Real freedom means being free to choose what is really good for us, unclouded by slavery to our disordered passions. On this feast of the Annunciation, it is in Mary's "Yes" to God that we see the glory of humanity truly freed from Original Sin: willing and total subordination to the will of God. Mary is free because she is full of God's grace, it is that same grace we seek from God, to set us truly free. Homily for my first ordination anniversary.
Some three hundred years before Christ, the Pagan philosopher Aristotle had set up a school outside of Athens called the Lyceum, where he would lecture the sons of wealthy Athenians whilst walking around under the Lyceum’s covered walkway. One collection of his lecture notes from this time was compiled into a book called the Nicomachean Ethics, most likely named for Aristotle’s son or father, both named Nicomachus. When I studied this text for the first time it was not in Athens, strolling in warm afternoons under a covered walkway, but in Rome, in a small lecture room with cramped desks. My teacher was not Aristotle, but a French Priest, now gone to God, named Fr Joseph d’Amecourt (OP). Fr d’Amecourt informed us that if (in our oral exams) we couldn’t recite from memory the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics, we would fail the course. Fr d’Amecourt was suddenly and unexpectedly taken ill during that first exam period, and we were given a written examination instead - avoiding the need to parrot that first sentence word for word.
That all-important first sentence is this:
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Aristotle’s bold claim was that human beings never did anything at all, without that action being aimed at some definite good. Fr d’Amecourt at this point would take a sinister pleasure in searching out some poor religious brother or sister, dutifully sitting in the front row where all the Holy hard workers sat, homing in on them, pressing their hand to the desk with his index finger and asking them, so tell me sister, what is the good of murder?
The point he was making, was that the Good to which an activity was directed, was not always necessarily a moral good. The swindler cheats his victim in order that he might get rich. The killer kills to right some perceived slight, or to remove an obstacle to his own happiness, or simply for the pleasure of killing.
This is one of the consequences of Original Sin, in fact it’s major effect on our human nature. Born from original sin is a wound in our human nature called concupiscence. Concupiscence describes our desire for the things which we love - the goods towards which we direct all of our activities. In the state of original sin, our judgment is clouded: we cannot see properly what is really good for us, we desire the things we ought not to desire and we are turned off from the things we ought to desire, we become overly attached to certain pleasures such that they become obsessions (whether that’s food, or sex, or money, or prestige, or power). Original sin messes up our faculties for making good decisions, and very often we do the wrong thing.
What does this have to do with the Virgin Mary? What does this have to do with the Annunciation?
In the state of Original Sin, we have an illusion of freedom. We think because we can freely choose between all these different perceptible goods that we are free, when in reality we are slaves to our own disordered passions.
But in Mary, we find one who is full of grace, in the original Greek κεχαριτωμένη (one who is already filled up with Charity, the grace of God). She is approached to bear the Emmanuel, God with us, because she has been filled with grace - that is, preserved from the stain of Original Sin. She is not a slave to the concupiscible passions, because of the gift of God’s grace she is a human being who is truly free. She can discern what is truly good when it is presented to her and has the grace to desire it; this is real Freedom because she can choose what we would all choose if we were not slaves to our disorderd desires.
What does this freedom look like? How does it show itself? In the words at the end of our Gospel passage:
‘I am the handmaid of the Lord, let what you have said be done to me.’
Where those of us with the illusion of freedom live as unwilling slaves to our disordered passions, Mary, who is truly free, becomes a willing slave to the will of the Lord: she submits and orders her life towards Him.
As in everything, in this also, Mary is an image of the Church as we are meant to be. Our salvation is the liberation from Original Sin, so that we are (in Christ) made like her. Yet, we do not have the immense gift of Grace she had from her conception, we are weaker, we are less free, we are still subject to disordered passion. She is the perfect image of the Church, her obedient submission to the call of God is the model which all of us follow and to which every Christian believer is called.
How do we, imperfect though we are, imitate her, even knowing that we are likely to fail and to fall again and again into sin? The answer, is to ask God to give us the grace. It was Grace which set Mary free, and thus it is only by Grace, and not by some special effort on our part that will likewise set us free. When we ask God, in faith, for His grace to set us free, he pours it out on us in abundance. How do we ask? Perhaps we might begin with the words of our second reading, simply placing ourselves in the presence of the Lord and saying: Here I am! I am coming to obey your will.
What then? Well, in the front page of the translation booklet for this Mass, I have included a prayer, by Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. It’s a prayer I prayed before the First Mass I celebrated as a priest, a year ago last week, and a prayer I included in the order of service for that First Mass. I commend it to you all now, as a plea for the grace of God, to ask for that liberating grace:
O my God, teach me to be generous,
to serve you as you deserve to be served,
to give without counting the cost,
to fight without fear of being wounded,
to work without seeking rest,
and to spend myself without expecting any reward
but the knowledge that I am doing your holy will.
Amen.
Comments