HOLY AND IMMACULATE

In the heart of Advent, the Church celebrates the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception: that is, pure divine gratuitousness. It is no coincidence that the angel Gabriel greets Mary as Kecharitoméne (full of grace). This perfect passive participle comes from the verb charitóo, and means, to favour. God, from eternity has therefore favoured the Virgin, filling her with grace. But Paul, in today’s second reading, reminds us that we are all called to be “holy and blameless” before God (Eph 1:4).   If this is our eternal destiny, it is also true that, here and now, we are invited to correspond to the gift of God; that, in his Only Begotten, he has blessed us with every blessing. But –and here is the question – how do we live our status as men and women called to be «holy and immaculate»? First of all, being holy and immaculate means recovering the virtue, the human and gospel virtue, of truthfulness, in its dual meaning of sincerity and living the truth.  The sincere person is a unified person who manifests the truth of the truth on the level of action. It is no coincidence that the devil is defined as a liar (cf. John 8:44). Hence the moral task is always to be honest about yourself, to be transparent towards others, and not live relationships based on lies. Furthermore, given that every relationship lives through language, it is also a moral duty to form a truthful word, capable of building bridges and not walls. Then there is a second aspect that we can define as the path of beauty. Already in the New Testament we have associated holy conduct with beautiful conduct (cf. 1Pt 1,15-16). The Author of beauty is the Holy Spirit, who communicates to man the splendour of God’s truth and his own holiness. The Spirit, as written by p. Florenskij, is the source and cause of the beauty of the new creature, which can thus see in itself and around itself the reflection of the light of the Kingdom. Mary is its extraordinary icon. «In her – wrote Paul VI – is the primordial beauty with which God had conceived humanity. In her every mercy, every kindness, all humanity, all poetry is a living woman.” Also for this reason Novalis exclaimed:

Whoever sees you, even once, O Mother,
will no longer be under the spell of evil.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey