In other words, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception does not contend that Mary’s birth was the result of something other than a union between a woman and a man, or that Mary was anything but fully human, but only that she was the recipient, by a divine necessity that later would be confirmed by the action of her will, of certain extraordinary graces that preserved her from inheriting that tendency for evil to which humankind is subject, and prepared her to become the vessel through which Christ would become incarnate in the world.
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While the Virgin Birth concerns Jesus, the Immaculate Conception concerns the origin of Mary, and her conception in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne (by way of Anne’s husband, Saint Joachim), in whom this conception is said to have occurred without the effects of original sin, as would be befitting of a being who would become the Theotokos (or God-bearer). And so it is described as ‘immaculate,’ though not supernatural, for it does not necessitate the Holy Spirit in the role of, for lack of a better term, the fathering parent.
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The two notions are distinct, and refer to separate events, though the confusing of them, or the mistaking of one for the other, is understandable, due to their relation in name and association, and the merging they have undergone in the popular imagination.
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I should say something about what is meant by the Immaculate Conception, as it is often confused with the Virgin Birth.
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Which isn’t to celebrate an absence of learning for its own sake, as if that were a good in itself, but only to say that God tends to smile on the pure of heart, regardless of whether they are brilliant of mind, for it is such purity that is closer to the childlike humility that allows a soul to approach the environs of divinity where virtue thrives and joy proliferates.
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It is telling, for example, that Bernadette Soubirous, who was so sickly as a child that she could not attend school with regularity, had neither the powers of vocabulary, nor the intellectual presumptuousness, to refer to the series of apparitions, during the fortnight that she experienced them, as anything more grandiose than “aquero” (Occitan for “that”). And that, initially, she had no understanding of what was meant by the phrase “I am the Immaculate Conception,” which was uttered to her, in her own native tongue, by the ‘young lady’ of her visions (after Bernadette herself had been pressed by a local priest, as the apparitions progressed, to inquire as to the lady’s name), so that she’d had to repeat the words to herself, over and over, phonetically, as she hurried back to the village from the grotto that day, so that she would not forget how to pronounce them, and would be able to communicate them to the ecclesial authorities who had taken an interest in her case, and who, to some degree, till then, had doubted both her honesty and her soundness of mind (though of course she still had doubters afterward, too).
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You will notice, for example, where Marian apparitions are concerned, that it is always to those with the most unassuming of natures, and a faith that hasn’t been compromised by the intellectualizations to which adults are prone when their egos have been flattered, and their sense of their own importance has been exaggerated, that God is pleased to make explicit an instance of his will, by way of a vision of, and message from, Our Lady.
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It is, perhaps, this willingness to function as an instrument for providence, not in a mindless way, but with the humility and simplicity of a child who would bring to bear, on a particular task, all the imperfect power of their talents and intelligence, that, of all the traits that saints can be said to share (regardless of their differences in temperament, personality, or aptitude, or any other category of chance that produces their variety), is the most important.
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And of Bernadette Soubirous, who, some years after she’d experienced the Marian apparitions at that grotto, in France, that afterward came to be known for the healing power of its waters, and she herself had entered the novitiate of the Sisters of Charity, where she would spend the rest of her life, working in an infirmary, and as a sacristan, once said, not with chagrin but with the honesty of the unpretentious, when asked about the occurrences that had brought to her renown, “The Virgin used me as a broom to remove the dust. When the work is done, the broom is put behind the door again.”
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I think of Thérèse of Lisieux, the French Carmelite nun who, wishing to be holy, but recognizing that her cloistered life, in a convent, precluded works of great scope, or influence, discovered what she called the ‘little way,’ which, to her mind, meant finding within the realm of small gestures, personal interactions, and private or unwitnessed existence, the endlessness of occasion through which virtue, rather than sin, can be manifested.
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In short, there are saints who would seem larger-than-life, like Joan of Arc, or Mary Magdalene, or Francis of Assisi, and while it is true that these have a specific kind of importance, in the ecclesial sense, as well as, perhaps, in the cosmic or eternal sense, insofar as they might even inhabit a special nearness to the seat of divinity, relative to other souls who attend to the beatific vision (though that is a point of theology I don’t feel is my prerogative to explore), there are also saints who might strike us as more ordinary, or less bound to a transcendent reputation, because their feats seem less astounding, and more down-to-earth, which isn’t to say that they themselves are less venerable, or that the ‘larger-than-life’ figures are less accessible to us, or less real.
