ST. MARY, MOTHER OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

ST. MARY, MOTHER OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
(transferred from August 15)
August 17, 2008
Ss. Peter & Paul – Fr. Phillip Ayers

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In his letter to the church in Galatia (our second reading today), Paul cuts through romantic nonsense to say that Mary’s ministry, like her son’s, was above all else to be the incarnation of a fundamental gospel message. The two of them, this mother and her son, are our hereditary links to kinship with God. To prove that we are sons and daughters of God, says Paul, this child was born of this woman, “so that we might receive adoption as children” (Gal. 4:5).
The primary images of our human relationship one to another and of our relationship to God are not images of husband and wife, nor even of father and son, for these relationships are known only to some of us. The inclusive and archetypal image of mother and child affirms our common humanity and, in this particular birth, affirms our common inheritance. We are all children of a mother! The fact that that child happens to be male does not represent male hierarchy or superiority; it represents gender symmetry. Arguments over which is the greater—mother or son, male or female—are as inconsequential and as circular as the argument of who comes first? the chicken or the egg? Madonna and child, like chicken and egg, are inseparable.
In them we have an icon of our relationship to God and of our kinship with one another. In the reality of something so simple, so fundamental, and so common as a human birth, our relationship to God is affirmed and our status as children of God’s own making is confirmed. But such relationship challenges our autonomy and independence. It is not “modern.”
A few years ago, we enjoyed a weekly, popular television series, “Northern Exposure.” In it, Dr. Joel Fleischman is a young Jewish doctor from New York transplanted to a remote little town in Alaska to work off his medical school loans. His character is a good representative of the secularized religious persons who make up an enormous percentage of our population in this country. In one episode, Dr. Fleischman learns of his possible ties to a dissident Jew in the former Soviet Union.
As he reads the story of Evgeny Fleischman’s flight from oppression, the young Jewish doctor recalls the stories of the Soviet Jews shared around the family table in his childhood and youth. As he reads on, Evgeny Fleischman becomes more and more real, an incarnation of things he has only lightly apprehended in imagination. Joel is fascinated and moved.
Though a part of him repudiates the relationship and objects that it means nothing to him, he is drawn by the story and the images it calls forth. Finally, Joel picks up the telephone at his crude desk in Cicely, Alaska, and dials Israel. For long, pregnant moments, all he can do is recite the name, “Evgeny? … Evgeny Fleischman?” When he realizes that they are connected, in the literal and figurative senses, Joel is overcome with tears. The scene ends with this young, thoroughly modern, secularized Jew asking tearfully, but with sincerity, warmth, and noticeable reverence, “Evgeny, how are things in Israel?”
In the person and the image of Mary we are invited to be reunited with that radical connectedness we share in our common birth and life. This was and continues to be the “greatness of the Lord” proclaimed in her song: that God is firm in the promise to our ancestors, that God has not forgotten to show mercy to Abraham and Abraham’s children, from generation to generation, even to our own day. This is the greatness that rejoices her spirit and ours: that in God’s greatness we are all embraced as one family. This is her eternal mission and ministry—that we might look upon these elemental images, ponder them in our own imaginations until they become incarnate in our own lives—reunion with God, with neighbor, and with self as whole, and as holy, as the union of mother and child.
[taken from a homily in Sam Portaro’s Brightest and Best]