If you were around for Christmas, I promised you the "missing" verse of the carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem." It would have been the penultimate verse:
Where children pure and happy
Pray to the blessed Child,
Where Misery cries out to Thee,
Son of the undefiled;
Where Charity stands watching,
And Faith holds wide the door,
The dark night wakes, the glory breaks,
And Christmas comes once more.
Isn't that nice? Why in the world would it have been removed? Well, believe it or not, it was controversial. Did you catch the offending line? It was, of course, the line calling Jesus “son of the undefiled.” Brooks took some heat for that from those who thought it sounded a little too Catholic, and even came a little too close to the idea of - gasp! - the Immaculate Conception. I don’t know if Brooks ended up agreeing, or if he just caved, but he rewrote the verse and eventually just took it out. I would have like to have conducted an aggressive interview with the critics. “So, sir, I understand you object to calling Jesus ‘son of the undefiled.’ If he isn’t that, then he must logically and necessarily be the ‘son of the defiled.’ Are you willing to go on record calling him that?
The funny thing is Brooks didn’t set out to say nice things about Mary. His purpose was to write a hymn of praise to Jesus. And in doing so, it just naturally happened that Mary got involved. It’s pretty hard to tell the Christmas story while pretending she doesn’t exist. And it turns out it’s also pretty hard to praise Jesus without some of that getting reflected onto Mary. And 'reflected' is exactly what happens. Jesus’ glory is his own. Hers is not her own, it’s His, filling her. That’s true about Mary and about any holy Christian.
A few weeks ago one of my good friends lost his Mom. We were in seminary together, and some of you have met Fr. John Silva. Well I was concelebrating the funeral in Snake Run, Indiana, and my heart was breaking for my friend, and I had the strangest notion. Just out of compassion and sympathy, for some reason it entered my mind that I wanted to give my Mom to my friend. I mean, she’s pretty great, and there’s plenty of family love to go around. The thought surprised me because of course he didn’t want a replacement, and of course I can’t make someone else the son or daughter of my Mom, great as she is.
But Jesus can. He also had a friend John, and he gave his Mom to him, and he to her. And certainly part of that was just him making sure she was cared for when he was gone. But Christians from the beginning have taken it also as a symbol of Christ giving her motherhood to all his disciples.
It’s a family thing, you see. God is family from all eternity, Father and Son and the Spirit between them. In the Incarnation, a human mother is taken up into that life, but it’s not just her. It’s all of us. If you look at it the right way, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He calls us brothers and sisters, doesn’t he? Well, he means it. Brothers and sisters indeed, and that means unavoidably and fantastically and, truly wonderfully, that His mother is ours.
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