Weekly HOMILY for January 1, 2009: Mary, a Model for How to Live in the Present

Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, Cycle A
Our Lady of Grace
January 1, 2005

Mary, a Model for How to Live in the Present
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato



The Past and the Future

A writer named Alice Camille says that many of us live in the past or in the future a good bit of the time.

Alice Camille says that “past-dwellers” can be divided into two groups.

➢ First, there are the nostalgiacs: those who think that the way things were in the past was great and who long for the good old days.

➢ And second, there are the rubberneckers: those who are fixated on something bad that happened and they just can’t get over it.

Then, Alice Camille also says that future-dwellers can also be divided into two groups.

➢ First, there are the I-can’t-waiters: those who can’t wait for this or that to happen because then everything will be just fine.

➢ And second, there are the worriers: those who are filled with anxiety about tomorrow.

The problem is that the past-dwellers (the nostalgiacs and the rubberneckers) and the future-dwellers (the I-can’t-waiters and the worriers) are not living in the present.

The fact of the matter is that they are largely missing the only moment that counts – today, right now, the present moment.


Mary and the Present

The image of Mary today calls us to (1) Live in the present and (2) Also shows us how to do that.

Our Gospel passage tells us that following Jesus’ birth, “Mary treasures these things and reflects on them in her heart.” Later on in this same chapter, Luke again tells us that Mary “stores up these things in her heart.”

So, Mary is portrayed as a reflective, prayerful person.

➢ She seems to look back to what has happened in her life and to what she has been told about her role in God’s plan.

➢ And Mary also looks ahead to the promises and hopes about tomorrow that God gives us.

So, yes, she reflects on the past and the future, but notice that she is not stuck in either of them!

Instead, Mary sifts through everything and extracts what it is that God wants her to do right now. She tries to shape her life in the present from her experience of the past and from her hope for the future.


Mary as a Model for Us

My recommendation, of course, is that Mary is a good model for us on New Year’s Eve/Day.

She calls us to be prayerful, to be reflective in a very specific way. She moves us to sift through the experiences of our past and review the hopes for the future so that we can live the present fully and live it well.

➢ So, prayerfully, what can we learn from our experience of our past? From success or failure, from joy or sadness?

➢ And, what can we learn from our hopes for the future? From Jesus’ vision of peace and reconciliation, or from our own desire to have more time for the people in our lives?

In other words, what do our experiences of the past and of the future say to us about the present?


Conclusion

The example of Mary calls us to address this question in a prayerful and reflective way.