Friday, December 8, is, according to the official Catholic church calendar, a holy day of obligation, meaning a day, if you are into, “obligations,” that you must attend Mass.  Let’s look at why this holy day was established in the first place.

   It wasn’t until 1858 that this “feast” was established and why was that?  To completely answer this, we need to go back to the garden. Until our first parents sinned, they supposedly possessed, infused knowledge, absence of concupiscence, (in other words, all appetites under control) and bodily immortality (preternatural gifts). In other words, “they walked with God.” 

   After the sinning, according to the story, we would live with pain, know shame, and eventually die.  This is of course, a simplified version, but in essence, to be human meant that we “became,” or are, “imperfect.”  It was into this “imperfection” that Jesus/God chose to become One-With-Us.  So why this feast of the Immaculate Conception?

   As we all know, this Marian feast states that Mary of Nazareth was conceived without the “stain of sin”—the rest of us, the Church men say, carry the stain of “original sin,” “acquired” because of the “sin” of our first parents.

   There was a time, even as far back as Aristotle, when it was thought that women’s place in the creation of new life was merely as a “receptacle” for that life to grow.  Over time  it was realized that women supplied ½ of the chromosomes for new life, and in 1858, Pius IX decided, in order to keep Jesus, the “Savior” free from sin, Mary would “need” to have been conceived without original sin, and unwittingly, in so doing, he essentially declared that Mary was not human, and therefore, neither was Jesus.

   At this point, it is important to interject that the biblical sources we have were, as Sister Sandra Schneiders says, “written by men, for men, and about men” to, I would say, “control the story.” 

   So, what do we have so far? God created us, supposedly perfect at one point—we chose not to follow God’s ways in the garden, “sinned,” and were thrown out of the garden to walk through life in pain, suffering, shame for our sinfulness, and eventually, experience physical death. 

   So, when God, who made us imperfectly—because we were able to sin, chose to “save us,” by becoming one of us in Jesus, the church men decided that God, in Jesus, wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the “original sin” all of us now “acquire” at birth, so the receptacle must be free of sin—stain—thus the “Immaculate Conception!” 

   Here is a possible alternate story, to that most confusing, “crazy-making” one: Our loving God, Jesus’ God of the Prodigal and the Good Shepherd, gifted us with life/humanity, which is an imperfect state, meaning simply, that we don’t always get it right—we sin.  Our loving God, who is always “chasing after us” (from biblical translation, The Message) realized that we needed an example of how to live out our gift of humanity in a better way than we had been doing—enter Jesus. 

   We say in our Catholic catechism that Jesus was, and is, fully God and fully human.  This is a mystery that we take on faith, and if this is to be so, then the human part has to come from Jesus’ human mother, Mary.  But if, as the church fathers say, she is without sin, then she simply isn’t human, because “humanity” means to be “imperfect.”

   Why is it so hard for us humans, who try to be religious, more so in our hierarchical men, to simply see a God who loves us beyond all imagining, and One who would go to any extreme—even co-existing with sinners to make that abundantly clear?  I would say that when we move too much out of our heads, instead of our hearts, we come to such an end.

   Therefore friends, as in the past, we won’t be meeting for Mass on Friday.  Might I suggest that you instead reflect on the Mary of the Magnificat who said her mighty, faith-filled “yes” to God and gave to the world, her Son, human and divine, who would become the Christ, a fine example for all of us to follow.