No Gravity in Canada?

Friday of the First Week of Advent
Luke 1:26-38

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

This is one of those dogmas of the Church that send many folks giggling as if they have confronted someone who states that there is no gravity in Canada.   A then revered teenager told my then eight-year-old son about this rare characteristic of the Canadian landscape and he believed it.  His older sibling laughed and ridiculed him mercilessly.  On a family vacation later that Summer, as we approached Isle Royale (where we could see Canada) and he saw that people and trees were decidedly grounded, he gave in.

The very fact of its almost universal acceptance from the dawn of Christianity is enough for me take the Immaculate Conception seriously.  But it takes my imagination to work through what it means for my own discipleship. In my reading, I remember coming across the notion that dogma ‘has the power to save us.’ And if it can’t it isn’t dogma. What is 'saving' about Mary's uniqueness?

To take that notion seriously I will need to use all the ways we humans come to know things…the least helpful being ‘scientific literalism’ (though I certainly want my surgeon to be most heavily informed by it;)

What if I imagine that God had been waiting and waiting and waiting?  What if all God longed for since the dawn of the human race was an absolutely free and unconditioned, yes?

Many may have come close.  Mary gave it.  

And once she made that yes, she became the icon, par excellence, of discipleship.  And that, I know, has saving power. 

All my conditioned yeses

My ‘Yes…but…

My ‘Yes…when…

My ‘Yes…if…

My ‘yes…maybe…

All my yeses tethered to my ego.

All my yeses afraid to trust completely

All of them…fall quite short!

The saving power is in the model I choose, however sloppily, to emulate.

One might believe that to choose a model is to enslave oneself.

But I think the opposite is rather truer.

If I don’t choose, aren’t I, in fact, choosing to stay enslaved to the above litany of conditioned yeses…a sort of ‘keeping my options open’ mode of living?

When have I ever been awed by a person who lives a ‘keeping your options open’ kind of life?  It is rather that person who commits so fully…who throws it all in and bets the ranch, who causes me great pause.  

Today, I will be awed by Mary.  

I will be awed by her yes to 'advent' Christ. 

I will pray for Mary’s support in doing the same.

Adventing Christ has a pre-requisite:

a Marian-like yes!