Many people have already asked for the sermon preached in the Lady Chapel of St James's Spanish Place, a chapel dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, upon her glorious Feast last Tuesday. The Celebrant and Preacher at the Missa Cantata was Father Gerard Skinner, newly Magistral Chaplain to the Order. As a "maiden speech" it holds its own above the highest bar. We are very grateful to Father Skinner for thus restoring the religious life of the Grand Priory and Association after the second covid lockdown. As this once-Octave continues, we may wish all our readers a continuing Happy Feast!
Sermon for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
"It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale."
This description of a London pea-souper lends itself well as an appraisal of the spiritual state of creation before the dawn of Redemption - indeed ‘Nature lived hard by’ - but many of you will recognize it as Charles Dicken’s prelude to his story of redemption, A Christmas Carol. You will recall how, on returning to his chambers that night, Scrooge is terrorized by the ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley is portrayed as a fettered spirit, ‘captive, bound, and double-ironed’:
‘The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. . . “No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.”, bemoaned the ghost.’ “I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”’
The fictional character of Marley, it could be said, is the very antithesis of everything that the Blessed Virgin Mary is. As much as Marley has forged his own damnation, our Blessed Mother has embraced the ‘freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8:21). Through her ‘Adam . . . bounden, bounden in a bond’ (15thcentury poem) is ultimately to be freed, the promise made to Adam after the Fall, the ‘Protogospel’ that is given in the Book of Genesis (3:15), begins to be fulfilled in her. Today, nine months before the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we celebrate the Conception of our Heavenly Queen, Mary conceived without original sin. Tota pulchra es Maria, et macula originalis non est in te.(Vespers Antiphon for the Feast)
Through the course of salvation history we find ‘candles flaring in the windows’ of time preparing mankind for the mighty works of God to come. The Fathers of the Church understood the burning bush which Moses saw – burning, yet unconsumed by the fire – to prefigure Mary entering life as do all men but doing so uninjured by the conflagration of original sin. Prefigured too in the Ark of Noah, which was not overwhelmed by the waters of the Flood - neither did the deluge of original sin do any harm to the Blessed Mother of God. Yet another type of the Mystery of the Immaculate Conception is seen in the image of the Ark of the Covenant as it crossed the Jordan River at the end of the wanderings of the people of Israel through the desert. It was springtime and the river was in full flood but as soon as the men carrying the Ark stepped into the river, the waters halted and rose up, high as a mountain, to allow the Ark of the Covenant to be carried across. Likewise, the torrent of sin and corruption, carrying mankind down to the Dead Sea of perdition, stopped in its course to let Mary, the new Ark of the Covenant, pass untouched. Virgo singularis(Hymn - Ave maris stella) – never before or ever again shall there be any like you! The Almighty ‘hath clothed her with the garments of salvation, and with the robe of justice He hath covered her, as a bride adorned with jewels.’ (Introit – Is. 61:10)
St John, in his first letter, wrote, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. “ (1 John 3:8): those ‘works’ being sin and its consequence, death: everything that separates us from God and ensnares us and binds us into sin, dragging us down so that our heaven-bound souls are weighed down. The Blessed Virgin Mary, through the grace of God, is the one human creation of God who has never known the darkness and obfuscation of sin, one who has never even so much as been touched by its chains. She is the one of whom the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins sings in his poem, The Blessed Virgin Mary compared to the Air we Breathe, that she
. . . mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet (25)
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through, (30)
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
How fitting that in the 1880s this great church should rise amidst the London fog, enshrining within as a beacon to the wayfarer, a golden statue of the glorious Mother of God, enthroning without the Cross, lifted high on the pinnacles of its gabled roof.
The Cross, the principal symbol of the life-giving death of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, is the source of all grace and it is through the meritorious Passion of the Lord that all grace flows. Although in the order of time, the moment of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary comes first, in the eternal order of grace it is from the throne of the Cross that all grace gushes. Is it not fitting that the Saviour, the Lord of all time and history, should command that His mother, the Second Eve, be the first to experience the grace of Redemption, the new creation that He was to accomplish? How natural that the Redeemer desire to spare His own mother the poison of the inherited sin of Adam, Original sin. How could it be otherwise that the Most Holy would take His flesh from any other than the purest of creatures and in her womb dwell? ‘To prepare her for the task of being Mother to the Son, both physically and spiritually, God the Father bestows upon her an incomparable plenitude of sanctifying grace, the infused virtues and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.’ (John Saward - Cradle of Redeeming Love, 182).
Today we celebrate and yet again acclaim and thank God for that moment in history when he gave mankind the gift of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. God’s gracious gift and Our Blessed Mother’s faithful response to her Creator, has given us this miraculous child of Saints Joachim and Anne who is graced beyond measure, weightless with regards sin; one to whom even the Archangel Gabriel, a spirit accustomed to dwell in the presence of thrice holy God amongst the Cherubim and Seraphim, the Thrones and Dominations, greets with profound reverence, ‘Hail, O full of grace!’ (Lk 1:28) ‘She is not merely in grace as others are,’ as St Peter Chrysologus writes, ‘but she is filled with it.’
She is one who will crush the serpent’s head. She is one who is powerful in breaking the chains of sin that we ourselves forge: ‘Solve vincla reis. . .’
Break the captives' fetters,
Light on blindness pour,
All our ills expelling,
Every bliss implore. (Hymn - Ave maris stella)
How can we forget, we can never forget, the countless times that we have emerged from the confessional able to disperse the fog of our hearts and minds or freed from the chains of our sins, forgiven and graced. How fitting it is that on so many of these occasions we have been instructed to make our penance through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary taking the awe inspired salutation of the angel once more upon our lips. Again and again at this moment our heavenly Mother hears us as we call and she, on our behalf, assists us as the chains of past wrongs are broken ‘that we should be holy and spotless’ before the Lord (Ephes 1:4)
And, above all, when we receive the Saviour in Holy Communion we look to the Immaculate Conception, the Ark of the New Covenant, seeing her example and asking her aid that we should be worthy tabernacles of the Lord, pure and humble tabernacles of God’s presence as she. ‘Solve vincla reis. . .’
Therefore ‘Raise up your heads, then, ye children of Adam, and shake off your chains! This day the humiliation which weighed you down is annihilated.’ (Prosper Gueranger – Advent, 380)
Through you Immaculate Conception, O heavenly Queen, cleanse yet again the spiritual air of our times and grant us this special grace: that we who call upon you repeating the words of the angelic salutation, ‘pleasing to God, the angels and men.’ (St Bernard -Sermon XLVII, De Annuntiatione Dominica)may grow in awe and wonder and thanksgiving at this mystery of the Immaculate Conception which lights our way to heaven and gives joy to the whole earth.
Sancta Maria sine labe originali concepta, ora pro nobis.
The painting shows the Immaculate Conception by Murillo of 1678, painted for the Hospital of the Venerables, Seville, looted under the thief Napoleon by Marshal de Soult, now in the Prado.
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