Immaculate Conception (The Song of Examined Life)

In the Collect of the feast we pray: ‘O God, who by the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin prepared a worthy dwelling for your Son, grant, we pray, that, as you preserved her from every stain by virtue of the Death of your Son, which you foresaw, so, through her intercession, we, too, may be cleansed and admitted to your presence. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Today we celebrate the immaculate birth of Mary, the mother of the Saviour. With this birth, God has appointed a new center of the human universe. It is almost like the scientific vision of the ‘Big-Bang’, for us Christians, all moral reflection, examined life, yearning for joy and companionship, repentance, and new beginning  all value  emerges and returns to this centre. We need this center more than ever.

We can expand the above astronomical analogy further. We can envision countless, growing whirlpools of ‘negativity’ in the vast see of history, and our present. These rotating spirals of sin (history unfolding, without making a collective attempt to purify it) pop up around us. It is almost inevitable that one to a smaller or greater extent - is caught up in it. This invisible, random flow of ‘dark-matter’ might explain sudden spiritual or health-struggles. People got injured morally and physically every day.

​This feast is not a mere symbolic encouragement. We are called to reconnect with, and confess, this real centre of history. It is a gift of gift to be able to perceive it on our spiritual radar. The sad fact is that this ‘star of renewal’ is not (no longer) shown on the radar of our culture. Something blocks it; something blinds us to this ‘white matter’. That’s why, our feast is so profoundly counter-cultural. For it goes against the blind vision of a culture, increasingly burdened with unexamined sin - collective and personal. And the presence of this ‘real dark matter’ is not neutral. It is producing the eyes and minds of denial. When the ‘Sacred’ is not simply refused but treated with hostility. That is why, with Mary, we are called ‘to sing a new song to the Lord’. Mary’s Magnificat is a song of examined life.
 
08.12.2020