From Archbishop Donoghue

Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
December 8, 1998
Malta
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Readings, in the Lectionary #689

Dear Friends in Christ,

It is never easy to talk about failure - no one like to fail. But we do - sometimes on a grand scale, when it seems that everybody knows, and everybody is effected by our failure - and sometimes on a very small scale, when we fail I the smallest demands of charity, and no one notices but us, and God. But after all is said and done, it is neither the scale, nor the quantity of failure that defines the uneasiness and bad feeling that failure causes in us - it is, rather, simply, that we failed to succeed, we failed to overcome, we failed to prevail. The fact aside from all detail and circumstance, is plenty to bring us down.

Perhaps the real reason why we cannot deal with failure is what is taught by the feast we celebrate today. For the feast f the Immaculate Conception has everything to do with Original Sin, the sin committed by Adam and Eve, as recounted in our first reading - the sin by which our first parents, from whom our natures have grown, trafficked with evil to gain the advantage, but instead lost everything. Their failure was colossal, and only a miracle of the highest order could possibly restore the harmony that had existed before - the harmony in which God actually walked with His creatures in the cool evening air of Paradise.

This miracle was the birth into earthly life of the Son of God - not to overcome life, but to tread its path meticulously - for Jesus bore our sorrows, and faced our temptations. But for us, and because He was God, He overcame all temptation and wiped out all sorrows. Such power, and such perfection could not have co-existed with any person suffering from the original inclination to sin and selfishness. And so, from the moment of her conception as a person, the Blessed Virgin Mary was freed from the effects of Original Sin. This was a singular grace, given but once and not again - but from it we learn by analogy the solution to our own problems with sin, and with failure.

For if we take the body of Christ into our being as He has made possible through the Holy Sacrament we celebrate, and if we imbue every moment of our waking, walking lives with His teaching, and with the example of how He wants us to be, then when the time comes for our judgement, our sin, our failure will be left behind in the dust of earth, and God will enter into us, in His Son, and in His Spirit, and we will come to know the Paradise that exited, before the lie was told, and death entered human history, to stalk mankind with malice, where God had formerly walked in friendship.

It is this hope that Mary the Mother of God shares with us today, and we pray that by celebrating her Immaculate Conception, we may be remade in the likeness of her Son and our Lord, and find the way, from this vale of tears, back into the Garden of Eternal Delight.

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