The best songs make us tap our feet and sing along.  They make our hearts ache and our eyes weep.  They inspire silent awe, knowing that we couldn’t put reality any better.  Those songs don’t always have the most artful lyrics or the most complicated tunes.  But they create something new in us when our hearts and our stories encounter them.  The best songs become our “greatest hits” because we give them meaning.  And in that meaning, for us, songs become wholly alive.

We celebrate today God’s song become wholly alive in the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Our Mother, who from the moment of her conception allowed God to sing in her a new creation.  Our Lady, who sings humanity’s fallen hymn perfectly, from her very first note.  So full of grace from the very beginning of her life.  So preserved from sin by virtue of the child she was to bear.  Mary, the Immaculate Conception, in whom God’s perfect song becomes a Son.

And that song is the same one that God seeks through grace to sing in our lives.  It’s the song he first created humans to sing, the song struck discordant by Eden’s disobedience.  Our Lady was conceived no less human, no more “divine,” than any of us.  Through the merits of Christ, Mary’s life was so harmonized with the will of God that she could proclaim, “May it be done to me according to your word.” 

We celebrate today our faith that God can and does sing that same song in us, a song of unspeakable yearning and joyous grace.  In this Season of Advent, we long for something which can hardly be put into words: to be united with the beauty we see, the joy we experience, the love we share, to pass into it, to become part of it.  Ceasing for a moment to consider our own wants, praying only that God’s will be done unto us according to his word, we learn better what we really desire, nothing more than to please God.  In this most humble desire, God imbues our lives with divine meaning.  And as in Mary, so in us.  The Holy Spirit fills our hearts with grace, singing in us God’s perfect song.