chronos has become kairos, so Mary remains not merely as the Mother of God-with-us but the Mother of all of us entrusted to her by that Son when he died so that we might live.

Mary is the mother who seeks to help us to understand how, in fulfillment of the words of the Book of Numbers, God seeks to bless and keep us, let his face shine on us, be gracious to us, and give us his peace, by bringing us to the blessed Fruit of her womb who is the sum of every spiritual blessing in the heavens. She is the Mother who teaches us, in fulfillment of tonight’s Psalm, how to rejoice and exult that, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem that way, God rules the peoples in equity and guides the nations on earth. She is the Mom who shows us how to experience the fullness of time by living together with her Son and by corresponding to the work of the Holy Spirit helping us to cry out “Abba, Father!” and strengthening us to live not as slaves to our whims, instincts, the age, or the devil, but as children and heirs of God.

Mary mothers us in several ways that are highly relevant as we make this transition from the end-of-one-year-and-the-beginning-of-another to the fullness of time living with Christ who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Mothering us to live by faith in the new year

She does this first by helping us to learn how to live by faith. She seeks to mother us as she mother Jesus. God the Father didn’t choose Mary just to be the “bearer” or “incubator” of his eternal Son according to his human nature, but as Theotokosshe also was given the awesome responsibility to raise him. Since Jesus was fully man at the same time that he was fully God, he would, according to his humanity, like us, have to learn how to accomplish most human activities. It was Mary, together with Joseph, who taught Jesus how to talk, to pronounce the Aramaic he’d eventually speak. She taught him how to read and pronounce the Hebrew in his prayers. It’s an amazing reality that just like we learn how to talk to God in prayer to a large degree from our parents when we’re young, so Jesus according to his humanity learned how to speak to His Father in prayer through echoing Mary. Mary, moreover, did not just physically breastfeed Jesus when he was an infant, but she continued spiritually to breast feed him over the course of his upbringing, digesting herself first many of the truths of faith and passing them to him in ways that he, like any child, could assimilate. Mary was the one who would get the young Jesus ready for the Synagogue on Saturday. She was the one who with Joseph would make the 60-mile walk with Jesus up to the Temple in Jerusalem three times a year. She was the one who by her example showed him according to his humanity what it meant to seek first the kingdom of God. She did that so effectively that Jesus was ready consciously to be about his “Father’s business” at the age of 12, so prepared in the knowledge of the Scriptures by a mom who treasured God’s word that he was able to amaze the greatest experts of the law over a three day period with his questions (Lk 2:46-49). It was from Mary and her cooking that Jesus learned about the effects of salt, which he would then use to call us the salt of the earth (Mt 5:13). It was from her that he saw that you don’t sew old patches on new clothing (Mt 9:16). It was from her that he understood about planting seed not on hardened, rocky or thorny soil, but on rich soil, soil like her own deep responsiveness to God’s word.

As Mary taught Jesus, so she seeks to teach us. While Jesus didn’t need faith, we do, and Jesus entrusted us to his mother so that we might imitate her faith.

At the transition of one civil year to the next, when we’re all led to think about the passage of time, about all that has happened during the past year and all that might occur in the year to come, the Church has us turn to our Mother Mary to show us how to live it with faith, no matter what occurs.

Little did Mary expect, as she was beginning the Jewish New Year about 6 BC, that that year would inaugurate the “fullness of time” that St. Paul describes, that God would send his Son, born of a woman,” and that she would be that woman. Little did she know would receive a visit from the Archangel Gabriel, conceive and carry the Son of God in her womb, put her life at risk for conceiving a child from someone other than by her husband Joseph, give birth to Jesus in Bethlehem in the midst of poverty and rejection, receive as surprise guests shepherds, angels and wise men from afar, present him in the Temple as Simeon announced that he would be a sign of contradiction, have Herod hunt down her Son to kill him and have to flee in the middle of the night to Egypt. What a year that must have been!And that was just the beginning of the adventure.

