Flowers for the Immaculate Conception (random notes on virginity, edition)

Off the top of my head, instigated because of a text I received:

• The etymology of “virgin” is referenced in a newly sprouted tender twig. The analogy in human beings is usually put on young women, with people being quite cynical concerning young men. But – Hey! – Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Saint Dominic Savio…
• To be a virgin usually speaks to great strength of spirit, to purity of heart, agility of soul, clarity of vision, profundity of understanding, with active humble reverence before God, who is Love and Truth.
• There can be great hypocrisy as Jesus points out in the parable of the ten virgins, five wise and five foolish. Saint Paul reprimands anyone who might brag about their self-control.
• Virginity is expected before marriage, that is between a man a woman looking forward to a family.
• Virginity, all things being equal, is to be abandoned in favor of the command to be fruitful and multiply.
• Jesus, by way of the Redemption and please God our acceptance of the Salvation He won for us, has become the Father of such souls. Please God, priests know something of this virginity and its fruitfulness in their priestly ministry, particularly in their offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the one Last Supper, united with Calvary, which is their participation in the marriage of God with His Bride the Church. That marriage of God and the Church is spoken of throughout the Old and New Testaments. We hear the Wedding vows of Jesus recited by the priest in the first person singular: This is my Body given for you in Sacrifice, my Blood poured out for you in Sacrifice. Priests are married by the Sacrifice they offer. Jesus takes on the punishment for sin we deserve in original sin and whatever of our own rubbish sin, death, standing in our place, the Innocent for the guilty, so that He has the right in His own justice to have mercy on us. How entirely inappropriate to have “women priests,” a symbol of lesbianism, of the murder of the image of God: male, female, marriage, family.
• But how about Mary, the Virgin Mary? She was betrothed to Joseph. She knew the commandment to bear fruit and multiply. And she is not stupid. She knew how this could happen, biologically, with Saint Joseph, with whom she had the opportunity. But she asked the angel, how can this be, for I do not know man. In other words, it ain’t gonna happen with any man, including Saint Joseph. She knew she was supposed to be a virgin, but she was not against being fruitful: just tell me how this will take place. The angel says that she will conceive inside her womb by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, so that her Son will be the Son of God. And when He is being born, in His being born, in which every other child is “unclean”, He will instead in that very moment be called holy, impossible unless the birth is itself miraculous. Then Mary says, “Let it done to me according thy word.” This is the only logic possible with the text.
• That she remains a virgin points to the conception of Jesus inside her womb by the Holy Spirit with no outside human intervention.
• That she remains a virgin points the fact that Mary is not mother of a monster, just the Head of the Body of Christ, but also of us, the members of the Body of Christ. I think Saint Bernard said that. And that fruitful motherhood continues throughout time by way of those birth pangs she endured under the cross, standing in solidarity with Jesus in His trials for our redemption and salvation, which made her suffering as a mother into an intercession for all of us, in union with His will.

I wrote this a million miles an hour. There’s probably spelling mistakes and run-on sentences. I didn’t look it over for completeness. As I say, just random thoughts.

Did I miss something? Some aspect, Scripture passage. There that one in Isaiah that the angel cites, about the Virgin conceiving in the womb as The Great Sign.