The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

God chose us in him, before the foundation of the world,
to be holy and without blemish before him
It only took a moment, a flicker
a minute movement of the will, the mind, the hand
After all, what is a single piece of fruit in this overwhelming paradise?
And then, fallenness
A legacy of hatred, division, suspicion, pain
Brother raises arms against brother
The simple language of fidelity disintegrates into Babel
Pasturelands smoke with the fiery fury of pitched battle
The disharmony of greed, lust, violence, hatred disrupts the counterpoint of generosity, respect, peace, love
With a simple gesture all of the sorrows of a scenario of serpentine scintillation descend upon the world, casting its citizens headlong into chaotic future writing on their burned skins the passages of a Satanic epic
Humanity became imprisoned in the adamantine chains of its own fashioning
and we learned to despise the Law for showing us who we were
We studied new ways to persecute and kill the prophets
We enchanted ourselves with our own seductive capabilities
We looked deeply into the divination of our imaginings and saw staring skull-like back at us nothing but own faces and we called those faces: gods
And we cursed, cursed the fruit, cursed the snake, cursed the earth, the mother and father, the fate, the selves that continued to raise the curtain day after day on the unrelenting tragedy of the human condition
We cursed God after all he said: Be fruitful and multiply
Multiply your woes, your wounds, your wayward warrants.
And tangled, jumbled, reprobate in a Sisyphean pile, we tumblingly lost all hope, believing the fate of Eden to be a universal and lasting “No”

But even in the midst of this chaos, this Babel, this Hell on earth, God held His breath and waited until he remembered that he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world,
to be holy and without blemish before him.
She was nothing in the eyes of the world, a child, a commodity,
The outskirts of a forgotten village, a terminal sandlot of human expectations
A mud house, a wooden window, a berating sun
And then …
The frenzy of beating wings, of feather dust
A cacophony of light
The angel called out to the lowest of the earth, the slave of men’s expectations
Hail full of grace
He knew her name and then he whispered in her ear the secret she had been prepared to hear from the first stirring in her own mother’s womb.
Can you?
Will you?
Yes, of course, this is why I was brought into the world.
Yes of course, this is God’s dream
Yes, of course, now the great work begins.
And God sighed and the breath of that sigh completed the Virgin’s yes
The breath of that sigh, held so long throughout the Chronos of our collective pain breathed forth long and welcome
It breathed forth like water to a parched earth, breeze in the arid desert.
Jesus is that breath united to Mary’s yes
Jesus the man of sorrows who acquits us of our sorrows
Jesus the man of journeys who becomes our resting place
Jesus the man of hunger and thirst, who becomes our bread and wine, the bread of angels, the wine of compassion
Jesus that daily reminder to us that in flesh, in spirit that …
God chose us in him, before the foundation of the world,
to be holy and without blemish before him
And so we can be brothers and sisters, so we can be who we were made to be
This promise stands before us today as a threat and an opportunity
A threat to all our rationalizations and an opportunity to say yes to the vocation, the difficult but beautiful vocation he has called us to, we know he has called us to it
A threat to our radical individualism, our selfishness and the opportunity to live into the mystery of God in the vital, breathing triumphs and sorrows, joys and hopes of our brothers and sisters
A threat to our woundedness and the opportunity for healing in lives torn open by broken homes, grudges, hurts, dismay, shunning, racism, shattered dreams
In this feast, in this cosmic, immaculate feast of God’s grandeur
We, a people taught to look down at the trodding, plodding feet of our own inebriated self intuitiveness raise our heads and behold our true destinies written in the skies
Inscribed in the glory of steel clouds offering an oblation of snow
Calligraphied in the highest aspirations of humanity, to know the truth, to love without counting the cost, to be transfixed by beauty
Embedded in a new promise, a future-oriented history of service, compassion, tenderness, kindness, fidelity for …
God chose us in him, before the foundation of the world,
to be holy and without blemish before him
and so we are called to be saints among saints.
Brothers and sisters it can be accomplished in us as it was accomplished in Mary, we can, we must become immaculate if not for the first time, the, by God’s grace, at least … again.
God whispers this promise to us today. Let us say yes and moving forward from this place so that we can rewrite the Satanic epic into the pure poetry of love inscribed in our hearts, though for a time hidden from view, before the foundation of the world.