New Year's

There are some human experiences that are common to all of us. Every one of us, each and every single one of us has a mother and a father. For many of us, we probably visited them over Christmas. For some of us, they’re still in good health. For others of us, we may not have been able to see them. Perhaps they were ill, and simply couldn’t handle all the commotion of Christmas. Perhaps we’ve become estranged from our parents, perhaps we never talk to them. Perhaps we lost our mother years ago. And even for a few of us, we may not even be absolutely sure just who our mother really is. Yet, at the most basic level, each and every one of us have a mother. It’s a part of being human that we must come from a mother and a father. We are conceived, we grow within our mothers womb, and we are born. That’s how it’s worked since the beginning of time. Then, as any mother can tell, there is a special connection that forms. A special unbreakable bond between a mother and child, perhaps the strongest bond between any two human beings. So today, we celebrate the feast of Mary, the Mother of God.

It’s something we as Catholics simply accept, sometimes without really reflecting on just how incredible it really was. The idea that the infinite God, the creator of the entire universe, really did become conceived and grow within Mary’s womb. That one woman could be so close to God. As any mother can talk about the connection between herself and her child, even before birth, as he begins to kick, as they begin to realize that this baby growing inside of them is real, is a live human being. Then imagine, to realize this child she was carrying really was God himself. There really are no words that could possibly describe that experience.

Then, today’s feast always falls on New Years Day. Its an odd coincidence how this feast ends up fixed each year on new years. exactly 8 days after Christmas, the celebration of the birth of our Lord. The 8th day after a Jewish boy was born was the day of his circumcision. So then today, we celebrate what used to be the feast of the circumcision. Yet even so, the two certainly do seem to fit together nicely. Circumcision was the ritual of entrance into the Jewish people,. With that, Jesus truely became a Jew, under the jewish law. Mary as his mother gave him his humanity, so that he was fully human, while the Holy Spirit came upon her as God came into her making him also fully God. It was certainly a new beginning if ever there was one. It really was not only a new year, but a new beginning , a beginning so great, that we fix our calendar around this date.

Up until that time, most calendars were defined by multiple starting points. For the Jews, the years since the foundation of Jerusalem, the years since their exile into babylon, the years since the building of the temple. For the Romans, the time since the foundation of Rome, the time since the rule of Julius Caesar, all sorts of markers were used, but after Christ’s birth began to be used, quickly it became the only calendar in the western world. It really is the one pivotal moment in all of history, that began something more important that anything that happened before, since or will happen in the future. God became man, and chose to be one of us, so that he could truly pay the price for our sins, to stand in our place and accept our punishment for us.

All the scripture tells us about Mary’s thoughts about all that are so simple. She kept all of these things in her heart, yet, the fact that we have the record tells us something else. By most accounts, by the time the Gospel was written, St. Joseph was probably already dead. The Apostles had certainly seen the stories of Jesus's miracles, but most of them were somewhere around Jesus's age. Where could we have gotten the stories we hear today. Who pased them on? Mary, the Lord's mother, is the only figure who's still around at the time of the writing of the gospels, who could've still told the story. She kept these things in her heart so that she could share the good news someday!

Now, for each of us. We probably have all of our new year's resoultions planned out. How we're going to give up chocolate, how we're going to lose weight, how we're going to do this or that better this year. Yet, as we begin this new journey. Remember what the mother of our Lord did as she began that new year, so long ago, long before anyone realized that it was actually year one. She watched, and pondered those thing in her heart, remembering and reminding.

Now Jesus himself hardly needed reminded who he was, but certainly the apostles needed reminded, and Mary was there to tell her story. For those mothers among us, as your children grow up. Watch them, remember their stories, keep those things in our heart, and someday when they've grown and become discouraged, if they lose faith, remind them of the days when they had faith, how proud you were of them, and how they can do it again. Then, for those who have lost mothers, remember them in your hearts, because our Lord didn't simply leave the old world behind, he transformed it. Yet, even so, he trusts each of us to pass on the story of what he's done, to keep all these things in our hearts