Happy New Year - especially in this year which, for the first time, I start with you as a fellow American. Of course I still have an English accent and sometimes use English words (like queue instead of line), but theoretically we share the same English language. Modern English has roots in Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Norman French, and it is only from around 1400 that it would be recognizable to us rather than seeming like a foreign language. On this Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, I want to recall that one of the most ancient poems in the English language is a celebration of Mary’s motherhood. It has survived in a single manuscript which seems to be a collection of songs of the sort which might have been carried around by a wandering minstrel who provided entertainment in taverns and the houses of the nobility. Now it is preserved in the British Museum in London and has become better known as a Christmas carol, set to music by a number of composers. This is a slightly modernized version:
 
I sing of a maiden
That is matchless,
King of all kings
For her son she chose.
 
He came as still
Where his mother was
As dew in April
That falls on the grass.
 
He came as still
To his mother's bower
As dew in April
That falls on the flower.
 
He came as still
Where his mother lay
As dew in April
That falls on the spray.
 
Mother and maiden
There was never one but she;
Well may such a lady
God's mother be.
The poet emphasizes three times that the conception of Jesus Christ in Mary his mother is “still” - meaning peaceful and silent, not disturbing her virginity. His life began in her as quietly as dew appearing on grass. The fall of dew has been used as an image of God’s silent action since the story of Gideon and the fleece soaked with dew (found in Judges 6:36-40), and we find it again in Eucharistic Prayer II where the priest says: “Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall, so that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The silent coming of the Holy Spirit makes Christ present in the Mass as once it made Him present in the womb of Mary, the “Mother and Maiden” whose prayers we ask for today and on every day of this New Year.