You can get a cup of coffee -- to go -- at McDonald's for 90 cents. By way of contrast, a monk's meal, by the figures released, averages 91 cents, or $2.73 per day for three meals. The meals for guests are a bit more since they are served meat: $1.11 per meal, $3.33 per day. But when you pay McDonald's 90 cents, you pay also for the handling, the building, the equipment, the help, the land and its improvement, and much else. Plus a little profit. Our costs, on the contrary, are selective. That is, we do not include equipment, refrigeration, transport, facilities: heat, light, power. Let alone help. It is selective pricing, simply a way estimating, a way of comparing one year with another. The figures can be matched with other houses if they detail costs in exactly the same way. Otherwise, they are meaningless.

A similar selective process was found in the last Britannica, for example, in the article on the history of the Church. The early Church was never called Catholic, but Christian. The Catholic Church emerges only after the great schism of the Orthodox. Both branches are then viewed as developments of the earlier Christian church, now one Orthodox, one Catholic. When I wrote them, they explained they were not interested in theological arguments with various creeds. Their approach was selective...a view of the facts with a particular slant. The facts are fitted to need. Just as we might price a meal only by the cost of the food. The new edition of the Britannica, I might add, is quite different and more objective. They read their mail.

We can think of this when we approach today's feast, the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to Mary, asking her assent to becoming the Mother of God. The feast is pivotal, basic, fundamental to our understanding of the mystery of our salvation. It is not mere piety and devotion. And the truth at heart is, of course, astounding.

The Holy Spirit does to Mary what a man does to a woman. He planted a seed: the divine seed by which she became the Mother of God. This is the most staggering event in history. It is unique, unfathomable in depth and beauty.

One consequence that follows immediately is that the act of conception is forever hallowed by God's direct involvement in it. From that time on, the union of man and woman becomes endowed with a holiness that is surpassingly marvelous for the fact that God, too, has entered the act.

It follows that the loving union which creates everlasting life acquires a holiness and glory all over again. Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, was born of woman who conceived of the Holy Spirit. Human love is now sanctified beyond our grasp by the act of God.

Love thus becomes holy. And what is holy cannot be violated, cannot be interfered with, degraded, humiliated by human deviance. Not without peril. For we then border on blasphemy. The consequences of irreverence are overwhelming evils. Our own generation has become well-schooled in the sequel to violating what is holy. A Pandora's Box of evil has been opened and spewed devastation on our society. You need no reminder.

The feast, then, is a call on us to renew our esteem for human love and human life. And a call, most of all perhaps, for courage: for the courage of responsibility and an understanding of the consequences of doing evil for a good reason.

The Virgin Mary was a humble woman. And it was her humility before God that graced her with the amazing courage it took to answer yes to the angel's request from God. She surely knew by intuition, born of grace in the Spirit, what yes meant. Otherwise, it is no yes. We ought, then, be inspired by that courage, and endeavor in the grace of God to trust humbly in Him, that we too may say yes and mean it and do it.

If we, too, follow Mary and her Son in the virginal way of love, we are both fruitful in the Spirit for the salvation of the people, and for the growth of Christ in us and in the world.

Our significance is far greater than we can imagine. And just as human love is to participate in eternal life, so our union with God, in fact, is to enter into the Kingdom for our good and the good of all. May we honor and revere human love. May we turn our own love to good account with the help of this wonderful woman, who this day conceived in her womb the very Son of God become human, become a man. We embrace this truth wholly and fully as the beginning of this greatest drama on earth.
 

Of her flesh he took flesh.
He does take fresh and fresh
Tho' much the mystery how,
Not flesh, but spirit now
And makes, O marvelous,
New Nazareths in us
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon and eve.

            -- Gerard Manly Hopkins