A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. In those days, Mary arose and went in haste into the hill country to a city of Judah. And as she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leapt in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. And she explained with a loud cry, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And why is this granted me that the mother of my lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting, Mary, came to my ears, the baby in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the lord. And then Mary said, my soul magnifies the lord, and my spirit rejoices in god, my savior. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. There's one thing we can say for certain about this feast of the presentation of our blessed lady, there is nothing in the New Testament about it. Now it was my great good fortune, and I mean that, my great and good fortune, to have spent five years with the Sulpicians in a college which no longer existed, which was intended specifically to prepare younger men for the bigger seminary. It was called the minor seminary, Saint Charles in Cadenceville.
And then in any sufficient seminary in those days, because this is no longer true, there was a great fuss made over this feast of the presentation. Because Jean Jacques Boulier, who founded the Salpicians, and they took their name from the parish church of Saint Sao Pisce, which is no mean parish church, and a follower of Saint Vincent de Paul. And from the very beginning, his idea was to do something for the secular priests, the parochial clergy we prefer to call. And so he devoted his life, Jean Jacques Olier, and so did Vincent de Paul, among other things. But with Jean Jacquesoliere, that was the main thrust to improve the what the French like to call the formation of the priest.
And I like that word very much because it means a lot more than education. Well, anyway, this feast of the presentation was the they used to call the Salpician Christmas because Olier had the idea that this represented the young man coming and presenting himself in a very special way to be a priest of God, not for himself, but for the church. And therefore, he thought that this feast of the presentation would be a very fitting occasion to symbolize this particular kind of dedication, and I don't think you can quarrel with that. And I have I have always said that however or how however much or however little you may find or think you find in the New Testament about this matter of the presentation of Our Lady, it's all involved with her being in the temple and all those things. You know, there there have been books three and four inches written on the life of the blessed mother.
Now how can people do those things? Somebody spins out these myths, you know. But anyway, when we look at this feast as an occasion that the church presents to us of dedication, of commitment, of renewal, renewing the presentation that we all did participate in. That is the great participation of baptism. Notice I did not call an initiation rite.
I loathe that word because initiation has the idea of joining some sorority or fraternity or becoming a knight of Columbus or a Mason or what have you. Initiation simply means to be introduced into something. Of course, baptism is that. But in god's, it's so much more than that. Baptism, our presentation, when the parents come and in the way we do it now it just so has so much more significance, when the mother and the father are there and in some instances when they lay the baby on the altar.
This has tremendous significance because baptism is not merely an initiatory rite or an initiation, it's a transformation, it's a metamorphosis. Now, you know when you took your biology in high school we had these examples of incomplete and complete metamorphoses and how we talked about complete metamorphoses of the frog, and maybe there are others, my memory is pretty pretty cloudy about those things. But when you talk about complete metamorphosis, you mean to say a complete change. A complete change. And that is what happens with baptism.
A human being in the natural order is transformed into something that it wasn't. It is now put in what we call the supernatural order. It is in the order of grace. There is a new life given to that baby or the the adult or whatever by the rite of baptism. Let's not forget this, and this is what we all went through.
But we forget it. We forget it. There is nothing so great or so valuable that if you hang around along long enough with it, that it won't become commonplace. You say that's a silly statement. It's not a silly statement.
I never will forget that when I one of the great things in when you approach ordination was in those days having your chalice made. You could design it yourself and you got a jeweler and you did and he there were conferences and what did you put in it and the family gathered their jewels and their silver and their gold and their diamonds and all of this. It was a great deal. I never will forget when this gentleman came down from Jersey and we were sitting around and he was telling us what you what we can do with the chalice, what he could put on it, how much it's going to cost the whole business. And he reached in his back pocket and pulled out an envelope, as I would pull out a handkerchief.
And he took the envelope and he said, look at that. And we opened and a bunch of diamonds rolled out, a handful of diamonds. He was carrying those things around with with more carelessness than we carried our nickels and our dimes and our pennies and our change pocket. And I remember asking, I said, aren't you intense about carrying these things around with you? He said, I forget I have them with me.
This is true of the finest things in life. And right way, I think, of husbands and wives who take each other like that. Well, anyway, the thing about it is this, this feast of the presentation, it may not have a great foundation in the New Testament. I'm the first one to say it doesn't. It's sort of a popular idea and it means a lot to me because of I've I've told you about it.
But the thing is it should mean something to all of us. This beautiful picture of our blessed lady as a little girl traipsing up the long steps to the great summit of the temple in Jerusalem and and dedicating herself to God, I have no idea whether that ever happened. All I know is there is no evidence that it happened. See, the idea goes back to the to this myth because this is a myth that she that she gave herself to God in the temple and stayed there for all these years until it was time for her to be married. There is no evidence for this.
As far as we know, the blessed mother was just a plain, commonplace, wonderful girl growing up as any other Jewish girl grew up in her day when something marvelous happened according to Saint Luke. Well, something marvelous has happened to all of us. She was told she was to be the mother of God. We're told we're going we're all priests. How come?
What does this mean to us? Where did it happen? Baptism. Baptism. It's much more than initiatory or a rite of initiation.
If you can't compare the two. You cannot compare them. So don't think about it in that way. Think about your com this change, this complete metamorphoses that took place with this rite of baptism through the grace of God. Here was our here is Christ coming to this tiny little babe and actually throwing himself at it and taking this child into himself and transforming it, and that is you and that is I.
Let's not forget it. We have a feast of our individual presentation. Because as sure as shooting that we are individually presented to God in baptism or the equivalent of it, and there may be well equivalence of it, but it's got to be something like it. There's got to be something there coming from God almighty in a in a most mysterious way to transform this perfectly good natural human being into something infinitely different. Notice, not better, different.
It's a complete metamorphosis. That's what happens, and that's what baptism does, and that's where we have been. Now the question is, where are we? Where are we? Do we recognize this?
I had a funeral yesterday, and this comes home to me that here you have a casket and Sunday we'll have a baptism. What's in between? What's in between? Here's a little baby three or four weeks old. Here is a per a or a woman, 65, 85, 95, 23, what's the difference?
A little span of life that we have lived between our presentation when we came in as an individual to meet Christ in the back in the sacrament of baptism, and when as an individual human being, I meet my god. The name of the father, son, and holy spirit. Amen.