Homily: Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God – Cycle B
Well, here we are!
It’s a new year and, in spite of an incredibly disappointing 2020 once
again everything seems possible. (With the freezing rain making it difficult to
get here this morning, I wonder if 2021 is trying to tell us to “lower our
expectations” a bit!) Now I suppose that
perhaps more than a few of us have spent the last few weeks lamenting all that
wasn’t accomplished in the past year: those resolutions we so fervently
resolved which, for a multitude of obvious reasons, perhaps never quite
materialized as we had imagined they would.
Nevertheless, today everything is new and full of possibilities. And it’s likely that many of us have made new
resolutions, which, I suppose, means that we are confident that this year we
will actually keep them.
You know, I like that about us. I like the fact that even when we don’t
always accomplish what we’ve set out to do, that we don’t let that keep us from
starting again. In other words, we don’t
despair that there is something more to accomplish, in spite of the fact that
we’ve fallen short. I think this is a
very Catholic attitude, by the way. As
Catholics, we routinely acknowledge when we’ve failed to live up to our
expectations—in other words, when we’ve “missed the mark”—and, once we do, we
decide to start anew, with a clean slate, and strive once again to achieve
those good goals we set for ourselves.
Sounds a little bit like the Sacrament of Reconciliation, doesn’t it? Putting all of that aside, however, and
turning back to our resolutions for this new year, I’d like to consider for a
moment what it is that Mary has to teach us about making resolutions.
Throughout these last eight days, the Gospel readings have
often reminded us of how, in various situations, Mary encountered things that
were distressing, confusing, and astounding; and that, after each of them, how she
“held those things in her heart, reflecting on them.” First was the message from the shepherds of
what they had seen and heard from the angels.
Then was the words of Simeon in the Temple, in which he prophesied that
a “sword would pierce her heart.”
Finally, there was the losing and finding of the child Jesus in the
Temple, in which Jesus’ words confounded her.
After each of these situations, we are told that Mary “held these things
in her heart and reflected on them.” In
other words, that she practiced silence.
I would venture to guess that most all of our resolutions involve
something active, that is, something we’d like to accomplish: I’m going to
exercise more, take that trip I’ve always wanted to take (or didn’t get to take
this year), learn how to golf, or play an instrument, or how to cook. And these are all good things, of
course. However, they are all things
bound to create “mental noise”: a nagging voice in the back of our minds
constantly reminding us that we have yet to accomplish the goal that we set out
for ourselves. But what if one of our
resolutions this year was to reflect on more things in our hearts? In other words, what if we resolved to
“practice silence” this year?
At the end 2012 (not long before he would surprise us by
stepping down from the papacy), Pope Benedict XVI offered advice for how we can
overcome the inevitable disappointments—both with ourselves and with the
world—that we encounter in our daily lives.
He says “we must be able to remain in silence, in meditation, in calm
and prolonged reflection; we must know how to stop and think. In this way, our mind can find healing from
the inevitable wounds of daily life, can go deeper into the events that occur
in our lives and in the world, and come to the knowledge that allows us to
evaluate things with new eyes.” In other
words, the Holy Father is encouraging us to ponder more deeply the events of
our lives and thus to come to see more clearly how our faith shapes our
response to them and our own ability to grow within them.
Thus, it seems that our Blessed Mother does have something
to teach us about making resolutions. In
all of these events of her life, she did not turn to media outlets to hear what
everybody else was saying about what had happened in order to try and make
sense of it for herself. Rather, she
turned to silence. In other words, Mary
learned to pray with these events so as to see more clearly how her faith would
shape her response to them and her ability to grow within them.
In Luke’s account of the losing and finding of Jesus in the Temple,
we read that “[Jesus] went down with [Mary and Joseph] and came to Nazareth and
was obedient to them” and that he “advanced in wisdom and age and favor before
God and man.” I suspect that one of the
things that he learned from his Mother—whom we venerate today precisely because
she is his mother—was how to reflect on things in his heart: a skill that I
suspect he perfected in the remaining “hidden years” in Nazareth before he
began his public ministry.
My brothers and sisters, Mary is our mother, too. Perhaps this year she could teach us how to
ponder deeply in our hearts: that is, how to practice silence. In doing so, perhaps we’ll find that, in
doing less, we’ve actually accomplished a whole lot more.
Given at Saint Patrick Parish:
Kokomo, IN – January 1, 2021
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