Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Our beautiful curse
Original Consciousness
First wonder … First dread

Gn 3:9-15, 20 / Eph 1:3-6, 11-12 / Lk 1:26-38

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conceptionof the Blessed Virgin Mary

Genesis 3:9-20; Luke 1:26-38

I really don't like the dogma we celebrate today. It flows from a place within our hearts that cannot conceive of God dwelling within something as sinful as us. God is pure; we are dirty. Therefore, Mary must have been made pure before she could conceive God in her womb. But this goes against all that I see revealed in the Incarnation. Jesus did not pre-sanitize the people with whom he came into contact; just the opposite. He delights in touching precisely those we throw away because they are too dirty for us. Does that sound like a god who would care about the cleanliness of his mother? God became human so that we might open our eyes and see that we are far more beautiful than we allow ourselves to believe. We may do dirty things, but we are never dirty.

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conceptionof the Blessed Virgin Mary

Genesis 3:9-15, 20; Luke 1:26-38

Today we celebrate the triumph of logic games over common sense. The "immaculate conception" is not an idea grounded in reality, but a product of the human need to classify and describe every minute detail of the divine as if it were an animal being dissected. Even reading the simplified version of how this "dogma" came to be will boggle the mind. How could so many bright and wise minds actually believe this stuff? Perhaps because of the very problem that this theory was meant to address: original sin. The easiest way to understand the story of Adam & Eve is that it is a tribal memory of the moment when human beings first crossed the threshold of consciousness. It is an attempt to make sense of that historical event when we went from being just another animal to becoming something far more extraordinary. Unfortunately, our evolutionary leap also gifted us with an insatiable appetite for solving mysteries, even if that means over-analyzing and embellishing in order to eliminate ambiguity. And so we get our feast today. It's not enough to believe that our Creator might choose to be one of us. We need to create a flow chart describing the precise procedures that were undertaken to give birth to God Jr. And we wonder why people have such a hard time embracing the Mystery of Faith.