The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Today we observe an unusual feast: the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Two other feasts commemorate events in the life cycle of St. Mary of Nazareth. Her Nativity, or birthday, which we will celebrate nine months from today, on September 8; and her Dormition, or death, which we will celebrate on August 15.
Though we encounter no mention of either event in Scripture, the Church regularly honors its saints on the day of their death. The birthday of only one other saint is observed: St. John the Baptist. The birth of St. Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, like that of St. John the Baptist, his cousin and forerunner, is momentous in the unfolding of salvation history. Both events anticipate the birth of Jesus.
But why also observe St. Mary’s conception?
The birth of a child is like an announcement from the rooftop – after much visible but hidden growth, a new life arrives. A death is similarly evident, only in reverse: it is an exit, a departure.
But the conception of a child – the first moment of its personal existence – is like a secret whispered in an inner room, something we are right to be almost shy to mention. It is an event unfolding behind a closed door.
And indeed, a prominent, early image for the Blessed Virgin Mary herself is the closed gate or the closed door.
We read these words in the prophecy of Ezekiel:
to the outer gate of the Sanctuary,
which faces East;
and it was shut.
And He said to me,
‘This gate shall remain shut;
it shall not be opened,
and no man shall enter by it;
for the Lord, the God of Israel,
has entered by it;
therefore it shall remain shut.’
Commenting on Ezekiel, St. Ambrose of Milan writes:
Who is this gate if not Mary? Is it not closed because she is a virgin? Mary is the gate through which Christ entered this world, when He was brought forth in the virginal birth and the manner of His birth did not break the seals of virginity.
And the twelfth century abbess Hildegard of Bingen writes:
Today a closed portal [i.e. Mary]
has opened to us the door
the serpent slammed on a woman. [i.e. Eve]
Before I venture to suggest how the image of St. Mary as a closed door may enrich our own faith as contemporary people, especially in the season of Advent, I must name two things:
Describing a person as a “closed door” may well stir up fairly negative connotations for us as contemporary listeners. In contrast, we tend to value being open: Open-hearted; open-minded; open to life, possibility, spontaneity. To be open is to be free. In contrast, we may speak of someone as “closed off” in their attitude or posture, or close-minded. Someone who is hard to read is a “closed book.” Events happening “behind closed doors” rather than “in the open” may immediately raise suspicion about what is being wrongly hidden from us.
Secondly, describing this person, the Virgin Mary, as a closed door – on this feast day in particular – runs the risk of reinforcing a historic message in the Church that sex is bad. A closely allied message has been that women, supposed by the Church historically to have a less ordered or less contained sexuality than men, are thus secondary to men. Theological understandings of the Virgin Mary that emerge from those false and damaging suppositions cast Mary as the exception to her gender, a kind of superwoman and superhuman, because she kept her sexuality closed off to all but God. All this is certainly a topic for another sermon, but I must pause and go on record as a celibate religious and a Christian to say: Sex is a very good gift of the Creator. Our sexuality more broadly – our capacity for intimacy, love, generativity and interpersonal communion – is a powerful gift. We need to speak more about this gift in church, as the church, as people who are vowed celibates, married, coupled, or single, of any sexual orientation, and with varied sexual histories, so that this powerful gift can be engaged and offered up in love, in responsibility, and in genuine holiness.
To return to this sermon, then. Contemplating the value of this image of the closed door, we can recall the words of Jesus: “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).
When our doors are open – the door of our house; the door of our heart; the doors of our senses; the door of our inbox, the doors of all those apps we have open – we may well experience many things, welcome many people, feel many emotions, receive and communicate many messages, and accomplish many tasks.
But if those doors are never closed, when will we rest from the work of welcome? What might we welcome in that is not good or life-giving? When will we know quiet, or solitude? When will we have even a moment to wash off the make-up; to take off the armor; to slip out of the starched business suit or the shimmering party dress (or the silk chasuble or the black cassock for that matter) and stand naked before our inmost self, and before our Maker – naked as we entered the world, and naked as we shall leave it?
It is in those moments that you may most powerfully glimpse a hidden part of yourself, where God longs to conceive Christ anew, in the way that only you are meant to conceive him. Caryll Houselander calls this inner space “that still, shadowless ring of light round which our being is circled, making a shape which in itself is an absolute promise of fulfillment” (The Reed of God).
To dare to speak of the first moment of St. Mary’s personal existence, her conception, I am invoking the image of the closed door because conception – Mary’s or anyone else’s — is ultimately surrounded in mystery. It is unseen by human eyes, known in its fullness by God alone.
The word mystery is derived from the Greek myein “to close or to shut,” probably referring to the lips or to the eyes. To draw near to the sacred in the ancient world meant to honor what could not be spoken or described, to remain silent out of deference for that which belongs to another order of reality.
We speak of God’s mystery in similar terms in our Rule, in our chapter on silence: “In silence we honor the mystery present in the hearts of our brothers and sisters, strangers and enemies. Only God knows them as they truly are and in silence we learn to let go of the curiosity, presumption, and condemnation which pretends to penetrate the mystery of their hearts.”
Advent offers us a special invitation to close the door and draw near to the mystery of God’s indwelling presence gestating within each of us. We do this in trust that another way may open and unfold at God’s initiative and in God’s time.
