Becoming Ourselves

The Immaculate Conception

Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our will.  This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us . . . It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . I have no program for this seeing.  It is only given.  But the gate of heaven is everywhere.[1]

July 26 is the Feast of the Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Tradition names them Anne and Joachim.  We really don’t know anything about them, but they are instrumental to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception:  the teaching that Mary was conceived immaculata, without the stain of Original Sin.  What could this mean? 

Beatrice Bruteau suggests that the center of Mary’s being was untouched by sin or illusion; a condition that Merton believed is true for all of us.[2]  There is that within us, which is of God, that remains immaculate. It shines like an immortal diamond in the heart of our humanity, reflecting the divine image – our Original Face, the face we had before our parents were born.  Unlike Mary, we forget this truth.  We become identified with egoic self-consciousness, born of self-differentiation from all that is other than me and the judgments of good and evil with respect to myself.  This is the limited “self” that wears the faces given it by biological development and socialization.  But the Original Face, the Immaculate Heart, remains.  We can become ourselves. 

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,

So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun![3]

When the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto at Lourdes, she proclaimed, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”  She is the archetype of what Matthew Fox calls “Original Blessing,” the antidote to Original Sin.   Mary, as an historical figure, may have a unique experience of her true nature, but as an archetypal figure, she expresses a universal truth.  We can come to share her awareness.  We can wake up to our true nature. 

In her poem, May Sarton speaks of this moment of awakening as a still point of timelessness that stops the sun.  One of the titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary is “the woman clothed with the sun.”  She is transparent to the generative energy of the eternal, an endlessly creative and radiant giving.  This endless giving is at the same time a nothingness, an absolute poverty, as Merton understood.  It is the emptiness that reflects the emergent unfolding of reality as one.  The gate of heaven is everywhere.  It is in us.

As the Buddhist Master Dojen argued,  “All reality, as Buddha-nature, is one.  The way requires the constant step into formlessness, the indeterminate . . . But nothingness is not a point of rest attained.  Only by realizing the dynamism of reality is Buddha-nature fully unfolded.”[4]

Bruteau submits that there may be some significance to the fact that the Buddha’s enlightenment is said to have occurred on December 8, the same day chosen for the celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.  Both the recovery of our Original Face, and the Immaculate Conception, express in different ways the reality of a unitive consciousness, an unstained beauty, at the heart of reality.  We can move from our limited self to a free, spontaneous, and unselfconscious experience of aliveness. 

We can become ourselves. 

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[1] Thomas Merton, “The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air” in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY:  Image Books, 1968), p. 158. 

[2] Beatrice Bruteau, “The Immaculate Conception, Our Original Face,” Cross Currents (Summer 1989): 181-189.

[3] May Sarton, “Now I become myself,” The Atlantic (December 1948 Issue).

[4] Bruteau, p. 195.