The Yes that Mary Gives, It Comes from Somewhere
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
There is a bad idea out there in the world (perhaps as common within the Church as outside of it) that we are not supposed to have problems in life. The thinking goes that to have a problem means that something is wrong that needs fixing and that with enough knowledge or effort or resources, just about any problem in life can be solved. The project in life is to free yourself from your problems, to liberate yourself from the hardness of life. Problems fill us with bad emotions that flag our attention and make the demand that there is fixing to be done—that there is work to do. Experience enough anxiety or sadness or stress or sorrow or fear or boredom or apathy and suddenly it is time to find a therapist, or change careers, or end a relationship, or lobby the government for better resources, or join a movement that seeks to engineer some form of social change in the world.
Sometimes those courses of action might be right. But you can search for solutions to your problems your whole life and you will never find a solution to the raw fact that to be a human person means to have problems. Our readings for the celebration of this liturgy are filled with persons who lived with incomparable advantages compared to us. Imagine living like Adam and Eve, created in perfect relationship with God, immortal and possessing a perfect interior balance of emotion and appetite and will and knowledge. But Adam and Eve still had problems. They were confronted with a choice about what matters most in life, a choice with real stakes, a choice that surely induced stress and worry about what to do. And all those problems were experienced before the reality of sin.
Mary is conceived without sin—that is why we are here today—and yet no one would say that Mary lived a life free from problems. Mary is free from the wounds of sin. She possesses an intimate knowledge of God and of God’s life and of God’s plan for the world. Mary is free from the kinds of broken desires and appetites that follow from the reality of sin. And yet Mary still lives a hard life filled with problems. Maybe the hardest human life ever lived. The Gospel tonight tells us almost immediately that Mary was greatly troubled at the greeting of Gabriel. The original Greek is more helpful: Mary was disturbed to the limit of her being, caught up between interior thoughts and emotions that were pulling her apart. Freedom from sin offered Mary no shelter from the reality of problems in life.
You will notice that Mary did not run from her problems, nor go find a therapist nor change careers nor end relationships nor join a movement to engineer social change nor lobby the Roman Empire for a more just distribution of resources. The response to the reality of problems in life, for Mary, is a matter of binding her life to the will of God. The Yes that Mary gives is not a measure of protection meant to shield her from the hardness of life—quite the opposite, really. Her Yes means that now her problems count for something. And what sustains Mary in the confrontation of her problems, I can only imagine, is the strength that comes from binding her will to the will of God. Human nature, even nature unstained by sin, lacks the power to effectively confront the problems of life and claim easy victories. We need grace, we need God, and the surest way to get to God is to bind your will to his will.
What does that look like, to bind your will to the will of God? We have in recent decades crafted a very dramatic vision of what it means to follow the will of God for your life—this is unfortunate. The conversation about following God’s will more and more today is taken out of the context of living an everyday life in relationship with Christ through the Church and made into a matter of wholesale abandonment to divine providence, usually by way of finding a vocation in life. To pursue the will of God is to receive a call to do something heroic, to go on mission for the kingdom, maybe in a family or in a religious community or in a parish or in a foreign country. We need an ultimate purpose, a final meaning, something big and real and meaningful. Otherwise, how would we ever really live in relationship with God?
Set those more dramatic images of vocation and mission to the side for a moment.
Here is God’s will for you: live a life in relationship with him on his terms—those terms being everyday life lived in relationship with Christ and the Church. Believe in Christ, accept his teaching, and act on his words. In the sacraments of the Church is found grace, which is God’s life shared with us. Through the reception of grace you receive a kind of spiritual energy that helps you to make good choices and do the work of love. Those kinds of choices and those kinds of actions, performed again and again over the course of years, help you to form virtues like fortitude and wisdom and temperance and justice and prudence that make it easier for you to do what is right and, yes, easier for you to confront your problems.
The bad thinking of our age tells us that we are not supposed to have problems. The received tradition of our Church tells us that we are supposed to get better at dealing with them. And what makes us better at dealing with our problems is virtue grounded in a daily life shared with Christ through the Church.
I imagine that Mary possessed many, many virtues that inclined her to give her Yes to God when the time came. Imagine what her life looked like before the angel Gabriel appeared to her. My guess is that Mary lived each day in relationship with God by way of religious faith: a received tradition captured in the rhythms of worship and prayer and right relationship. The Yes that Mary gives, it comes from somewhere—not the reality of a sinless conception per se (as though her Yes is a necessary consequence of freedom from original sin) but rather from the reality of living bound up with the will of God, day in and day out, year after year, in the ordinariness and tediousness that defines most human lives. Mary lived with God each day. Her Yes came from somewhere. And the Yes that Mary gives does not remove her from the hardness of confronting problems in life.
But the Yes that Mary gives does result in a divine solution to the reality of human problems. The world wants to tell you that there is a solution to be found for every problem in life. You just need to find it. My suggestion: get better at dealing with your problems by living a life of virtue grounded in the life of the Church. Because no matter the depth of our knowledge or the extent of our resources or the determination of our will, the only real answer there is to give to our problems is Christ.
Homily preached on Friday, December 8th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary