The Second Eve

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception 2021

What do Eve and Mary have in common? Both are mothers, mothers of the whole human race. If Eve is the mother of fallen humanity, Mary is the mother of redeemed humanity. Typology is a common feature found in scriptures which helps us see the link between the Old Testament and the New - figures and events in the Old Testament prefigure those found in the New. In the case of Eve and Mary, it is one of a negative typology. Mary is what Eve wasn’t. St Jerome famously taught that if death came through Eve, life came through Mary. Mary's obedience untied the knot of Eve's disobedience.

Similarly, the first reading and the gospel chosen for this Mass also draw upon these parallels. The parallels are obvious: both Eve and Mary were women, both were virgins, both were approached by angels who promised them something glorious should they cooperate with their respective propositions, both stood at the dawn of creation (Christ’s work was a “new creation”). The contrasts, too, are obvious: In the one case, disobedience of God brought misery, while in the other, obedience brought about happiness; the first one was all-too-eager to hear what the evil spirit was suggesting, while the second was “troubled” at the angel’s wondrous greeting; the first accepted the angelic proposal even though it contradicted God’s Word, while the second tested the message by its fidelity to God’s word.

But the readings go beyond just highlighting parallels and contrasting the two figures. We see in the gospel, the story of the Annunciation reversing the effect and the consequence of the temptation of the first Eve in the Book of Genesis. In the Garden, Eve believed the lies of a fallen angel, disobeyed God and so became the cause of Adam's Fall. At the Annunciation, Mary believed the words spoken by a holy angel, obeyed God and so became the Mother of the One who would save us from Adam's Fall! Mary's obedience reversed Eve's disobedience; thus Mary is the New Eve for the New Creation in Christ.

But perhaps the most important parallel which highlights the nature of today’s feast is the place of sin in God’s plan of salvation. There is no place for sin, full stop. God created the first man and woman in a state of sinlessness and it is only through their disobedience that sin entered into the world. Now in the work of redemption, in the work of re-creation that is to be wrought by His Son, God had to begin with a similar and yet far superior state of sinlessness. Jesus, the Sinless One, the unblemished Lamb of God, had to be brought into this world and assume human nature and flesh, from one who was similarly preserved from sin, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Son’s unique and irreplaceable role in God’s plan of salvation is intertwined with that of Mary, His mother. For failure to recognise the role of the Virgin Mary, as part of the salvific plan of the Heavenly Father to bring us our Redeemer, would be to reject the obvious - to insinuate that the Son had no mother; that the angel sent by the Father did not come to ask for her free consent; and that she did not morally and physically cooperate to give to the Saviour the instrument of salvation, His human nature.

In the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, we see the fulfilment of the proto evangelium (the first gospel) which we heard in the first reading, that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the serpent’s offspring. Eve’s moral failure will be undone by God’s victory through Mary, the Second Eve, and her Son. The Immaculate Conception is really the supreme manifestation of God's prevenient, unmerited mercy. After all, the Virgin Mary did not "merit" her Immaculate Conception. Nor could she ask for it. It was something done in her and for her, by the Father of Mercy, and solely on the basis of the foreseen merits of His Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. By God's prevenient grace, therefore, she was made the masterpiece of the Father's mercy. And in the fullness of time, this special grace enabled her to receive our Saviour into the world.

This is what we celebrate today - the wondrous, the incomparable, the boundless mercy of God. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is first and foremost a feast of His mercy, shown to Mary, and through Mary to the world. We are children of Eve by the order of nature, a nature scarred by Original Sin. But by the order of grace and God’s mercy, we are now Children of Mary, redeemed, restored, recreated - called to a life of holiness instead of sin, called to be children of God instead of the world, called to be Saints instead of remaining perpetually sinners. In our Lady, we are reminded that we are not irredeemably cursed by sin or the Fall, but we have been incontrovertibly redeemed by the mercy of God.

Beauty Restored

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

I believe most of you, including the adults, would have enjoyed the animated movie, “Shrek.” I know I did. It’s a clever deconstructive parody of fairy tales – where the monster, the ogre “Shrek”, is the protagonist hero. But that was not the only twist in the story. As the story built up to its climatic ending with the audience cheering on our hero to free the love of his life, the beautiful princess Fiona from her curse, we are treated to one last surprise ending. Perhaps, it wasn’t a surprise after all. When Fiona was finally freed from the curse, she was depicted as ascending into the air in a rain of glimmering lights (a parody of the Assumption of Our Lady, like one of Murillo’s paintings of the Immaculate Conception), she is suddenly transformed! One would be expecting a beautiful princess. But no such luck! Instead, she remains an ogre and, we are assured, will continue to remain an ogre for the rest of her life. The spell has been broken and she has become what she truly is. Beautifully Ugly! Ugly is the New Beauty.

The argument put forward for this movie and so many others, is that we live in a real world, not a fairy tale realm of perfect individuals, of clear lines dividing the good and bad, but a world that is inherently ugly, violent and broken. In fact, we are constantly bombarded with the message to embrace this world and all its foibles. “Face it, there’s no other option. So, you better learn to live with it!” So we begin to treat black as white, evil as good, monsters as angels, and villains as the good guys.

But the old fairy tales are claiming the exact opposite; that what everyone knows in his heart to be true, that there are such things as goodness and beauty and truth – and even though in this life they are obscured or hidden altogether, a time will come when the truth will be revealed, when dragons will be slain, bewitched captives will be set free and Ugly Ducklings will be revealed as beautiful swans. Yes, we must embrace ugliness, hatred and lies in the sense that they are part of our fallen world and our fallen selves; but when we embrace them, we should do so with a view to the good end, that is to come. There is something universally true about the happy ending to fairy-tales and traditional stories. They all point us in the direction of human aspiration where we hope that our most insurmountable problems would find a solution, where suffering would finally be alleviated once and for all, where the horrors of injustice will be righted, where the clutches of sin would be broken and its captives set free.

The good news is that the beautiful happily-ever-after ending is something real and not just part of a fairy tale. The feast the Church celebrates today affirms this truth. The Immaculate Conception is no mere abstract dogma, but a concrete actual truth of fact, lived and realised in the life of a person of flesh and blood, like ourselves, the Blessed Virgin Mary. The ugly taint of Original sin has not marred or disfigured her beauty. She reveals to us the truth that we are God’s greatest masterpiece in His created universe. Mary shows us our true vocation and God’s original plan for us. As Pope Pius IX says in his encyclical solemnly defining the doctrine for Catholics, Ineffabilis Deus, “The absence of any stain or spot of sin distinguished her from all the rest of mankind. It distinguished her from the holiest of the Saints, since they, one and all, were sinners. Her perfect sinlessness was the source of all her glory and all her majesty; it was this which opened the door to the unlimited graces that she received from God; it was this that qualified her for her divine maternity and raised her to the throne as Queen of heaven.” What is said of our Lady can be ascribed to our original state. We were not meant to be ugly ogres; that is the result of the Fall, the consequence of sin. Sin defiles and distorts beauty, the good and truth. Created by Grace and infused by Grace, we were meant to be exceedingly beautiful.

One of the basic lessons I taught our altar servers has to do with the appreciation of beauty. It’s not just a lesson in aesthetics but a lesson in salvation. I told them, “Ugliness is of the devil and Beauty is of God.” We could easily substitute the word ‘beauty’ with ‘God’ or ‘holiness.’ This is because the God we worship, is a God who is the embodiment of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. For the wicked, God’s holiness is revolting. Ironically, the wicked seem to delight in the ugly. For the righteous, the great works of redemption and sanctification bring true spiritual delight to the holy. The righteous are naturally drawn to the beautiful. Since man’s contemplation of the beautiful is ultimately a contemplation of God, then his desire for beauty is ultimately a hunger for holiness, a life in union with God. Thus, my simple advice to our young altar servers is always to aspire for the beautiful, for the true, for the good, for then, they would be aspiring to be united with God.

