My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins,

and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful.

My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my Father and Lord, my guardian angel intercede for me.

Today the Church celebrates the Feast or the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Now for us to understand this feast, we have to go a little bit back to the origins of devotion

to the Blessed Mother. In the early church, the fathers of the church came to focus on the mystery

of our salvation and our Redeemer Jesus Christ. And they came to articulate every more carefully

the very nature of the incarnation,

how Jesus was true God, who became man, and it was not God under the appearance of man,

nor was he kind of like a minor God created by God, like, you know, in time, like a good creature and stuff.

That's what some bishop said, like Arias, the bishop of Alexandria. He could not wrap

his mind around the idea that he was true God and true man at the same time. So the church had to

condemn this, reject this. That's why we say in the creed he was born of the Virgin Mary,

Natus ex-Maria virginia, exX Maria virgin, out of or from the Virgin Mary.

And that's, in a certain way, seems kind of contradictory to think that, you know, born of a virgin, since virgins by nature, well, they cannot give birth. They're virgins.

But of course, as the fathers reflected and prayed about this, they came to realize that Mary

was really the mother of God and that she had been specifically created for this purpose.

And her perpetual virginity had to be defended to ensure that

the child that she gave birth to was not of human intervention, but was really of God. He was born

of the Virgin Mary. And he became like any other man, human, but without sin. You'll recall that

luminous interaction between Gabriel, the Archangel, and Mary, as he transmits this key message

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