The Nativity of Our Lady

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“This is how Jesus Christ came to be born,” we’re told in St. Matthew’s Gospel. “His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a just man, and not wanting to expose her to reproach, was minded to put her away privately.

“He had made up his mind to do this when suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.

“Now, all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son, whom they will call Emmanuel’ (Isa. 7:14), a name which means ‘God is with us’” (Matt. 1:18-23).

Today is the feast of the birthday of Our Lady, and this birthday has been celebrated from the earliest centuries of Christianity. It’s a special feast of the Mother of God, an occasion of great joy, because Mary’s arrival is a sign that the Redemption is near.

For us also, as children of Our God, we try to behave well on the birthday of Our Mother, like all little children.

There was a kindergarten teacher once in Manila who, when the birthday of Our Lady came, was trying to think of a way whereby he could get across to these students something about the birthday of Our Lady and what it meant. And so, he had an idea, and he decided to buy a birthday cake, and they got candles, and they lit the candles, and they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Our Lady, and then they ate the cake.

One year later, all of those kindergarten students remembered the birthday of Our Lady.

It brings to mind a phrase of Pope St. John Paul II, who said, “We go to the great spiritual mysteries through physical signs and symbols” (John Paul II, Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 1146).

Those physical signs and symbols become very important. We are creatures of matter and spirit. We go to the spiritual through the material.

God had been waiting for this birth. When this day came, there must have been great joy in heaven, because “the fullness of time had begun” (Gal. 4:4).

She is “the Morning Star” (John Paul II, Encyclical, Redemptoris Mater, Point 3, March 25, 1987), the bright promise of immortality.

In the Old Testament, the birthday of Our Lady passes unnoticed, like so many aspects of her life. And yet, she is the Gate of Heaven (Hymn, Ave Maris Stella).

And so, the Entrance Antiphon of today’s Mass says, “Let us celebrate with joyful hearts the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of whom was born the sun of justice, Christ Our God.”

In a very beautiful encyclical on Our Lady, John Paul II, fifteen or so years before the new millennium, around the presumed time of the birth of Our Lady, two thousand years from the birth of Mary, he issued this document.

He says, “As the dawn heralds the coming of the new day, so Mary heralded the coming of the Savior, the ‘Sun of Justice,’ into the history of the human race” (John Paul II, idem.)

He has this very beautiful phrase: Mary is like “the dawn”—the dawn that tells us that the sun is coming—a new principle of energy, new beginning, new everything.

The liturgy of the Mass calls the newborn Virgin the fulfillment of God’s design in calling all men to everlasting life. From all eternity, the Blessed Trinity predestines Mary to be the Mother of God. God adorns her with all the graces for this purpose.

St. Alphonsus says, “She is the most beautiful, fully human soul ever created, second only to the incarnation of the Word” (Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary).

Pope St. John Paul liked to call her God’s first Opus Dei, because she’s full of grace, she’s full of everything that makes her beautiful in the sight of God.

St. Thomas Aquinas says that God gives each person the necessary strength for a specific mission in the world (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Third Part, q27, a5).

Given Mary’s exalted vocation, her grace from the time of her conception surpasses that bestowed on all the angels and saints together.

Mother of God, daughter of God, spouse of God. That’s why we call her Queen of the angels, Queen of the saints. Greater than her, only God. She occupies the highest dignity in heaven.

St. Thomas says that her tremendous participation in the divine nature was proportional to the singular dignity to which God called her from all eternity (ibid., q7, a10).

And so when we try to glance at images of Our Lady and say sweet and loving things to her, especially on days like today, we have a special pathway to her heart, like little children on their mother’s birthday.

But we can remember that she’s all beauty, all fair. There’s a phrase in Latin that says tota pulchra, all beauty.

St. Bernard says, “Mary’s sanctity and beauty were so superlative that it was fitting that God would be her Son and she His Mother” (cf. St. Bernard, Sermon 4 on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary).

St. Bonaventure says, “God could have made a greater world, but he could not have made a mother more perfect than the Mother of God” (St. Bonaventure, The Mirror of the Blessed Virgin Mary—Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis).

And St. Alphonsus says she was the most beautiful soul ever created (Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary).

It’s very natural that we would try to have a lot of devotion to Our Lady, that we would try to bring her into everything every day, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to sleep at night, that we would try to live a presence of Mary.

Just like little children like always to be in the company of their mother, it’s logical that we also would like and seek to be in the company of Our Mother.

She reminds us that we too have received a personal call to holiness from God to fulfill a specific mission in the world. It’s our job to be focused on that mission, like Our Lady was focused on her mission—father of a family, mother of a family, spouse, working person.

All the different roles we have to play, there’s a grace for that: our apostolic mission to raise the spiritual temperature of those around us, our work to promote the domestic Church that has been entrusted to us.

We have to be taken up with our mission because that’s the purpose and meaning of our life. We have been sent.

Every time that we need inspiration for our mission, all we need to do is look at Our Lady in her mission, how she said so frequently, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

There may be many times when we have to make an act of humble acceptance of the will of God, possibly humble acceptance that there are things we cannot change, or humble acceptance that God doesn’t need our action or our words. What He needs is our witness, our holiness, our prayer.

