"What child is this? What mother is this?

What Child is this? What Mother is this?

I grew up in an Episcopal parish. In some ways we prided ourselves at being catholic, or maybe even a little bit better. We liked to say that the English reformation simply purified the Catholic Church in England, and that we kept everything that was authentically catholic. We could point out things about our church building, about our liturgy, and about our faith that made us catholic. You might think that we considered Mary to be a corruption, because her image was absent from the church, devotions and prayers were absent from the liturgy, and all of her days on the church calendar were absent – except one.

The Catholic Church’s devotion to Mary developed because of a long meditation on Jesus, her son. Convinced that Christ born in Bethlehem is already Son of God as we sing at Christmas in “O Come all Ye Faithful” – “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb; Only begotten, Son of God the Father, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.”

If Christ is worthy of our adoration as God, then how did he come to dwell among us as a person? How powerful was it when Mary told Gabriel, “Let it be to me according to your word.” How full of grace and sinless did she have to be to carry God the Son of God in her womb and give birth to him? How full of love did she have to be to raise, with Joseph, a child, a teenager, a young adult like Jesus? How much did she understand him when she told the people at the wedding, “Do whatever he tells you.” How much according to God’s plan was it that the same Holy Spirit that overshadowed her so that Christ could be conceived in her, was the Holy Spirit that fell upon her and the disciples at Pentecost, giving birth to the Church?

It does seem to be true that to truly know Christ is to know his mother, and to tuly know his mother is to know Christ. May we know them and love them better and better.