SOLEMNITY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY - 2021

DAILY HOLY MASS READINGS

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!
Blessed art thou among women. LK 1:28

GENESIS 3:9-15,20 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

When God created Adam and Eve they were perfect, sinless, God walked with them and they were filled with grace. God gave them their own beautiful paradise teeming with life all that God asked of them was not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Had God not given them the most wonderful gift of free will - He designed us to be children of God not puppets and He desired that we choose to love Him freely. 

Then the Serpent entered paradise and chose to tempt Eve, sowing in her heart a desire to have what God expressly forbade. She had it all but was lured into believing that God held something back and if she reached out for it she too would be like Him. Not only did she eat of it but tempted Adam to do so as well and in an instant, there was an unbridgeable gap between  God and man.

When we freely choose to disobey You, my Lord, we who are nothing without You, distance ourselves from You. Adam could have resisted the temptation, but he allowed himself to be lured by Eve into what God had expressly forbidden. Both were filled with shame and fear the moment they committed their first sin which barred them from God's presence until the birth of the New Eve.  

The New Adam would be her Savior. She, by the power of His merits, won for the whole world at Calvary, would be preserved from the taint of original sin from the moment of her conception. She, in turn, would conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear in her womb the salvation of the world.

Thank You, Lord.

EPHESIANS 1:3-6,11-12 ©

My Soul's Beloved,

Every phrase in these verses taken from the letter of Paul to the Ephesians is a trumpet blast announcing the goodness and graciousness of God, Your Father, who has blessed us with every spiritual grace and blessing in the heavenly treasury. He writes, Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ, to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence. This was God's plan before the fall. Instead of simply annihilating us He did something far more stupendous, and breathtaking, He started over with Mary. And through You, her Son and His, we would become adopted children of God.

Why? St. Paul says, 

for his own kind purposes,

to make us praise the glory of his grace,
his free gift to us in the Beloved, (You, His Son)

Were it not for Mary, the New Eve, and her fiat, none of this would have been possible. There was no plan B.

God did not permit the fall to become the end of our story but He began a new one in You. One in which as Paul tells us, that we who were chosen as God's own, from the beginning under the predetermined plan of the one who guides all things, as he decides by his own will; chosen to be, for his greater glory,

the people who would put their hopes in Christ before he came.

From the beginning God created us to be His children and this plan was ruptured by the sin of Adam and Eve but the love of God, our Father, found a way to repair the breach through You, His Son, whom He sent into the world through Mary, to redeem us. 

And it is in him that we were claimed as God’s own,
chosen from the beginning,
under the predetermined plan of the one who guides all things
as he decides by his own will;
chosen to be,
for his greater glory,
the people who would put their hopes in Christ before he came.