Today is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the conceiving of our Lord in the womb of Mary.

There are two conceptions which are at the core of the Christian experience. The conception of Mary in the womb of her mother, Anne, and today's Feast, that of our Lord Jesus Christ in Mary. The first is the fruit of the second, for human redemption was anticipated in Mary. She was conceived without sin by Joachim and Anne, surely the most beautiful of all acts of human love. For at least once in history the most significant of human acts of love was done without any taint of darkness. No shadow of original sin touched it. Superbly beautiful. So it was always to be in the original plan of God, this act which was ever blemished by the sin of our forebears.

Nothing in history more profoundly attests to the reality of human freedom than Adam and Eve's use of it to disobey God. The enormity of that misuse of our greatest gift is beyond measure.

And now that primal disordered act is repudiated and overcome through the obedience of Mary to God's request of her. Here is poetry of high order. And the consequences of her obedience to the divine Will are more than those of the first rejection of It. Mary becomes the human participant in God's splendid dream of human salvation. Joachim and Anne were wholly unaware of what was accomplished in them in the providence of Almighty God.

And Mary today as cooperator in God's designs for the human family can only have grasped in some modest way what was involved. Yet she gave her total willingness to surrender to God's Will with total love.

The sorrow and the joys of the world were all of them brought to a point of destiny in her willing assent to be Mother of God. The sorrows of the world come to an end in her, the eternal joys of our nature are made possible — suffering and sorrow are no longer punitive. Are now redemptive. That sorrow was to culminate in the Passion and Death of her Son, soon upon us. In that sorrow she was to share. And in the joys of the world's redemption she also shared. Joys which came to fruition at the end of her life.

Nothing comes home to us in all this as powerfully as the realization of the great meaning of the human will. Human freedom is the greatest gift and through it we can surrender to God's Will and so share with God in the redemption of the world.

For our belief in God, our surrender to Christ, our efforts to follow Him to glory make even of our lives a witness that is staggering in its implications. By our love for Christ we share in His saving design for all humankind.

Thus, our celebration of this event is far more than the mere memory of some past event, but is an entering ever more fully into the mystery of God's love for us. We can undo what Adam did, renounce what Eve did, and with Mary surrender to the Holy Spirit for the birth of Christ in us, our union with Him in His Suffering and Death for our salvation and the salvation of all. As humans with free will, we freely love God and do His Will, and so with Jesus and His holy Mother, live this day and every day for God's glory and the gift of salvation for all.

Here is beauty and grace almost beyond comprehension. Yet more true than any truth is the heart of it. Even if our grasp of it be inadequate, we like Mary are aware enough: our own act is real, our response worthy and valid. Praise God to be called to such a work, to participate in so marvelous an endeavor.

Like Mary we can join Jesus in His Suffering and Death for the world, take what sorrow we know and all the sorrows of the world and unite them in one passion and death for the glory of the resurrection and the life to come.

We can scarcely conceive this beauty we are involved with. We can only stand in wonder before it. Even as today we witness in awe the response of the young Virgin to the word of the Angel: "Be it done to me according to thy word." In that brief moment the whole of history changed. And we are party to it, participate in it. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." This day the Holy Spirit did to Mary what man does to woman in married love. He sowed the seed. And the seed was divine.

And she conceived the Son of God. Here human freedom reaches its ultimate. And the most significant human act of human love becomes eternally sacred for the fact that God Himself has done it.

May our union with God's Will be as hers was, fruitful for all time and eternity.  Amen

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