Tomorrow is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, which means you’ve got to go to mass. Our new parish, though, is only have a morning mass, so we went to the vigil mass tonight. At six. Which meant the Boy was ready to go to sleep before mass even began.

The notion of the Immaculate Conception has always confused me, no less now that I’m Catholic. The idea is that, to avoid the “stain of Original Sin” passing on to Jesus, God removed from Mary at her conception original sin. The mechanics of this, as I understand it, involve retroactively applying the salvific nature of her son’s sacrifice to her — which brings about an obvious question: why not just do that to everyone? In the spirit of “fake it until you make it,” I go along with it. But the whole thing leaves me a little off kilter. So, truth be told, does the whole Christian story, and I guess that’s supposed to be the point of it in some sense.

There are so few things we encounter these days that we could call “immaculate.” A newborn child. And I sit here, thinking about what I could add as a second item on that list, and even with the thought of adding a qualifying “perhaps,” I’m stuck. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps that’s what Original Sin is all about. Perhaps it’s human nature. Perhaps Original Sin is human nature. Perhaps it’s not important at 10:50 on a Wednesday.

Part of growing up, I think, is that realization that “immaculate” really doesn’t exist in our world. The natural world is filled with such cruelty, with wasps that plant their eggs in still-living organisms that the larva will literally eat alive — and likely very painfully. Then there are all the natural disasters just waiting to happen, or just happening. Thinking about “immaculate” leads us to think about its opposite, whatever that might be, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps that’s the point.