OUR LADY’S BIRTHDAY

Thursday is the feast of the birth of Our Blessed Lady.

      The Church does not usually celebrate birthdays. Our Saints’ days are usually, though not universally, celebrations of the days on which they entered eternal life—in other words, their death day. We only celebrate certain special births for particular reasons: The birth of Our Lord, obviously, is the beginning of His visible life on the earth. We also celebrate the birth of St. John the Baptist because his birth was in a special way a preparation for the coming into the world of His cousin, Our Lord, as we learn from the first two chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel.

     Our Lady’s birth is special because it marks the entry into the world of the first human person totally free from all sin, by virtue of her Son’s future passion, death and resurrection. It is hard for us to visualise the holiness of Our Lady because it surpasses anything our sinful experience can grasp. Sin has darkened our understanding and our imagination to such an extent that many people tend to believe one of two things: either that sin is part of our natural state (which it is not— since it only came about through the fall of our first parents); or that sin does not radically affect us except in so far as we, personally, choose to sin.

     Our Lady is the answer to these errors. She is truly free from sin from the very moment of her conception and she remains free from all sin throughout every moment of her life. Her sinlessness is a wonderful witness to the power and grace of God, who in Christ destroyed the hold which sin had over all mankind. The birth of the sinless one, chosen to be the Mother of God, is a moment of joy and light for the whole world. 

     Following from her birthday, next Monday is the feast of the “Holy Name of Mary”, celebrating the naming of Our Lady as “Mary” the English version of “Miriam”, a Hebrew name meaning “Lady”. This name wonderfully sums up Our Lady’s nobility and her special role as “The Woman” from whom the new creation of grace and redemption will be born into the world.   

                                                                                   ~ Fr. Paul Dobson