The Church sets Mary before us today as a model of faith and trust in God as we begin our new civil year because she, like us, needed faith, needed trust in God, to journey into the unknown. As we approach the new year, not having any idea what it will bring, she gives us her maternal confidence in faith that whatever comes, whether seemingly good or bad — tremendous happiness or sadness, births and conversions of loved ones or unexpected deaths, even our own, the end of the scandals in the Church that have wounded so many, or even the metastasis of that cancer in the Mystical Body — that whatever comes, whether seemingly adverse or propitious, Christ wants to incorporate into his saving mission, even making his grace super-abound when sin abounds.

Mothering us to ponder contemplatively what has happened in the last year

The second way Mary seeks to mother us as we transition from one civil year to another is by helping us acquire a contemplative heart like hers. Mary shows us how to treasure things in our heart so that we might indeed receive from God grace upon grace.

In tonight’s Gospel of the visit of the Shepherds to Bethlehem, after Mary had heard all that they had told her about what the angels had said to them, St. Luke tells us that she “kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” We heard the same words yesterday on the Feast of the Holy Family, that after the finding of Jesus in the temple, Mary “kept all of these things in her heart.” Mary wants to help form in us a heart like hers.

Ten years ago, Pope Benedict, in his apostolic exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, talked about Mary’s contemplative heart and said that “ever attentive to God’s word, she lives completely attuned to that word; she treasures in her heart the events of her Son, piecing them together as if in a single mosaic.” He said she shows us all in the Church how to piece together all of the events of our life to the events of Jesus’ life and to understand our ups and downs within God’s plan of salvation.Backin the early 1980s, in a book called Seek What is Above, he wrote much extensively about Mary’s keeping the word in her heart and pondering it. With words that should help us as we look back and look ahead, he stated, “Memory requires more than a merely external registering of events. We can only receive and hold fast to the uttered word if we are involved inwardly. If something does not touch me, it will not penetrate; it will dissolve in the flux of memories and lose its particular face. Above all it is a fact that understanding and preserving what is understood go together. … Only by understanding do I receive reality at all; and understanding in turn, depends on a certain measure of inner identification with what is to be understood. It depends on love. I cannot really understand something for which I have no love whatsoever. So the transmission of the message needs more than the kind of memory that stores telephone numbers: what is required is a memory of the heart, in which I invest something of myself. Involvement and faithfulness are not opposites: they are interdependent. In Luke, Mary stands as the embodiment of the Church’s memory. She is alert, taking events in and inwardly pondering them. Thus Luke says that she ‘preserved them together’ in her heart, she ‘put them together’ and ‘held on to them.’ Mary compares the words and events of faith with the ongoing experience of her life and thus discovers the full human depth of each detail, which gradually fits into the total picture.”

The Greek, as Cardinal Ratzinger alludes, means that she “pieced together” all the events of her life, like the pieces of a mosaic, and “held on to them,” treasuring them. She related what was coming then to what had come before, like the tesserae of a mosaic masterpiece, and sought to see how each new piece fit into the whole. In the prayerful meditation of her heart, she connected the dots so that she could try to understand everything within the “big picture” of God’s plan of salvation. And it was because of that big picture that she learned how to “treasure” everything. We see this in her famous prayer, the Magnificat, where she pieced together various passages of the words of Old Testament heroines, saw how they applied to her, and rejoiced. Later when she saw Jesus crucified, she related that horror to what the Angel Gabriel had said in the Annunciation, that he would be great, be given the throne of David his Father and his kingdom would have no end, and so was able to stand rather than faint there, awaiting the inevitable fulfillment of what God had promised. Mary, in short, took everything and applied it to her own being chosen to be the Mother of God and held on to this truth in every vicissitude that would come. She was able to see in each trial and joy how God was calling her to share in her Son’s human life so that she could participate in her Son’s divinity.

