Our standard, our reference
We celebrated the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary last December 8. We had a school-wide Mass at the gym, and we said it in Latin. Everyone had the English-Latin missalette so they can follow and participate in the Mass more actively.
On my way to the Mass, a student approached me to ask what the Mass was for. It turned out that he did not know about the Immaculate Conception. In the minute that took me to reach the place, I tried to explain to him the nature and significance of the feast. But I can’t help but feel flabbergasted that he was practically ignorant of it.
Of course, I knew that the fellow came from a public high school. But he was already one of our top freshman students. I wondered how many young people were like him, knowledgeable about computers but a “tabula rasa” in religion.
That experience gave me the idea that I needed to talk a lot about the Immaculate Conception. The feast is in fact a very important feast in the liturgical calendar, one of the holydays of obligation together with Sundays and Christmas and the New Year which is actually the Solemnity of Mary’s Divine Motherhood.
That underscores the importance of the Marian solemnity. And rightly so, since it reminds us of who we really are, what kind of dignity we have. The Immaculate Conception of the Mary shows us the standard we should never lose sight of as we go through this world of sin, temptation, problems, etc.
Some lines of the feast’s Eucharistic preface point to this truth: “Full of grace, she was to be a worthy mother of your Son, your sign of favor to the Church at its beginning, and the promise of its perfection as the bride of Christ…You chose her from all women to be our advocate with you and our pattern of holiness.”
Our predicament is that with all the problems, pressures and difficulties we face everyday, not to mention the temptations and sins, we tend to think that the usual state of our life is all that there is to it. So we are tempted to lower our standard, not realizing that doing so can trigger a freefall to worse conditions.
With this feast we are reminded of how we were at the beginning and how we ought to be in the end. That is, as masterpiece of God’s creation, we are made in his image and likeness, elevated through grace to be children of his, meant to participate in his very own life, and not just creatures who simply come and belong to him.
We are supposed to be like God, holy and perfect like him, sinless like him and also like our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary. God chose her to be the mother of his son who became man to save us, Jesus Christ.
The Solemnity of Mary’s Immaculate Conception means that this woman was given the rare privilege of being exempted from original sin, that is, her conception was not accompanied by the handicap of not being in the state of grace as we originally were meant to be. In fact, she was filled with grace.
Original sin precisely means that what was meant to be our state at conception, that is, to be in grace, is missing because that state was lost with the sin of Adam and Eve in paradise. It is not a sin we commit. It is one we inherit. We fall heir to a wounded and handicapped state at our very conception.
Mary’s privilege did not however remove her freedom to commit sin, if she wanted to. To her credit was her total correspondence to the grace given her. She was sinless all throughout her life.
Her example certainly is most worthy to be emulated. At least it gives us a clear idea of the standard we should never forget as we go through our daily life. We may not be like her now, but we can want to be like her, and that’s already a big thing.
She stands as a bright light that leads to our true destination in a world filled with darkness or false lights. Thus it is all worthwhile to deliberately develop a devotion to her, looking at her, knowing her more, loving her, bringing her with us wherever we go, involving her in everything in our life.
She loves to play that role with us, because she was given to us by Christ himself to be our mother too, and not only his.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
