From The Year & Our Children: Catholic Family Celebrations for Every Season
Why are we making gifts for each other two, three, four weeks ahead of time? Working as hard as we can to make something beautiful? To wrap it beautifully? To tie it beautifully? To think of something full of love to write on the card that goes with it? Because we know that Christmas is coming.
That Jesus should become man and save us from our sins is more than good reason to prepare, to anticipate. We want everything to be perfect for Jesus and for our beloveds when Christmas comes.
Just so, God the Father prepared for the coming of Jesus. He prepared for His divine Son a perfect Mother through whom He could come into the world.
This is how He prepared: God the Father knew that when the time came, from our Lord’s death on the Cross would flow graces that would never end, that would make it possible for Godlike powers to be given to men.
For example, He knew that our Lord would institute a sacrament through which grace would come to wash away the Original Sin inherited from Adam and Eve, and to fill the soul with marvelous beauty where God Himself could dwell.
In creating a Mother for His Son, God used this grace ahead of time – not to wash away Original Sin but to make a Mother whose soul was untouched by Original Sin.
This is what we mean when we speak of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, the name she used for herself when at last she told St. Bernadette who she was.
God does not live in time. He invented time for us so that we could keep track of ourselves, but He has no need of it, and in the foreverness of Heaven, He used all the magnificent graces His divine Son poured forth from His death on the Cross in time to merit for our Lady a perfect soul from the instant He breathed it into being.
That is why, when Gabriel came to her in Nazareth, he could say, “Hail, full of grace….” That is why, when Mary went to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth could cry out, “Blessed art thou among women….”
This does not mean that our Lady was conceived in a miraculous manner, as her divine Son was conceived.
She was born of the lawful union of Joachim and Anne, loving husband and wife. It does mean that at the moment the seed of life that was to become our Lady was united to her immortal soul, it was to a soul God had created perfect.
Our Lady was made immaculate so that when the time came for the plan of the Redemption to unfold, her pure and holy body would be a perfect resting place wherein the love of God – His Holy Spirit – would breathe and His divine Son would begin to live. This beautiful doctrine explained to the children on the vigil of her feast will help form the spirit in which the entire family will assist at the Mass in her honor and receive Holy Communion.
The great Advent mysteries in the life of our Lady relate in many ways to the knowledge we must give our children about their bodies.
Now we see again why we must have reverence and awe for our bodies. They are made for great and holy things.
All the little girls in the world who will grow up to discover that God’s will for them is to be wives and mothers will, as mothers, carry their babies the way our Lady carried her baby.
Every mother we see who is expecting a baby can remind us of our Lady. It is so good of God to have His Son come to us this way, and so sanctify the bearing of babies.
He could have come in thunder and lightning. He could have come like a wild storm riding the sun, driving the moon and the stars before Him.
But, loving us in our littleness and our struggles and our pains and worries, He chose to be like us in all things save sin, so that we would always know that God knows what it is like to be a man.
If we have children for whom it is time to learn something of the way babies are born, Advent is an especially appropriate time to continue with that part of sex instruction.
This carrying of babies within the mother’s body, is it not beautiful? This is how our Lady carried her Baby, close to her heart, protected and sheltered there by her own pure body. This delivering of babies, as we call it – the emergence of the baby from his mother’s body – is it not wonderful? It is God’s way.
He decided it was to be like this. If there were a finer way for it to be, He would have it be that way.
“Let us pray tonight and ask our Lady to help us have reverence for our bodies, and for the bodies of others, and never to do anything with them God does not want us to do.” These things and a host of others relating to the meaning and spirit of Advent make beautiful, rich, prayerful conversations that go with the making of gifts.
Some are for parent and child alone, some for the group; both ways, the treasury to explore is inexhaustible.
A Prayer in Honor of the Immaculate Conception
ANT. This is the rod in which was neither knot of original sin,
nor rind of actual guilt.
V. In thy conception, O Virgin! Thou wast immaculate.
R. Pray for us to the Father, Whose Son thou didst bring forth.
Let us Pray
O GOD, Who, by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, didst
prepare a worthy habitation for Thy Son, we beseech Thee, that as
by the foreseen death of that same Son, Thou didst preserve her
from all stain, so too thou wouldst permit us, purified through
her intercession, to come unto Thee. Through the same Christ our
Lord. Amen.
Prayer to Our Lady Immaculate
Most holy Virgin, who wast pleasing to the Lord and became His
Mother, immaculate in body and spirit, in faith and in love, look
kindly on the wretched who implore thy powerful patronage. The
wicked serpent, against whom was hurled the first curse, continues
fiercely to attack and ensnare the unhappy children of Eve. Do
thou, then, O Blessed Mother, our queen and advocate, who from the
first instant of thy conception didst crush the head of the enemy,
receive the prayers which, united with thee in our single heart,
we implore thee to present at the throne of God, that we may never
fall into the snares which are laid out for us, and may all arrive
at the port of salvation; and, in so many dangers, may the Church
and Christian society sing once again the hymn of deliverance and
of victory and of peace. Amen.
Ejaculations
In Thy conception, O Virgin Mary, thou wast immaculate; pray for
us to the Father, Whose Son, Jesus Christ conceived of the Holy
Ghost, thou didst bring forth.
“The key to accepting our husband is humility. We must realize that we have human faults and limitations….that we, too, are not the perfectly virtuous individual. Remember, the only person we can change is ourselves. It takes humility of spirit to have a successful relationship. As for the rest, we must pray…..” -Finer Femininity
Coloring pages for your children…. (click on picture to get full view)
In this joyful and charming book, Maria Von Trapp (from The Sound of Music) unveils for you the year-round Christian traditions she loved traditions that created for her large family a warm and inviting Catholic home and will do the same for yours.
A beautiful feast day to you! O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!