Mary wants to help us to develop a similar contemplative heart. On Christmas morning as well as this morning in the Gospel for the last day of the year, the Church has us ponder the prologue to St. John’s Gospel in which St. John tells us, “Of His fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (Jn 1:16). The graces God wants us to receive and respond to in 2018 are building on the graces he gave us in 2017, and 2016 and beyond. Many of these grace have build on those he gave to our parents and grandparents, as well as graces he gave to the Church before us, to priests and religious, to Cardinal O’Connor, to so many popes. This means that the events of the past year and the events of the new aren’t random. Every year is like a new chapter in a book, but it’s not a new book. It’s building on what God has been trying to do in our life up until now, what he’s done for the world in Christ, what he did all the way back to Creation. In order to live well the new chapter, we need to see how what will fill the at-present blank pages of the new chapter is related to what has already come. Every gift this year — including the caresses of the Crosses with which he will bless us and the Church — is building upon so many gifts that God has already given. But we need a contemplative heart, a heart that connects the dots and treasures everything God gives, in order to perceive it. That’s the second thing Mary wants to mother us to learn.

Showing The Church to Mother Others

The third and last thing I’d like to ponder tonight is more specifically how Mary seeks to mother us and make us capable of mothering Jesus and others in Jesus’ name. In nature as well as in supernatural world, mothers normally teach their daughters how to mother their grandkids. Mary likewise wants to train us to cooperate with, and share in, her maternity. I’ll never tire of pondering St. Ambrose’s great insight that Pope Benedict cited in Verbum Domini, that even though Jesus has only one mother according to the flesh, in faith Christ is called to be the progeny of us all. We are called to conceive the word we hear interiorly and let that word gestate and grow to be so big that eventually — as if we were “ten months pregnant” — we need to give birth to the word, together with our flesh, in the midst of the world.

This is a two-step process: first by letting Mary mother us, to help us conceive her Son within and let him grow; second, by letting Mary help us to bring Christ to birth and grow in others. Christ knows we need this double gift, which is why on Calvary he entrusted us to his own Mother’s maternal genius. St. John Paul II that Mary’s acceptance of us as her spiritual children was part of her original fiat, part of her allowing her entire life to develop according to God’s word, including his words on Golgotha, “Behold your son.” Her mothering of us is not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, in which she seeks to help us “hear the word of God and keep it,” what will make us, indeed, brothers, and sisters, and mothers of Jesus (Lk 11:28, Lk 8:20-21). She adds each of us as tesserae in the mosaic of love that is her heart together with the love she has for her Son. Her fiat to virginal motherhood at the annunciation was the expression of her total self-giving to God, which was a gift perpetually renewed as God was continuously filling her with grace, a self-giving that includes her total maternal self-giving to each of us. Just as with Jesus, just as with St. John, Mary’s motherhood of us is totally personal. When a woman, as we know, is the mother of many children, she still has a unique, unrepeatable and intimate relationship with each one, and what is true in motherhood according to the flesh is also valid for motherhood in the order of the Spirit. Mary seeks to help each of us entrusted to her become fully conformed to her Son.

Like I presume some of you have during this difficult year, I have been praying through In Sinu Iesu: When Heart Speaks to Heart: The Dialogue of a Priest of Prayer, which details what Jesus, credibly in my opinion, seems to be indicating to an anonymous Benedictine priest about the way he seeks to have us respond to the scandal. It’s striking how essential Jesus is stressing it is that priests and the entire Church entrust ourselves anew and more profoundly than ever before to his Mother.

Jesus tells us in those interior locutions, “My Mother will give you the direction you need. … She will rectify the things that are not as they should be and show you how to use your energy, your time, and the talents I have given you. Take her as your Mother and Teacher, and do not be afraid to consult her even in little things. Nothing escapes the loving attention of her Heart. Trust her with all the details of your life and you will see that she is present to you, as she was to Saint John, and that nothing of what you live, or suffer, or fear, is foreign to her. …My Mother will show herself a Mother to you.”

On occasion, especially on major feast days, Mary herself speaks to her Benedictine priestly Son who has sought to welcome her in imitation of St. John, with words that similarly apply to each of us, saying, “I am your Mother, the Mother given you by my Son Jesus, from the Cross. … You are … precious to me and ever under the mantle of my protection. Let me live with you as I lived with John. … Speak to me simply and with complete trust in the compassion of my maternal Heart and in the power given to my maternal intercession. There is nothing that you cannot bring to me, nothing that you cannot present to me, nothing that you cannot offer me, even your very sins. … Give to me, then, all that you would offer to my Son and to His Father. … It is not enough to have some practices in my honor in the course of the day: I desire more and you are called to more. You are called to reproduce the life of Saint John with me in the cenacle and at Ephesus.”

