The Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

What the heck is worth celebrating about a woman's heart?

Well, a lot of things.  First of all, Mary was no ordinary woman.  Scripture makes this clear when it recounts for us the words of Elizabeth:

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the holy Spirit, cried out in a loud voice and said, “Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.  And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.  Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”  (Luke 1:41-45)

Mary is uniquely blessed among women. She is one of a kind. No other woman will ever bear in her womb Jesus, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity incarnated as a human being. 
No other woman will have the unique privilege to sustain the human life of the Son, to donate to him the flesh and blood which will form his own human nature.  No other woman can say that God came into the world bearing her image and likeness--that he was her Son--in the same way that Mary could.

And why did he choose her to be his mother?  For of course, God could have chosen any woman to bear Jesus.  He could have reached out to anyone.  Why Mary?

Because she was the woman, out of all women, most suited to be an icon of the divine Love.  She was chosen by the Father to bear his Son, by the Son to be his mother, and by the Holy Spirit to be an icon of itself, of the love the Father has for the Son and the Son for his Father. 

Mary is "most blessed among women."  She bore in her womb the Son, he who is the Word made flesh (John 1:14), the Bread from heaven (John 6:35), and the high priest for the believers of the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 6:19-20).

A list of contents which sounds a tad familiar, don't you think?

Behind the second veil was the tabernacle called the Holy of Holies, in which were the gold altar of incense and the ark of the covenant entirely covered with gold. In it were the gold jar containing the manna, the staff of Aaron that had sprouted, and the tablets of the covenant.  (Hebrews 9:3-4)

In the Ark of the Covenant are the manna (bread from heaven), the rod of Aaron which indicated that Aaron was the true priest of God, and the books of the Law, the word of God.  Mary, then, and the Ark are closely related.  To study one is to learn about the other, as well, though Mary has a higher role than the Ark of the Covenant.  The Ark carried artifacts, the created things on which God had acted for his purposes.  Mary bears God in her womb for nine months.  The Ark was kept in the Holy of Holies.  What does this tell us about the sanctity of Mary?

Further, the Ark was a work of art.  We get a list of instructions for the building of the Ark in Exodus 25:10-22, ending with:

In the ark itself you are to put the covenant which I will give you. There I will meet you and there, from above the cover, between the two cherubim on the ark of the covenant, I will tell you all that I command you regarding the Israelites.  (Exodus 25:22)

"There I will meet you." The Ark is the nexus between heaven and earth, the place where God sits, from which God gives his law, the Ark bearing his covenant with the Chosen People of God.  It is crafted carefully, according to the specifications of the living God.  And so, of course, it would be beautiful.

Now beauty, according to Barbara Nicolosi-Harrington, is the combination of wholeness, harmony, and radiance.  Wholeness means there is nothing missing or extra in the piece.  Harmony means all the parts complement each other.  Radiance means the art is transparent to the transcendentals (such as truth, goodness, being, and love).  Mary, quite clearly, is utterly beautiful because Mary radiates into the world the Son.  She gives birth to God.

Is this because she is awesome like that?  Did God look at the world, see her, and feel irresistibly drawn to this perfect creature who had achieved all this on her own strength?  No.  Not at all.  God made her this way.  From the moment of her conception, she was uniquely blessed because God knew he was going to send Gabriel to her, knew that she would say yes to being the mother of his child, knew that she was to be the Ark of the Covenant for the new and eternal covenant in the blood of Jesus, which comes from Mary.  God crafted her just as carefully, just as finely as he expected the Israelites to craft the first Ark of the Covenant--and even more so.  For a covenant in the body and blood of Jesus, God crafted an Ark in the flesh and blood of Mary.  For the Word Incarnate, God prepared a residence of flesh.

Mary is immaculate because God is her savior, as she makes clear in the Magnificat:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior

for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:

the Almighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his Name... (Luke 1:46-49ff)

She was uniquely blessed by God, uniquely prepared for the coming of her Son.  The new Ark of the Covenant is holy beyond the holiness of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, for she bore God in her womb, gave him flesh and blood, and served as an icon of the love of God to the natural Son of God.  Her heart, therefore, must have been filled to overflowing with the divine Love of the Father for the Son--that is, she must have been filled with the Holy Spirit.

The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.  (Luke 1:35)

So celebrate the feast of the Immaculate Heart, a day to remember and to celebrate the heart of a woman filled with the Love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father, a heart which held no stain from the enemy, no room for the things of sin, for she was prepared from the first to be a true mother to a unique Son.

For more:

• An explanation of devotion to the Immaculate Heart and the history of the feast.
• The Catholic Encyclopedia explains the Immaculate Conception.
• Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in Ineffabilis Dei .