Is this you?

[Quietfire]

This is Part 2.
There is one more part-the Annunciation and why we pray to Mary, if anyone is still interested, I will post it as well.


We have considered one result of Our Lady's being the mother of God-all sons want to give their mothers gifts, this Son could give without any limit save her power to receive(in other words-she had to want it-ya know...free will.); and what in supreme measure he gave was sanctifying grace. But there is one special element in his power to give that we might easily overlook. Because he was God, he could give his mother gifts not only before he was borne of her, but before she was born herself. This is the meaning of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

It is surprising how this phrase has caught the imagination of the public but more surprising how often it is used with no trace of its true meaning. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is used as if it meant the virgin birth of Christ. But it refers not to Christ's conception in Our Lady's womb, but to her conception in the womb of her own mother. It does not mean, either, that she was virginally conceived; she had a father and a mother. It means that her Son's care for her and gifts to her began from the first moment of her existance.

For all of us conception comes when God creates a soul and unites it with the bodily element formed in the mother's womb. But from the very first moment of her soul's creation, it had, by God's gift, not natural life only but supernatural life. What this means quite simply is that she whom God chose to be his mother never existed for an instant without sanctifying grace in her soul.

A century ago the Church made this doctrine the subject of an infallible definition. For century upon century before that Catholics had held it for certain truth. Once the Church had formulated with all possible clearness the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, so that Catholics could live day in and day out in the full awareness of who and what Christ is, they began to see it as unthinkable that he should have allowed his mother to exist for so much as an instant without sanctifying grace. Yet for many devoted lovers of the Blessed Virgin, a troubling question remains. Our Lady had said in the Magnificat: "My spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior." How could God be her Savior, what was there to save her from, if she had had grace always?

Gradually they came to see the answer, or rather the two-fold answer. To save men from their sins is a great mercy of God; but to save this one woman from ever sinning was a greater mercy, but still a mercy. Not only that. Sinless as she was, possessed of grace at every instant, she was still a member of a fallen race, a race to which heaven was closed. The Savior's redeeming act opened heaven to her as to all members of the race.

Roughly a hundred years after the definition of the Immaculate Conception came that of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady. In the dogma, the word assumption has no relation to its English meaning of something one assumes because one cannot prove it. It means the taking of Our Lady, body and soul, into heaven. It is, if anything, earlier than the belief that she was conceived immaculate; and it is not too much to say that in 1500 years it never raised any serious doubt, or even problem, in the minds of Catholics.

It was an almost inevitable result of living with the full truth about her Son. For the ordinary man, there was the simple feeling that Christ would want his mother with him in heaven, not her soul only but herself, body and soul. Any son would want that, and this was the one Son who could have what he wanted. For the most instructed, probably, ther was another element. It is a doctrine of the Church that all men would receive back the bodies from which their souls had been separate at death. The gap between was a result of sin, and Our Lady was sinless.

Men, of course, cannot pretend to know what God will or will not do. For all of us the temptation occasionally arises to decide some question with the confidence that the decision is God's,when all that we have done is to decide what we would do if we were God. But when the vast mass of Catholics see a conclusion as certain over a space of some fifteen hundred years, the risk is not great. It vanishes altogether when the Church gives its solemn definition as she gave it in 1969.


Pax.

[Dave]

Great job, Quietfire, except for one thing ... the word for God-bearer is Theotokos, not Theoketos. Theoketos means God-seeker.