It must come as a kind of shock to the believers in the religion of niceties to learn that Holy Church today does not wish us a ‘happy new year’ in her liturgy, which is not to say that she’s unmindful of our turn of the calendar nor, certainly, that she would not wish us well in the year to come (the first reading, in fact, is a Jewish-styled blessing for peace). It is just that the Church has something more pressing on her maternal mind than a pleasant exchange of well-intentioned phrases. She is concerned much more with our welfare far beyond the year to come: our living forever well, in beatitude.

If today then is not ‘new year’s eve/day’ in the Church, it is still one of the twelve days of Christmas, a far-surpassing observance. The liturgical attention on Christmas day was focused on the nativity of Jesus, true God and true man, born of holy Mary. This was a birth in an extraordinary manner, a virginal birth, wrought by God in some unspecified and wondrous way. The emphasis today turns not to the virginal manner of Christ’s delivery of Mary but to her divine Motherhood. ¿Was that a little slip of the tongue, to say, ‘divine Motherhood’? All Christians who have a semblance of true faith know that Jesus’ mother is Mary. To acknowledge Mary as the mother of Jesus does not necessitate faith; it’s there for the historical record. But if one says further that Mary is Mother "of God," he soon finds himself standing on one side of a great divide. Surely the Church, in asserting the divine maternity, does not propose an absurdity for our acceptance–as if God, or the Church, would ask us to believe things contrary to right reason. We certainly do not assert that Mary, a creature of God, gave birth to the divine essence which pre-existed herself an eternity before she was conceived! That would be a monstrous parody of Christian doctrine. Strictly speaking, of course, it is only the body that the Son of God took from Mary. His rational soul, just like that of every other man, did not come from her or from anyone else, but was a special creation of God and was infused in his body at the moment of conception. Early heretics in the Church had argued that Mary should be called mother of Christ’s flesh only. The champions of true faith, such as Saint Cyril of Alexandria, explained the illogicality of that position, by pointing out that while every mother produces her child’s body only, yet, what they deliver into the world at birth is a complete living being and not merely one of its parts. In other words, they are persons who are born of their mothers, body united with soul. Mary’s baby too is a Person, a Divine Person, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son of God, the "eternal Word," as the NT calls him. So, even though Mary did not give birth to divinity itself, she is, through being Mother of Jesus (who is God joined to humanity), the Mother of God. In my Christmas sermon I mentioned that those who deny Mary’s divine maternity, will soon deny the very divinity of Christ, and thus the whole of the Christian faith will be lost.

It is something to ponder that Jesus knew, he experienced, he felt a mother’s love: and not just any mother’s love, but Mary’s. This for our Lord, as for any infant, must have been a real consolation. God then took delight in being loved! Perhaps we can be so bold as to say with some writers that God is willing to accept our love but only in the measure that it, more of less, resembles the love of Mary, the only creature of His who could love Him as He deserved to be loved. To say it another way, our love for God should be a ‘Marian’ kind of love which is not only humanly warm and ardent, but supernatural and fully receptive, a fully obedient love. ¿What kind of Christians might we become, if only we had the heart of Mary, the world’s one and only "Immaculate Heart"?

And just as our Lord gave us a dual commandment, to love and to love neighbor, imitating or acquiring the heart of Mary will not only direct our love towards God and purify it, but also make us love our neighbor in a supernatural way. The divine maternity we celebrate today is that Holy Mary is mother not only of Jesus’ physical body, and soul joined to divinity, but she is also mother of his mystical body, which is to say, the Church. She consequently loves us, maternally, intensely, in and through her immense love for her Son. Being schooled in Marian piety does something wonderful to us: it makes us who are cold, feeble and inconstant lovers of God and our brethren to take on a quality of charity that’s no humanitarian, altruistic dutifulness, but a kindly, tender and radiant Christian sort of love, the kind that is so sorely absent in our chilly attempts at ‘fellowship’. The world longs for, needs, craves the love of Christ, a love that is as once human and divine, an incarnate love, a divine love in a human heart, a love, in other words, that’s found in the heart of the Holy Mother of God.