In that whole process, our joy and our consolation come from looking at Our Mother, inspired by her silence in Bethlehem, in Egypt, in Nazareth, beside the Cross.

Besides the joy of contemplating the fullness of Our Lady’s grace, we need not forget that God gives unfailingly to each person sufficient grace to bring the specific mission that we have in the world to completion.

St. Paul likes to say, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12:9). Mary is the Mother of grace, the Mediatrix of grace. It all comes through her immaculate hands.

Mary’s birth leads us to have deep respect for every human person.

“Lord,” we’re told in the Prayer after Communion, “may your Church renewed in the Holy Eucharist, be filled with the joy at the birth of the Virgin Mary, who brought the dawn of hope and salvation to the whole world.”

As children of Mary, we’re also called to bring that hope to so many souls around us who may not have hope, who may not realize what God wants of them.

Parents cooperate in the act of procreation, and God infuses a unique immortal soul at the moment of conception. Each soul is different, each soul is special, each soul has an immortal destiny, and parents have a special mission to care for those souls, to bring them to heaven.

“On the birthday of the Mother of God, the great joy we feel and celebrate brings with it a serious responsibility. We should be glad to learn when a child comes into being in a mother’s womb and rejoice when it enters the world” (John Paul II, Address, November 8, 1985).

St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to say that every baby is the presence of God in the world.

Pope St. John Paul said that even when the arrival of a newborn implies hardship, entails renunciations, or presents restrictions and burdens, the child should always be accepted and feel safe in the love of its parents (cf. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Letter to Families, February 2, 1994).

Every human being is called to become aware of their divine filiation, to give God glory, and ultimately to enjoy everlasting happiness.

There’s a story about Our Lord at the time of the general judgment putting St. Peter close to the gates of heaven and telling St. Peter to be very restrictive about who he allows into heaven—not to allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry into heaven.

And then Our Lord goes away, and He comes back some time later, and He finds that heaven is full of people. He says to St. Peter, “I thought I told you to keep the gates tightly closed and be very selective about who you allowed into heaven.”

St. Peter answered, saying, “Yes, Lord, that’s what I did, but every time I closed the gates, Your Mother keeps opening the windows.”

And so Our Mother is our hope. God the Father must have rejoiced infinitely when a human creature full of grace was born, destined to become the Mother of the eternal Son. It’s a day of great significance in the whole history of humanity.

The woman was free from original sin and most chaste. Although God granted Joachim and Anne special joy as a participation in the grace poured out on their daughter now born into the world like all others, what would they have felt if they had had an inkling of her vocation?

Looking at all the great feasts of Our Lady, we get an inkling of her greatness, what her life meant. The Church celebrates her patronage under different titles, to give us different optical angles on the Mother of God.

More to the point, we’re told how much we should appreciate the immeasurable efficacy of our own passage through life, if we remain faithful to the grace we receive to enable us to carry out the mission granted us through the eternal providence of God.

The Christian vocation that we received at baptism, you could say, is renewed every day. Our Lady reminds us of it, helps us today to grow in holiness and apostolate, and to keep the apostolic aspect of our Christian vocation ever before our eyes.

As with God, time no longer has any significance for Our Lady. She has reached the fullness of age, the eternal youth born of participation in the constantly fresh vigor of the divine nature.

St. Augustine teaches: “The Almighty is younger than all” (St. Augustine, Homily on Genesis), precisely because He is unchangeable. The greater the personal union with God, the deeper such a habitual disposition can be.

As the creature most closely united to Christ, Mary is certainly the youngest of all.

When we seek God directly, when we turn to the God of our youth “who gives joy to our youth” (Ps. 42:4)—we’re told this in the Psalms—fills us with joy, then youth and maturity coalesce in us too.

From the time of her adolescence, the Blessed Virgin enjoyed full spiritual maturity in proportion to her age. Now in heaven, in the plenitude of her initial grace and that merited through union with the work of her Son, she keeps watch over us and lends her ear to our praise and petition.

Today, she must be listening to the thanksgiving we offer to God for creating her. She looks on us and understands our life, since after God, she is the one who knows most about our weariness and our struggles (cf. Antonio Orozco, Look Up to Mary).

She’s the Comforter of the afflicted, she’s the Consolation of the migrants, she’s the Mother of mercy, she is so many things. She said, “All generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48).

“Little did her parents realize how great was the fruit of their chaste love. And they probably never grasped it in their lifetime” (ibid.).

Maybe you look to each one of your children and you dream, and that leads you to pray, to focus on that spiritual goal, mission that God has given to you, to lead your children to sanctity and apostolate.

“Who can predict what is to become of a newborn babe? No one knows for sure” (ibid.). The future of every child is mysterious. Each one is entrusted by the Creator with a specific task to carry out in the world.

Today on the birthday of Our Lady, we could ask her that she might help that specific task of each one of our children. We know she’s always beside them. She is our sweetness and our hope, lifting them up, encouraging them, helping them to discover that mission and that purpose. We have a role to play, but she’s always there in the background making things happen.