Few realise that our environment has a great power to shape us. Beauty is transformative. C.S. Lewis, describes it this way, “We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” If we expose ourselves to truly beautiful places, truly beautiful objects, truly beautiful churches, truly beautiful liturgy, and truly beautiful people, we desire to become beautiful ourselves because beauty awakens our desires for the higher and nobler things of life. But if we expose ourselves to places, things, or people that are devoid of beauty, our taste for the higher and nobler things of life is dulled and corrupted, and we begin to accept a life without beauty. In fact, over time we can lose our ability to recognise beauty when we see it—especially the beauty of moral goodness in the saints. And it is then that we lose hope.

Admittedly, unlike the Blessed Virgin Mary, we are not preserved from Original Sin or any sin for that matter. We continue to struggle with the imprisoning and deforming qualities of evil and sin. But, the Church our Mother offers us the path of sanctification. We may not be conceived sinless like the Blessed Virgin Mary, but we hope one day, to be freed from sin like her. This is not just a fairy tale. This is real. Our primary work in this life is to become holy, to become beautiful, good and truthful. This is the way of sanctification. Again, sanctification is more than saying “no” to sin. It is more than just the rejection of ugliness and all its lies. Sanctification means saying “yes” to holiness, saying “yes” to beauty, to the good, to the Truth and joyfully submitting to the will of the Father. Sanctification means saying “yes” to a loving God and what He loves.

St. Augustine was correct when he wrote that “beauty is the splendour of truth”. The truth about us is that we are made both good and beautiful but that we have lost our original beauty and goodness. And the greater truth is that we will be restored someday to our original “princess” beauty; ugliness was not our ultimate origin, nor will it be our final destination. Unlike the ending to the movie “Shrek”, we will not ascend like the princess Fiona to become an ugly ogress, but our bodies would be transformed, transfigured into the glorious bodies that we were meant to be. We are not meant to be ugly worms but glorious butterflies. It would take the redemptive ugliness of the cross to bridge the gap between our beginning and our end. Ugliness (like lies and evil) makes no demands on us; rather, it invites us to sink lower into the mud and mire. The good, the true and the beautiful, on the other hand, invites us to take a glance backward and then trudge on with hope toward the distant land which is our true home.

The Original Look: Without Spot or Wrinkle

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception 2017

The Church, in honouring the saints, normally celebrates, not their birthdays, but their dates of death, which the Church regards as their birthdays into eternal life, Heavenly glory.  However, there are three exceptions to that simple rule: December 25 - the birth of Our Lord; September 8 - the birth of Our Lady; and June 24 - the birth of John the Baptist.  And what do those three have in common?  The first two, Our Lord and Our Lady, are conceived without original sin; and John the Baptist is born without original sin.  We presume that the moment of his sanctification is, not at his conception, but when Our Lady visited Elizabeth, resulting in John the Baptist leaping for joy. 

But though the Birthday of Mary seems to be a great day for the Church to honour her with a grand celebration, the Church chooses not to do so. The greater feast is today, celebrated as a solemnity, a first class feast which shares the rank of a Sunday. And it is a day chosen to commemorate not the birth of Our Lady but her conception in the womb of St Anne. This is because the Church teaches that her sanctification, her freedom from sin, took place from the very moment of her conception. This is what the Immaculate Conception is all about. Contrary to popular myth, this feast is not about her virginity. Neither is it about the virginal conception of Our Lord in her womb. But, rather, it is a feast that celebrates God’s original plan for humanity before the fall, and His redemption after the fall. Our Lady is the first to be redeemed.

To understand Our Lady’s role in the whole scheme of God’s plan of redemption, let us take a closer look at sin and, particularly, original sin.  Sin is not some “thing”, or some “black mark” that appears on our otherwise pristinely white souls. For it was so simple then, going to confession is like going to the laundrette to have your soul washed clean. Well, that's not a bad way to try to explain something to children, but it's a little inaccurate.  Sin is not something; it is a lack of something, a deficiency.  It's an absence - an absence of grace, which is the life of God. Our first parents, Adam and Eve were created in a state of grace, a state of original holiness. They were created to be with God forever in Paradise. Their sin, however, took that state away. Sin wasn’t an add-on and certainly gave them no added value. No, sin took everything that was worthwhile, everything that was worth living for, away from them, including eternal life. They who were meant to have everything, were dispossessed of everything. You and I all inherit that deficiency, which the Church calls Original Sin.