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Which isn’t to make a hierarchy where one is unnecessary, or to imply the presence of one where one may not exist, but to distinguish again, I suppose, between sanctity as it avails itself to every person who becomes incarnate in the world, and the communion of saints as it is articulated and recognized by the various denominations of the Church, for the hope and inspiration it affords, very generally, but also for specific things like its intercessory power in heaven, where it persists in the beatific vision, and the protection and guidance that might obtain to those pilgrim souls, throughout creation, who would seek among its number those ‘patrons’ to whom they have a special devotion, and might address themselves in prayer.
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And, anyway, perhaps it is the lives of those saints who are well-known, and who have been, as it were, ‘canonized,’ rather than those who are hidden in the mists of time, known only to God (and to the few souls with whom they were acquainted), that are most likely to kindle a person’s faith, or encourage a person in the faith when that person is struggling, and is assailed by doubt. Insofar as the imagination is captured more easily, and brought to reverie, by saints whose biographies are specific, and exist within a tradition, than saints who are intangible, and whose stories must be constructed in the absence of one.
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Though, of course, the life of any saint tends to bring on itself attention, for there is, in the abandonment of the self to the will of God, as it makes itself known in the sphere of reality that the particular saint inhabits, a summoning of virtue that will allow the saint to do things that are surprising, and that, try as that saint might to unbind those things from the arena of their personhood, for the sake of modesty and discretion (which is not a false modesty but true, insofar as a person can be a channel for good, not an originator of it), will cause those around them to notice. Which is to say, I suppose, that no saint means to ‘hide their light under a bushel,’ and that to distinguish between modes of sanctity, as I have done in the previous entry, is not to compare or adjudicate holiness, for that would be absurd, but to recognize that providence can make a saint out of anyone, wherever and however it finds them, and that the historical record is only a glimpse of the fullness of history.
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One might even say that the latter is closer to the precincts of God, even if, in the particular instances of its unfolding, it is not as visible to the masses, and to recorded history, as is the former, which draws to itself, by the flash of its color and its brightness, the gaze of a public that is susceptible to the tropes of heroism that would place such a life in the collected memory of a culture or civilization.
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Which I do not say to be a killjoy, or intend as a diminishment of the challenges of life, or of its rewards and consolations, but only because salvation is salvation, and it makes no difference whether one attains it through heroics, which are intense, but tend to be over quickly, or through the steady, unrecognized plodding that might describe, through its hiddenness, the lives of many saints.
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For it is the hours of the day that one must, in some sense, get through, even if, in another sense, it is by way of these hours that one can find the circumstances of one’s salvation. Which isn’t as dramatic as it might sound, for salvation rarely depends on the horrors or perils or excitations that might appear, in individual lives, all of a sudden (and as equally of a sudden be over), so that they would draw to themselves, through their fleetingness, when they do occur, something of a romantic aura, but on the mundane trials and banalities that comprise the lives of ordinary length, and eventfulness, that are destined to belong to most of us.
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If I went to bed too early, I’d wake in the night, and would lie there for some time, trying to fall back asleep, and sometimes I’d be able to, though, if I couldn’t, I’d get up, and go to my computer, and sit before the lighted screen in the dark, and work on whatever project I happened to be in the middle of, until I either felt tired again, and could go back to sleep, or became aware that dawn had arrived, and that the interior of my apartment was no longer hidden, but was, in a ghostly way, becoming visible, at which point I’d make coffee, and continue to write, and would try not to think too much about what lay ahead of me, in the unmet hours of the day.
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It is from this pier that, in recent summers, I’d board the ferry some afternoons, and ride it to a point farther south in Brooklyn, where, about a mile from the slip in which that ferry docks, there’s a bar I would sit in, and have a couple beers, before wandering back through the neighborhoods to my apartment, where sometimes I’d have a couple more beers while sitting on the floor and thinking, or while fixing something to eat, and where other times I’d try to let the night come on, without drinking anything more, until it was late enough and dark enough that I’d tire, and could fall asleep.
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At the corner I turned left, and went downhill, and under the expressway, where noise from the traffic was loud and fast, and on along the sidewalk of a road that led into the park beside the harbor, until I reached a pier, at the end of which I stopped for a while to stand and look at the bay, and at the snow that was falling on the waves, and at the waves themselves, which slushed against the pylons, and at a couple of seagulls that were wheeling out over the waters upon which, at other times of day, on other occasions, I had seen them swoop and dive.