Imagine I.C.

Seeing the Immaculate Conception through God’s eyes

12/08/2018

Luke 1:26-38 The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, "Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you." But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end."

You may have seen that we have created a new slogan for our elementary school. It reads: “Imagine I.C.” and I really like it and think it’s rather catchy. If we asked our students what comes to mind when they hear the words, “Imagine I.C.” their imaginations could conjure up all kinds of things. Some may immediately think of the grand, stately columns that greet and welcome students every morning when they enter the main doors, like the colonnade in front of St. Peter’s Basilica embracing all the world. We have a fabulous façade for an elementary entrance. Some may think of Ms. Anabel who prepares hot and healthy lunches every day and gives a little extra for those students with heartier appetites. Some think of the loads of homework every evening, but then later they breeze through junior high and high school thanks to the strong study skills they mastered here in these halls. They may think of Fr. John or Fr. Stephen. But on second thought, since Fr. Stephen plays the piano and serenades them at lunch, joins them for Gaga ball at recess, and directs traffic on Tuesday morning drop-off, they are probably not thinking about Fr. John.

They may not think about me, but I think about them when I “imagine I.C.” Yesterday, we had our school Advent confessions. I felt so pleased and proud of our students as they made very heart-felt and humble confessions. I am doubly proud because I know that confession is very hard and often embarrassing, which is why so few adults take advantage of the graces of this sacrament. But not I.C. students, and my heart burst with pride. When I see the slogan, “Imagine I.C.” my mind imagines our students growing in grace, like Jesus was described in Luke 2:40: “The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” Those splendid students are what I see when I “Imagine I.C.”

Today we celebrate the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in the womb of her mother, St. Anne. If we were to ask God to glance at our new school slogan and ask him what he thinks of when he tries to “Imagine I.C.”, he would answer, “I think of the woman whom I made, the Immaculate Conception, herself.” In fact, only the imagination of the Immortal God could have conceived how he would fulfill the plan of salvation promised all the way back in Genesis and finally perfected in a poor girl from Nazareth. Only when God imagined the Immaculate Conception did he finally tie together all the several strands of salvation history scattered about in the Old Testament and provide a perfect portal for his Son to enter this world while staying unstained by its sins. So, when the angel says in the gospel, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God,” he is not whistling Dixie; he’s dead serious: she was the fruit of his imagination. In other words, Mary was the bodily fulfillment of what happens when the Divine Mind begins to “Imagine I.C.” When I imagine I.C. I think of students who make a good confession, but when God imagines I.C. he sees a young girl who never even had to go to confession, and she is who we celebrate on December 8th: the first fruit that fell from the tree of the divine imagination.

Let me share with you a rather long quotation from Archbishop Fulton Sheen. I will end with it because he expresses far more eloquently everything I have been stammering and struggling to say. He wrote: “There is, actually, only one person in all humanity of whom God has one picture and in whom there is a perfect conformity between when he wanted her to be and what she is, and that is his own Mother. Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfill the high hopes the heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign. The ideal that God had of her, that she is, and in the flesh. The model and the copy are perfect; she is all that was foreseen, planned and dreamed. The melody of her life is played just as it was written. May was thought, conceived and planned as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realization” (Sheen, Mary, the Women the World Loves).

In other words, Mary is what God think when he tries to “Imagine I.C.” because she is the pure product of that immortal imagination. The Blessed Virgin Mary should be what we think of, too, when we “Imagine I.C.” because she should be the inspiration for our merely mortal imaginations. You should think about her even more than you think about Fr. Stephen.

Praised be Jesus Christ!