Presentation of the Lord - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2014

What was the sword that pierced Mary’s heart?  Simeon didn’t say.  But perhaps you can get some sense of what it might have been by looking at the sword [or one or two of them] that can pierce your hearts.  I think that, for those of you who are married, the sharpest sword comes from your own learning to love – to love your spouse for a start; and to love your children, for seconds.

Growing in love means coming to terms with your inevitable need to control the ones you love – not just eventually to face the impossible – that you can’t [at least in any deep sense – and that is struggle enough!]; but coming to see that the deepest love is always totally unconditional, without strings.  You love the other precisely as the other is, in all their imperfection – and you do so willingly and joyfully.  With children there is the delicate interplay between responsibility and control.  Sometimes it might be harder for fathers and their sons than it is for the mothers.  I don’t know.  But it, too, is struggle; and it is pain.

Love can ask more than that.  Mary at the foot of the Cross had to accept that she could do nothing to control the situation.  She had to witness, helplessly, the prolonged brutal torture of her Son.  But he was there on the Cross because he freely chose to be.  He did not want it.  But it was the price of his integrity and of his choice to love – and he was totally committed to those.

I think that Mary, in her love for him – her readiness to identify, as totally as she could, with his mind and heart – had to learn to say YES wholeheartedly to what he chose, to what he wanted.  She had to say YES, freely, as he freely did, to his totally dehumanising death.  That would have been at the price of every maternal instinct that she had.  She suffered vicariously, through her choice to love, what he suffered physically.  From the human point of view, she lived his suffering.  Which was how she became the Mother of the Church, the New Eve – the Mother of all the redeemed living.