The only One preserved from that deficiency was Our Lady. When Cardinal Newman was trying to help Protestants understand who Mary as “the Immaculate One” is, he came up with a very clever title for Our Lady.  He referred to her as “the daughter of Eve un-fallen.”  You and I are the sons and daughters of Eve in her fallen state.  Mary, however, is the daughter of grace, Eve would have had, had she not sinned. In her, we see what life would be, before the Fall.  This reminds us, of course, that God's original plan for us was that of holiness and grace, not sin and alienation.  Holiness was meant to be the ordinary state of life.  Holiness is what makes us truly human, not sin. And, it's important to regain that focus: to make that original plan our own personal plan.

This unique privilege of the Blessed Virgin Mary, completely unmerited by her, seems to make her a super-human, beyond the reach of us mere mortals. But this is a problem with our perspective. Mary is the complete human being, and we are the defective ones. We are the hollow men, the badly drawn boys and girls, incomplete like the stick figures on the door of restrooms. But Mary is a human being as she ought to be, replete with and completed in grace, fleshed out, full-bodied and perfected in her life. Our Lady is perfect because she is most perfectly natural, and she is utterly natural because she is filled-with-grace. Mary is full of grace because Christ is the fullness of grace, and it is from His grace that we have all received grace upon grace. Mary shows us our true vocation and God’s original plan for us.

This is what today’s second reading tells us: we are chosen in Christ eternally, chosen to become holy and to be enfolded in God's friendship. In fulfilment of His timeless love, the Father sent His Son into history, and through His death and resurrection poured out the Holy Spirit on people of all times. The Spirit was at work in Mary from the first moment of her existence, making her holy, free from sin. The salvation of Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is a pre-sacramental salvation. Mary does not need baptism. From the beginning of her existence she was utterly filled with God's grace. You and I, and the rest of humanity, inherit original sin and its effects, and we have to submit afterwards to the medicine, which is called Baptism.  God did something better for His Son's Mother - she never had to suffer the deficiency, to begin with. And this is why the Immaculate Conception is so important for us. Mary's pre-sacramental salvation is a sign of our post-sacramental life in the Kingdom of heaven. Unlike Mary, the Spirit begins the same work in us at our baptism.

We have not yet been brought to the same integrity the Spirit wrought in Mary. So we find it difficult to imagine a sinless life. We are so used to little compromises that we forget a sinless life is fully and richly human, not somehow inhuman. Because the sin of the fallen angels, the first sin of human history, the root of all sin, is pride, we tend to suppose that the ability to say 'No’ to God is a sign of freedom and somehow safeguards our dignity. But Our Lord has come to remind us that sin is a slavery. It is saying ‘Yes’ to God that we are truly free. In today's Gospel we hear of Our Lady’s fiat, her great free act of saying ‘Yes’, made in the power of the Spirit who had been at work in her from her beginning: “Be it done unto me according to your word.” As the first Eve drew her Adam to his act of disobedience, so Mary the New Eve was enabled to draw the New Adam to his saving act of obedience, ultimately to say ‘Yes’ to the great sacrifice that had to be made on the cross.

As Mary already is, so shall the whole Church be, as Scripture says, “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and immaculate” (Ephesians 5.27). What this feast means for us is that Christ's love does not stop with us merely being forgiven sinners, but it will transform us as though sin had never been. Our redemption will not be simply the happy end of a fraught journey. In our redemption we will be somehow mysteriously freed from our history. Even our sins will form the weave of a completed holiness. There will be no more striving to get there, because we will have arrived. Till then, let each of us, seek Our Lady's intercession as we endeavour to make the Incarnation of her Son a reality once more in our own personal lives and in the world in which we live.  Let us invoke her with that favourite title which St John Paul II created for her: “Our Lady of the New Advent, pray for us, and make us worthy to share in the promises of Christ.”