From the Salmon

About the time I broke my site, I wrote a paean to Jesus’ ancestral Salmon. In a throwaway line about genetics, I referred to Jesus’ conception as “Immaculate.” One of you wrote in to point out that the Roman Catholic dogma of Immaculate Conception actually refers to the conception of Mary, not of Jesus.

A fair point. And a timely one, since Friday was actually the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s Ineffabilis Deus, which elevated the Immaculate Conception from doctrine to dogma.

Clearly, I’m not up to speed on even the most basic of Marian theology. After clicking around the Internets this evening, I know a bit more, particularly thanks to this history. But the most touching piece that I read came from a fellow Berkeleyan, writing on the Commonweal blog:

I’ve always sort of struggled with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Reading descriptions of its development is sort of like reading a very complicated legal brief. Lots of talk about the “imputed merits of Christ,” the theology of Duns Scotus, and all that. Most of the time, I enjoy that sort of thing. But not today.

Today I’m thinking about mothers. One of the reasons that Mary is so important is that, in some sense, she is the guarantor of the humanity of Jesus. Jesus had a mother, just like all of us. Much of what Jesus became as a human being, he became because of his mother.

If you met me and got to know me for a while, and then met my mother, you would immediately see some of the traits that she passed down to me. I suspect that those who got to know Jesus, and then met Mary, had the same experience. Maybe it was her smile, maybe certain turns of phrase. Maybe Jesus inherited his fiery passion, his fearlessness from her. She must have been a formidable woman!

One of the ongoing temptations in Christianity has been to deny, sometimes without even meaning to, the humanity of Christ. A lot of us are still carrying around a mental image of a fleshy “costume” animated by an all-knowing, all-seeing deity. The idea that Jesus could have been shaped in some fundamental way by his human environment sometimes seems threatening. But that is precisely why the Incarnation is so stunning.

It doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me that if God was going to become incarnate in human flesh, that he would do a little advance planning. And perhaps one of the things He might be most concerned about is the woman who would bear Him, who would shape Him and guide him to adulthood, a poor peasant girl from the Judean countryside. How would she ever have the strength to bear the burden that would be laid upon her?

The answer? He gave it to her.

Oh, I’m sure this is very poor theology and someone far more learned than I could poke numerous holes in it. But in some sense, I think this is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is all about: a son’s love for His mother.