In the midst of the Advent journey, we arrive at one of the most beloved feasts for the whole Church and deeply meaningful for us as Daughters of Jesus and the entire Mother Candida Family: the Immaculate Conception.
We celebrate Mary, full of grace, chosen from the beginning to collaborate in a unique way in God’s plan. To celebrate her is also to remember our own vocational history, our choice and our call to place ourselves, like her, totally in the Lord’s hands.
Today the liturgy invites us to contemplate not only who Mary is, but who we are in the light of God’s gratuitous love.
We welcome the Word
Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heaven.
He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him by love.
He has destined us through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to be his children, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he has so generously bestowed on us in the Beloved.
In him we have also inherited, we who were already destined by the decision of him who does everything according to his will, so that we may be the praise of his glory who once hoped in the Messiah. (Eph 1:3-6,11-12)
This Word reminds us that God’s choice precedes any merit, that our vocation is born of the gratuitous love of the Father. Like Mary, we are called to be the praise of his glory, living in transparency, availability, trust and gratitude.
Charismatic text
On April 2, 1869, I was praying and waiting before the altar of the Holy Family in the church of Rosarillo, and suddenly, as if a radiant light had been kindled in my heart, I understood clearly that I had to “found a new congregation under the name of Daughters of Jesus, dedicated to the salvation of souls, through the education and instruction of children and youth”. I no longer had any doubts, but I did have obstacles to discard what the devil – alas, daughters, the devil…! – made me see as gigantic mountains before saying yes to God our Lord. There I approached Father Herranz, with my inspirations and my lights. I told him, simply, what the Virgin Mary had given me to understand at the Rosarillo as what God wanted of me. I did not want to hide anything from her, and I told her, from the very beginning, the greatest difficulty I had at that time to be able to carry out such a work. I told her clearly that I could neither read nor write. He saw no objection and gave me to understand that he was a man of God and that he trusted Him in all things when he understood that it was His will.
Many times in my long life, I have thought about it and have admired how unexpectedly God takes things when they are for his glory and the good of mankind, whom he loves so much. This poor servant girl, almost illiterate, who resolved in her adolescence to be only for God and who kept her desire alive, waiting to know what his concrete will for her would be, while she asked him for his light through prayer and penance. A response from God, received by each one in a different way, surprising and disconcerting, illogical in human terms because He wanted faith to be the first support of this risky undertaking… (Carmen de Frías Tomero, FI. Donde Dios te llame. Salamanca, 1990, pp. 42-43). Card 1-B of “Acceptance of the Determination of the GCXIX”).
In the voice of Mother Candida we contemplate the same dynamism that we see in Mary: choice – listening – fear – trust – response – mission. Our foundress experienced that God chooses the small, the weak, what seems “insufficient” in the eyes of the world. He does not choose because we are capable: he enables us because he chooses.
The Immaculate Conception teaches us to let ourselves be loved first, to accept that God takes the initiative, and to respond – like Mary and Mother Candida – from naked faith.
Resonates in our lives
To celebrate the Immaculate Conception in the middle of Advent is to remember that God continues to call our name, continues to call us to collaborate with Him, continues to trust in our littleness.
What does it mean to you to know that you have been chosen by God, to know that you are responding to a vocation?
May Mary Immaculate accompany us, enlighten us and teach us to say an ever freer and more hopeful “yes”.
