A Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Readings: Genesis 3:9-15, 20 Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12 Luke 1:26-38
An abandoned baby is discovered at the rear gate of a rainy Irish churchyard in the wonderful new novel of Niall Williams, Time of the Child (2024). Jude Quinlan, a 12-year-old boy, discovers the infant while waiting for his father, Pat, who is in Craven’s Pub, drinking away the little he’s earned from selling his cattle at that year’s Christmas fair.
Jude brings the infant, by tractor, with the help of the Talty brothers, twins and bachelor farmers, to the home and surgery of Doctor Jack Troy. Ronnie, the physician’s eldest (though unmarried) daughter receives them at the door. Jude immediately explains that the child is dead, but that they did not know what else to do.
Taking the lifeless infant into his arms and retreating to his surgery, Doctor Troy orders everyone to stay where they are. What follows in his waiting room so accurately hues to Catholic life in 1962, the year the novel is set.. Ronnie brews tea for those who are waiting.
Then, without signal or announce, but same as if, the brother who was the driver placed his cap on the table and got down off the chair onto the floor. He wasn’t there two seconds before his brother was kneeling alongside him, by reflex the two old men assuming a position that had been in their bones since they could stand. Neither looked at the other, nor at Ronnie nor the boy. The seats of the chairs they turned into and made as bases for the elbows. From a jacket pocket a beads was brought. It came in a leathern pouch of long wear, with a flap cover. The man spilled the beads into the cup of his hand, put the pouch in a side pocket. He let the rosary loose so the anchor of the cross dangled, and before he had blessed himself the boy had slid on the floor and bowed his head too.
The Troys were not a family for the rosary. Of course, all the girls had prayed it in the convent, but when they came home the beads got lost among the various and sundry that lived in the uncountable drawers. Perhaps because it was the place of medical science, Avalon was not a house for prayer. The girls’ mother and father took them to Mass, yes, but that was the extent of it, and none of the sisters questioned it. So, when the two men and the boy blessed themselves and one brother began the Apostle’s creed, Ronnie was a foreigner in her own house. The three were in that head-bowed state that was part-habit part-ritual, a state that, whether through devotion or not, dissolved time and space, and through the rhythm of the spoken words made that kitchen other. Not that they were spoken exactly. From long use, the words of the prayers had lost their edges. Without pauses between them, and the use of that singular intonation that was the one used in every house in the parish, they became a low-voiced chant that was in no language and all languages at once, a tonal music to the Mother of God rising off the cold floor.
Critics of the faith would dismiss this. Adults acting like children, running to a mother who is somehow supposed to make everything right. They might insist: Mothers might be capable of that in our childhoods, but their powers do not reach into our mature years.
But the woman we celebrate today proves that a protective, enveloping love does indeed last through life. Far from exalting Mary at the expense of her creator and redeemer, today’s feast insists that Mary is herself the recipient of unmerited and unexpected grace from the God who loved her so.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats the original declaration of Pope Pius IX:
The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin (No. 491).
What does this solemnity say except that everything is grace, that grace overwhelms us, runs before us, accomplishes everything that is needed if only we will allow it to do its work? Mary surrendered herself into God’s hands because those hands had already securely grasped her.
Call it a dumb faith, an immature faith, an overconfident faith, but this is the faith of the church. Grace runs before us, carries us, as it did the Virgin Mother, in its wonderful wake. Love envelops us all the days of our lives.
To Ronni, it felt as though the fixtures that kept the ordinary world in place had been undone, and instead here was something elemental, open and raw. She could not look at them. All three prayed the rosary every night, she realized. Prayed it on their knees before bed for intentions various as all human hope. But here they were praying for the soul of the infant.
And, though fury and sorrow were still in-throned in her, she got down onto the floor, too.
Spoiler alert: The infant lives.
