Reflection: Feast of the Immaculate Conception - Your Permanent Record

GN 3:9-15, 20; EPH 1:3-6, 11-12; LK 1:26-38  (inspired by the poem Truant by Margaret Hasse)

How many of you remember the threat, “this is going to be on your permanent record.”  It was always hung over your head. If you skip school - "It’s going on your permanent record." If you misbehave – "It’s going on your permanent record." Bad grades are put "on your permanent record."

If you get in any trouble, no matter what you did, you would be threatened with, “It’s going on your permanent record.”

That’s what happened in the Garden. The man and the woman started running with the bad crowd. God finds out. He comes and gives them all a good lecture. God tells them, this sin, the original sin is going to be on their permanent record. It has been with humanity ever since. The snake got permanent detention.

But there was one person born who never had to worry about this permanent record of original sin.  It was Mary and it is the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. In the Immaculate Conception sin was taken off the blessed virgin’s permanent record.

Here we have a young woman, born without this original sin. She was so in tune with what God wanted because she didn't all that interference that comes from our faults. Probably everything that Mary, the daughter of Joachim and Anne, did was a prayer.

I think this is what Paul means in his letter to the Thessalonians, when he tells them to “pray always.”

There is nothing that says this is what the Blessed Virgin did.  But I believe that one born without original sin, without the temptation of human faults, like the first man and woman your life is a walk with God. A life of constant prayer.

She wasn't walking around saying the Jewish equivalent of the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary.” Her entire life was a prayer. Her life was open to God's presence. She lived the presence of God in a life present in the world. Her prayer was the way in which she was always present to His presence.  

Living in his presence when as a young teenage, she was asked to be the Mother of God, the arc of the new covenant. Living present in His presence as Jesus grew and she became his disciple. She was present to his presence, as a weeping mother, who watched her son suffer and be crucified.

That is something we need to be able to do. Learn to be present to the Divine Presence. When we are able to do this:

• The things that used to defeat us no longer defeat us.
• The things we thought we could never surrender to, we now can.
• Even to accept that we are not ready to accept

All these things are being present to Christ’s presence. Present to God’s presence, whose grace is always with us.

In our humanity, we do not have the immaculate conception.  We can live lives that are present in His presence. If we live this way, think how beautiful our permanent record records will be.