Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Botticelli Virgin

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

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Thursday, 08 December 2011 -
Fr. Raymond Homily

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: Raymond . . .
To: Nivard . . .
Sent: Thursday, 8 December 2011, 9:42
Subject: Immaculate Conception

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 2011

In the beginning God created this world as a beautiful garden. And then, as the climax of his work he created man. Male and female he created them; and he looked and saw that it was good - it was very good.  He took great pleasure in the wonderful work of his hands.

This teaching that comes to us from revelation gives us a picture of the human race as being the very climax of God’s creation – his masterpiece as it were; something in which he delights.­ Now if we want to injure someone in some way we can do it very effectively by harming someone in whom he delights; by spoiling something he holds most precious to himself.  This was the mentality of the jealous Satan when he tempted our first parents.  He was out to spoil God’s masterpiece.  And unfortunately he seemed to succeed in doing just that.  He made of us a fallen race.  From that time on, it would seem, God’s masterpiece, no matter how it might be restored, was always something that had been tarnished.  But God’s plans and purposes are not upset by anyone, not even by the one, who, since then, “has claimed power to sift us as wheat”.

God’s masterpiece was still destined to be found untarnished, pure and perfect and unsullied. And this was to be accomplished as we all know in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Our tainted nature’s solitary boast” as the poet so beautifully put it.  Nor was this perfect creature of God’s fashioning merely a “restoration” of his handiwork.  No, the first Adam and Eve, The Adam and Eve of time, the Adam and Eve of nature, were long preceded in the mind of God by the Adam and Eve of Grace.  Before ever the world began, the Scriptures tell us they were decreed in the great plan of the Incarnation of the Word, the Wisdom of God.  This great plan and purpose of God was untouchable by any created power and it swept, and is still sweeping, down all the centuries of human history, advancing inexorably to it final conclusion.  A conclusion that is still to be consummated in the apocalyptic image of the pregnant woman, still threatened by the eternally-frustrated dragon, but standing eternally on the moon and clothed eternally with the sun.