"Reflecting on the Immaculate Conception of Mary helps us to enter into a profound and life-giving mystery.... lack of self-giving is precisely what ails us in today’s culture. When we prepare engaged couples for marriage, for example, we spend quite a bit of time on what, to many, seems a foreign concept: trusting God with your life.... Because of the serpent’s deception, men and women throughout history have bought into the lie and grasp fruitlessly at all sorts of ways to control their own destiny instead of putting things into the hands of their loving Creator. This is so painfully manifest today by the high incidence of sexual activity outside of marriage, and the death-dealing acts of contraception and abortion. But we must have hope! Despite the many manifestations of grave sin all around us, God so wants to heal and restore us, that He became Man to save us. By the gift of Mary, conceived without sin, He provided the pure vessel to be the Mother of the Savior.... Pope Benedict helps us understand the Immaculate Conception this way: 'The person who abandons himself totally in God’s hands does not become God’s puppet, a boring "yes man"; he does not lose his freedom. Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great creative immensity of the freedom of good.' In place of the destructive behaviors that only cause us heartache, let us look to Mary Immaculate, the new Eve, the Mother of the Redeemer, to lead us to the freedom of the truth and to share that truth with others, for nothing shall be impossible for God" (Truth and Charity Forum, 12/9/13)
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