"Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing..."

In Christian terms, the idea that the Virgin Mary is just a person who happened to conceive and give birth to the Son of God in the flesh is silly on the face of it. To be sure, Mary, or Miriam of Nazareth, was fully human and in no way divine. She was unique, exceptional among the human race.

In Catholic theology, one does not read too much about the concept of prevenient grace. In certain Protestant theologies, especially Calvinism and Arminianism, prevenient grace gets a workout. In certain Calvinistic renderings, prevenient grace is worked out to the point at which a deterministic world results. This, in turn, gives us such theological travesties as "double predestination," which is the idea that God creates certain people only to damn them.

What is prevenient grace? It is God's decision that precedes and overrides human decisions. According to certain modes of Calvinistic thinking, prevenient grace is often or even always irresistible. In other words, God's decrees his will and God's will cannot be overridden. Your cooperation, therefore, is not always, perhaps even usually, a conscious choice.

Any healthy theology cannot hold that God's will, at least concerning an individual's life and in specific circumstances, is irresistible. It is possible to resist God's will. In fact, we often resist it. We can say God's grace is tireless and inexhaustible. Think about the beauty of what Pope Francis said and repeated during the Jubilee of Mercy. You will tire of asking God for mercy long before God will tire of being merciful to you. His point was God will never tire of being merciful because the name of God is mercy (to use the title of a book by Pope Francis). No matter how far you might try to separate yourself from God, he is always there, not as a threatening or imposing presence but in a mode that you might most easily recognize him and respond.

In the Prayer over the Offerings for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the celebrant invokes these words: "... grant that, as we profess her, on account of your prevenient grace, to be untouched by any stain of sin, so, through her intercession, we may be delivered from all our faults" (Roman Missal).

Immaculate Conception, by Giuseppe Angeli, 1765

Citing an Apostolic Constitution promulgated by Pope Alexander VII in 1661, Pope Pius IX, in his encyclical Ineffabilius Deus, by which he dogmatically declared the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1854, noted:

Concerning the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, ancient indeed is that devotion of the faithful based on the belief that her soul, in the first instant of its creation and in the first instant of the soul’s infusion into the body, was, by a special grace and privilege of God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, her Son and the Redeemer of the human race, preserved free from all stain of original sin. And in this sense have the faithful ever solemnized and celebrated the Feast of the Conception

This preservation is what constitutes the prevenience of the grace. This also gets back into the collapsing of time that we're invited to experience during the season of Advent. Her preservation from sin was wrought through the merits of Christ's saving atonement, which is what makes it graciousness on God's part and not inherent to her being. Otherwise, we would have to revere Mary as divine.

The Gospel reading for today's solemnity is Luke's account of the Annunciation. It shows that grace, even prevenient grace, is not irresistible. After greeting this common young woman in an incomprehensibly grandiose manner, the Archangel Gabriel tells Mary that she is to conceive by the Holy Spirit and will give birth to the Son of God, Mary gives what Roman Catholics traditionally call her fiat. This comes from the Latin Vulgate (the Bible in Latin), which translates her words as fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum (i.e., "be it done to me according to your word"- Luke 1:38).

God does not force an unwanted pregnancy upon a young woman for whom such a condition might prove fatal. Her acceptance is vital.

This leads us into "Mary did you know" territory. It seems clear, if we take the Annunciation into account, that Mary perhaps grasped the what and the why of the life and mission of her son. Based on the presentation of Jesus in Temple, during which event she is said to have encountered Anna and Simeon, she may not have fully grasped precisely how he would accomplish his divine purposes in and for the world. Who knows, if she had known the precise manner in which her own heart would be pierced by a sword, it might've altered her decision? The decision to love, to really love, is always a risk. The choice between life and death.

Advent is about saying "Yes," saying to God either again or for the first time: "Be it done to me according to your word." Like our Blessed Mother, saying "Yes" to God entails a risk. I am convinced because choosing to love renders us vulnerable that God does not force our hand. God certainly never seeks to coerce your fiat. It is the nature of love that it cannot be forced. Love always requires a choice, a fiat. Love is the most courageous choice a person can ever make.