Nothing spectacular accompanied Our Lady’s birth. Everything was very ordinary. The Gospels make no mention of it. She was born in a city of Galilee, probably in Nazareth itself. There was no extraordinary revelation about her birth. The world continued giving importance to other events which would soon fade and vanish from all memory.

Our Christian vocation gives us a sense of fraternity, gives us a sense of the very relative value to the passing things of every day, the crises and the pandemics and the ups and downs.

What is most important in the eyes of God often passes unnoticed by men who commonly seek extraordinary things in order to carry on their existence.

On his first Christmas in Rome, Pope St. John Paul, like all popes on Christmas Day, gave a message to the United Nations, a message of peace on Christmas Day. And then when he was finished, he said, “Now we turn our attention from the assembly hall of the United Nations in New York to a small stable in Bethlehem of Judea.”

The contrast was very marked. We turn our attention from the great things of men with their glitter and their glamor and their razzmatazz to the great things of God, which are silent, quiet, hidden, which pass unnoticed.

Only in heaven was there rejoicing on Mary’s birthday, and it must have been a great celebration.

Our Church is a Church of celebration. We celebrate the Mass, we celebrate Easter, we celebrate feast days, because we have an awful lot to celebrate.

Our Lady spent many years of her life in obscurity. We’re told in Genesis that all Israel awaited the handmaid foretold in Sacred Scripture (cf. Gen. 3:15; Isa. 7:14), without realizing her actual presence among men.

Judging from appearances, she hardly differed at all from others in that small town. She went to the well for water every day like everybody else. She had free will and was capable of love, but she loved with an intensity hard for us to appreciate. And her desires were always in keeping with the love of God.

Our Lady was intelligent. She placed her mind at the service of the mysteries she gradually grew to understand more deeply. She kept all these things carefully in her heart, in her mind, pondered all these things (cf. Luke 2:19,51).

But there were times when she didn’t understand. When they find Jesus in the temple and he says, “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” we’re told, “They did not understand the words that were spoken to them (Luke 2:49). But they accept them.

There may be times when we don’t understand the mysteries of our life, or the mysteries of the cross, or the mysteries in the lives of our children. But with Our Lady, we can learn to accept those things in silence, to go back to the ordinary.

Our Lady must have learned, like all the other girls, to sew and to cook. She would have been able to grasp the perfect relationship between the wonders she witnessed and the prophecies referring to the Redeemer. Little by little she would have been able to put two and two together.

We know that she could remember and make use of specific incidents, passing from one event to another in her mind’s eye, “pondering all these things in her heart.”

She must have had a vivid imagination to spur her on to a life of initiatives and simple genius in serving others. She must have known how to make life more pleasant for people around her, especially when sickness or misfortune would arise.

We see the quality of Our Lady’s friendship at Cana in Galilee. She was willing to move heaven and earth, to do anything for her friends to avoid any embarrassment (John 2:1-12).

She went to the hill country to visit Elizabeth, placed herself completely at her disposition. And she didn’t just waste three days or three hours or three weeks, but three months (Luke 1:39,56). It was a serious contribution with her life, with her efforts.

There are many things we can learn from that period about our own personal friendship with people around us.

She also would have rejoiced in carrying out the little mundane duties of each day, because [somehow] she lived in the presence of the Savior. All the time she would have been unnoticed, but well aware that God lovingly contemplated her while she carried out those daily tasks.

By reflecting on her daily life, we’re led to realize that we do our ordinary work in the presence of God. We will serve others without fanfare, finish our work well, avoid looking out for our entitlements and privileges all the time.

By imitating Our Lady, we learn to understand the value of little things done every day out of love. We approach with a supernatural spirit ordinary acts that normally don’t stand out at all: the ordinary fulfillment of our family duties.

It takes only a minute to put some household furnishing in order, to update some information on a computer, to make the bed of a sick person. To find the exact citations for a lesson we’re preparing just takes a little more time.

All these little things done so quickly can be full of meaning. Those small tasks, done with affection to please God, draw down divine mercy on us and on our friends.

These can be occasions we frequently renew for increasing sanctifying grace in our soul. Mary is the finished example of fidelity in the ongoing process of our sanctification, as St. John Paul says, “which consists in making the whole of our life into a fit offering to Our Lord” (John Paul II, Address, October 12, 1979).

Days like today are an occasion for us to go a little closer to her.

“You should not be surprised,” we’re told in The Forge, “to feel in your life that weight dragging you down which St. Paul spoke of: ‘I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind’ (Rom. 7:23). —Remember then that you belong to Christ and have recourse to the Mother of God, who is also your Mother. They will not abandon you” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Forge, Point 124).

And also in The Forge (Point 157), we’re told, “Mother, do not leave me! Let me seek your Son, let me find your Son, let me love your Son—with my whole being! —Remember me, my Lady, remember me.”

So today is a day to shower Our Lady with the little details of affection that move our hearts, which all the saints have showed us how to do.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

EW