Mary wants to have this type of relationship with each of us, and 2019 is a time for each of us to have our most Marian year of all.

But at the same time, Mary seeks to teach the Church how to be a loving Mother, and in a special way, to each all consecrated women to be icons of her maternal love. She wants to mother the Church and especially you, Sisters, to be spiritual mothers after her own loving heart. As we face the scandals in the Church, there’s conspicuously the alarming crisis of spiritual fatherhood, which has revealed itself in so many ways. But as history has shown, most men learn how to be dads by the help of women who domesticate and teach them, who help them to become truly responsible for others, who inspire them to make a total gift of themselves to their children in imitation and in cooperation with their own total self-giving commitment as mothers. That’s why I think that the most effective medicine to heal the Mystical Body from these self-inflicted wounds will be when consecrated women as spiritual mothers teach the whole Church, especially those with the vocation to be spiritual dads, how to care for everyone in the Church, especially those most wounded and vulnerable, as beloved sons and daughters.

John Paul II wrote about religious and consecrated women in Mulieris Dignitatem, that the great sacrifice of the renunciation of physical motherhood makes possible their motherhood according to the Spirit, a spiritual maternity that expresses itself as “concern for people, especially the most needy: the sick, the handicapped, the abandoned, orphans, the elderly, children, young people, the imprisoned and, in general, people on the edges of society.” He went on to say, beautifully, “In this way a consecrated woman finds her Spouse, different and the same in each and every person, according to his very words: ‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’ (Mt 25:40). Spousal love always involves a special readiness to be poured out for the sake of those who come within one’s range of activity.” In chaste celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven, “this readiness is open to all people, who are embraced by the love of Christ the Spouse,” and shows that her vocation “is always the vocation of a person — of a unique, individual person. Therefore the spiritual motherhood that makes itself felt in this vocation is also profoundly personal.” It’s personal first as a daughter of Mary. And it’s personal as a Mother of so many others, one by one, with a special care for those most in need of love, after Mary’s image.

If 2018 were defined by the scandals of the failure of priestly and episcopal fatherhood, I urge you to pray to, and receive from, Mary the help you need so that 2019 may be defined by the fidelity of consecrated and ecclesial motherhood.

Mary’s Maternity and the Holy Eucharist

The great way we renew ourselves in devotion to Mary’s motherhood and to our identity as her beloved daughters and sons is at Mass, by which we enter into time into the eternal kairos of Calvary, when Jesus, giving his body and blood for our salvation, gave us to his Mother and gave his mother to each of us. St. John Paul II wanted us in the Eucharist to ponder Mary’s maternal love of her Son as a means to grasp better not only how to receive Jesus in Holy Communion but also to understand more profoundly how Mary loves each of us. “Is not the enraptured gaze of Mary as she contemplated the face of the newborn Christ and cradled him in her arms,” he asked, “that unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Eucharistic communion?” He continued, “Mary lived her Eucharistic faith even before the institution of the Eucharist, by the very fact that she offered her virginal womb for the Incarnation of God’s Word. … At the Annunciation Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood. As a result, there is a profound analogy between theFiat that Mary said in reply to the angel, and theAmen that every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord. Mary was asked to believe that the One whom she conceived ‘through the Holy Spirit’ was ‘the Son of God’ (Lk1:30-35). In continuity with the Virgin’s faith, in the Eucharistic mystery we are asked to believe that the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine.” Here she seeks to mother us to receive her Son in faith before we receive his body and blood within. She wants to nurture us to offer our hearts, and wombs and whole bodies as tabernacles for his incarnation. She wants to help our whole life become an “Amen!” so that our existence will develop in accordance with the Word made Flesh we’re about to receive. And in embracing Him, we are in turn embraced by her who has never ceased embracing him, and we and the Church are helped by her to continue to embrace him in each person we meet, whom she loves with a maternal heart.

Alma Redemptoris Mater! Hail, Mother of the Redeemer! Succurre cadenti, surgere qui curat populo! Hasten to help your stumbling children who cry out to you! Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: