In honor of this feast I first thought to share with you the poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe”:

“Mary Immaculate, merely a woman yet this one thing has to do: let all God’s glory through; God’s glory which would go through her and from her flow…”

Hopkins’ poem is a beautiful meditation on the mystery we are celebrating, and I think he really “got it.” And that made me think of Thomas Merton’s echo of Hopkins in his own poem “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window,” “Because my will is simple as a window, he hears her say, “and knows no pride of original earth…because my love is simple as a window and knows no shame of original dust…”

And that made me think how this feast is in itself a window through which we may look into our own tradition and our own Catholic way of seeing reality; and then more importantly how it is a window that opens out from that tradition into the vastness of mystery.

Few of us may realize the tortured and curious evolution of this feast that means to celebrate Mary as a sinless human person from the moment of her conception in the womb of her mother Anne. It would be fascinating to report the circuitous route this feast took to this chapel this day – originating in the monasteries of early Palestine and Syria, finding hospitality in Ireland and England, but many condemnations and rejections in medieval Europe by the likes of Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure and even Thomas Aquinas who could in no way countenance the claim of Mary’s sinlessness from birth. It took nineteen centuries for the Church to declare the teaching on the sinlessness of Mary central to its cluster of core doctrines, or as I prefer to say, its core mysteries - because after all Catholic Christianity is a mystery religion. And that is both the wonder and problem of our tradition since few in our time and place know what to make of mystery, much less how to live and thrive in it. But somehow this mystery in its own good time erupted in the imagination of the Church and has given rise to a tremendous cult all around the world. This is the patronal feast of the United States, and is also a great feast in the communities of Latin America. So mystery indeed…

In his book Cradle of Redeeming Love, John Saward says that a mystery in the strict sense is a divinely revealed reality that little ones can understand but not even learned ones can comprehend. Theological mysteries are truth and therefore light for the mind, but the truth is so vast, the light of such intensity, that the mind is dazzled and amazed. When one meets a mystery of faith, one finds not a deficiency but an excess of intelligibility: there is just too much to understand.

We have been schooled very little in how to live in the realm of mystery except thought the liturgy; yet this is why we have been baptized, why we are laboring to be born again: so that we can gradually awaken to this realm of mystery in which we may come to understand and experience the fullness of being. Only children live in the realm of mystery without distress; and it seems that as we mature in reason and critical thinking, in our navigation and integration on the material realm, our native, inborn intuition and instinct for the more gracious, spacious realms of being constrict, narrow, grow dim. And that is why we need to be born again in the sacrament – mysterion – of baptism: to take our place in a mystical body to learn the way and wisdom of the mysteries which are the Christian life itself: incarnation, passion, resurrection, transubstantiation, transfiguration and all the other mysteries we probe and celebrate in our life of faith. We are baptized to work with the constrictions and obscurations that we have come to call – for better or worse - “original sin ” - the true-self distortion that we are saying today Mary never knew, and what has taken centuries for us to agree on how and why and what it might mean.

But the dogmatic route can sometimes be a digression on our way toward understanding because the mystery of Mary’s sinless nature and how it may shine light on our own sinful nature has always been a conundrum and it really works better that way, much better than as a dogma couched in theological language that sometimes even theologians can’t understand. Sometimes dogma tries to resolve mystery, to accommodate it to our rational mind, to answer the challenging, unsettling provocation it affords and thereby strips it of its power, and us of its illuminating effect. Why can we not let the sacred mysteries stand as riddles to which there are no answers but only irresolvable, growth- provoking wonderment?

As with so many of our liturgical feasts and core teachings, this one originated in the monasteries of the early Christian world because monks were in the business of being born again as new creatures desiring to live the life made flesh in Jesus – a life on the boundary (in the bosom) of God. They were dedicated to creating ways and means to aid in the transformation of our flawed and fragile human nature into something more mature and wise, capable of spiritual life. They were trying to evolve our human nature in their experiments with its potentials, and the work of contemplation, prayer and asceticism or spiritual training were all at the service of this goal.

Central to this process of being born again was the characteristically Christian habit of creating a culture of imagination where intuition might flourish and open to the realities the monks sought to actualize in their own nature. And the liturgy – played out in feasts, festivals, prayers, hymns, iconography, symbol, poetry, gesture – was a great vehicle for this work of transformation of consciousness and renewal of manners.

Though this feast began as a way to honor the physical or biological conception of Mary in her historical existence, it began to morph into something more “mysterious,” for as the monks grew in devotion and attentiveness to this moment of grace it seemed to pull them in deeper; the more they lived into the simple fact of Mary’s life it began to reveal dimensions they had not imagined. Today’s feast, therefore, is a window on a process of what we call the development of doctrine – one might call it the maturing of faith or spiritual insight, because it began to move beyond the mystery of original sin (a controversial teaching all in its own right in the early Church) which is our experiential starting place in this life, toward the mystery that seems to be before that – original sinlessness, the original integrity of our nature as it mirrors the divinity in whose image we are made.

I have always thought it an interesting coincidence that the feast of the Immaculate Conception and the feast of the Buddha’s enlightenment, Bodhi Day, both share this date, December 8. koan - engaging riddles, provocative questions that if lived into awaken insight and fuller understanding of life. Questions have a great magical power. A question is a seed which grows in us and it changes us as it grows, just like pondering what we call “a mystery.” And there is one such koan we might borrow from the Buddhists as a way to move into the real question or conundrum this feast of the Immaculate Conception poses for us today.

There is a famous question that Zen masters would give to new students: "What is your original face before your parents were born?" Just as the Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers would give a young disciple a word to ponder and probe in their formation, the Zen masters would give their students these challenging riddles that if asked over and over again, would at some point break open the mind of the disciple and flood it with understanding, which in turn could never be really put into words, but could be experienced and lived. We cannot explain the meaning of “our original face before our parents were born,” but Buddhists say it can be experienced, and that the experience yields great clarity and energy for living. Perhaps, analogously, this is the promise of our feast, which is not just saying something about Mary as one privileged historical person, but may be saying something about all of us as mystical persons. Perhaps in the radiance of this mystery we receive some similar illumination about our true nature before we were born, and like Mary, we behold ourselves whole, undistorted, reflecting the beauty and goodness of our Creator.

In the realm of mystery – which is to say in the realm of God--there is no such thing as time, no past, no present, but an eternal duration that is NOW. Might it be that what we say of Mary’s sinless nature is the deepest truth of the divine image which is our true essence as well? And might it not be perhaps a word about our original nature laboring to be reborn by the practice of our Christian life that opens us to gratuitous grace?

It is interesting to remember that when Bernadette Soubirous experienced a vision of Mary at Lourdes in the late 1850s, the extremely beautiful Lady in question did not in any way try to finally clarify the theological debate concerning what it means to be “immaculately conceived.” All she did was to bend close to the young visionary and in a humble and trembling way say: “I AM the Immaculate Conception.”

She might have said “Look: this is my true face before I was born.”

She might have said, “What is your original face before you were born?”

What might such a koan asked over and over - in our prayer, in our encounters, in our moments of moving from one thing to another, toward and against each other, in the pause between angry words, love words – how might such a question root in us and begin to subtly work its mystery on us? What if we were to wonder what our true face is like – our original nature before it became distorted by our various afflictions, the grimace of our sufferings, the falsity of the veils we wear to meet, as T.S Elliot would say, “the other faces that we meet?”

What is the countenance of my original face? In beholding it what might I see? What might I be? Perhaps there are only two mirrors in which we catch a glimpse of our original beauty: in the reflection of the loving gaze of another, and in the luminous darkness of God’s presence to us. Or maybe there are three and she, Immaculata, is the third: a mirror reflecting back to us our original face before we were born.

This feast is a Christian koan that presents not a theological fact or formula, but a mystical fascination that has the power to draw us more deeply into the depths and beauty of our own true nature mirrored in the one who as Hopkins says

“…not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race-
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemed, dreamed; who
This one thing has to do-
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow…”