Homily for the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God

Over the past several weeks, but especially since Christmas, media outlets have been reviewing the year and the decade – recounting the ups and downs of the past months and years and compiling top ten lists of all sorts. They’ve also been busy making predictions for the year ahead and what 2010 might hold for our country and our world.

It’s only natural at the end of one year, and the beginning of a new one, that each of us reviews the past year of our lives. We try to make sense of what we have experienced, to relate different moments in our lives, and to determine the lessons for the future that we were meant to draw from them. In a sense, we seek to better know who we really are and what meaning there is to our lives.

We hear in today’s Gospel about the shepherds’ visit to the manger in Bethlehem – and as he does in several places in his Gospel, Saint Luke says that: "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart."

The Greek word we translate as “pondering” literally means, “piecing together” and it should make us think of a great mystery that is only discovered and understood little by little over time.

Mary “ponders” and “pieces together” the mystery of being the Virgin Mother of the Incarnate Word. Her child, lying in the manger is the Son of God – true God and true man. She has given birth to the world’s salvation. These truths are far from easy to understand. Similarly difficult to understand are the many sorrows Mary suffers in her motherhood. And yet, Mary remains faithful to God’s will in the midst of uncertainty and suffering. She continues to treasure in her heart, to "piece together" all the events of her, and her Son’s life, and what they mean.

Friends, in the midst of our end-of-year reviews, and our New Years resolutions, we perform a kind of self-evaluation, an examination of conscience if you will, and determine where we have succeeded and failed, where we have matured or regressed, where we have grown in wisdom and grace, and where we still need to reform our lives.

But perhaps even more important than that, in and through this process we can learn from Mary how to ponder in our hearts, how to “piece together” the deep unity that exists in everything we experience – good and bad, success and failure. We can penetrate the essential mystery of our lives, which is, as St. Paul says in today’s second reading, that through the birth of the Christ-child we have become children of God and heirs of God’s kingdom. As we pray at each and every Mass: we have come to “share in the Divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.”

May the New Year we begin today be a time for us to advance in knowledge of this great mystery, which gives meaning to the entirety of our lives. Let us pray, as we heard in the first reading, that the Lord will "make His face to shine" upon us, "and be gracious" to us and bless us. Then we will certainly realize that, “the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year – it is that we should have a new soul.”