The memorial of the immaculate heart of Mary is today. Yesterday was the solemnity of the sacred heart of Jesus. As the priest reminded us, sacred means holy and immaculate means pure. His focus was on how holiness is not the same as being perfected, but that in the drama of their lives these two hearts were made perfect through suffering, and thus they came to be filled more and more with the Father’s will. Of course Jesus in his divinity had that without restriction, but it had to grow in his humanity.
I have been thinking about how, as father said during his homily, only God is holy. Jesus is recognized in that way in his sacred heart. And thus in his life of growing holiness, through his humanity as the mediator, he is the one who mediates that to Mary, and she is the immaculate one, the perfectly beloved creature. This is passive spiration, and hence the reason the Holy Spirit conceives in her because the Holy Spirit is the Beloved of the Father and the Son, the Gift of love. That is the meaning of passive spiration. “I am your beloved” says the Holy Spirit from all eternity. And Mary then is totally conformed in likeness to the Holy Spirit–beloved since she was conceived. And so the Holy Spirit continues to increase in her. Her belovedness increases such that at the fullness of time the Word is conceived in her. More and more beloved throughout her life. Then, her Son floods (mediates) her with his sacredness, his holiness, himself. He becomes the finality of her soul. She is the new Eve! The mother of all the faithful.
It is no accident that the first reading today was about the 3 angels visiting Abraham and Sarah, and Sarah’s “laugh” about how she will “next year” bear a son. Abraham is the father of the faith as tradition teaches. Mary will be the mother. God purified Abraham through many events, but most of all through the gift of Isaac to Sarah, and then the “sacrifice” of Isaac. Abraham trusts and God’s word came to be true in him. Sarah was the mother in whom the old covenant came to be conceived and was born. She was old, the mother of the old covenant. She suffered as did her husband for years waiting for a son, probably in despair or even giving up at times for God’s promise to come to be. Hence the story of Hagar and Ishmael. This drama prepared God’s chosen, and the world, for the ultimate gift, the Son to Mary, and to us through Mary. She is the perfection of purity and so can be the perfectly beloved creature, perfectly beloved “earth,” perfectly beloved Zion.
Mary is the one who as beloved, then “mediates” this as a fiat, and then becomes theotokos, and as such mediates the care, tenderness, nurture–in other words the conditions for the conception, development, and flourishing of her Son. And her Son fills her with Himself, and His Father, with holiness, with love, and she loves then as He loves–all of us, bearing forth her Son at the foot of the Cross. Abraham begot his son to his sacrifice, but it was ordained to be incomplete until fulfilled by God the Father sending His Son to the Cross. And Sarah did not bear Isaac as a sacrifice. Mary did. She beholds him, and thus treasure him in the deepest indwelling of her heart. The known is in the knower. The beloved in the lover. And no creature love her Son more than Mary. No creature knew her Son more than Mary. Abraham and Sarah paved the way for this supreme act of love. God the Father and Mary completed it. Salvation comes to fruition in the death and resurrection of the Son. This was the seed planted in the womb of Mary’s heart when He died on the Cross. She accepted this in the most profound fiat. This was a greater suffering than any other she could endure. Her own death would have meant nothing like this to her. She mediates this purity, this fertility of her own soul, so as to become the womb of the Church as it poured out from His side. This fiat to her Son gives way to glorification and the entrance into the inner life of the heart and home of the Holy Trinity, the kingdom of God, the new Jerusalem. Zion awakens anew in her. Mary is queen.
The directed dynamism of all history is now made clear. The mediated fertility of the earth now begins as a mustard seed from the side of Christ into the heart of Mary. And this seed grows in the womb of her soul until it is born with the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, where it is then conceived alive in the souls of all Mary’s children.
The Last Adam, the last Man is beheld by all, first and foremost by the new Eve. His heart was sacred. Her heart was immaculate. The place of the authentic man and the authentic woman is fixed for eternity. But we live in the drama of a choice between life and death, between purity and defilement, between sacredness and eternal dying. To receive the finality of all history, we have to become pure of heart, her children. And then his Triune sacredness will become ours.