Читать книгу Simply Mary - James Prothero - Страница 6

So, I suspect that I was healed by the prayers of Mary, but of course, there’s no way I can prove that. But then that is always the pattern, is it not? God seems determined to flaunt our need to nail down objective, scientific proof. Revelations are made to those who have ears to hear. There is no mass campaign to prove God’s miraculous powers. If there is any password into the Grace of God, it’s not anything your lips could utter; it’s having an open heart. If God has to put on a show for your insistent demand for proof, he’s not going to bother. Jesus himself performed many signs, but never when they were demanded—only when they were unexpected.2 Even as the Apostle Paul was seeing Christ on the Damascus road, none of his companions heard or saw anything they could make out.3 God doesn’t dance on command. He speaks to whom he will and when he does, we alone may be the only ones to hear.

As for Mary, Gabriel told her his news exactly in a way that would make everyone she cared about, her family and her fiancé, to doubt her. I can just imagine her thinking, “Just great. No one is going to believe me.” I recently saw a painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which I think the best Annunciation scene I’ve seen so far.(see the cover) It is by Henry Ossawa Tanner, and in it Mary is off to the right facing a blinding light to the left. She is dressed in simple, woolen robes. She is dark-skinned with coiling black hair. She is not particularly pretty in any current sense, nor does she have the Amish-girl, Caucasian look of Protestant Marys. All around her are the trappings of a poor woman’s bedroom. Her face is troubled and uncertain, as we know from her own account of the event, conveyed in the Gospel of Luke, that she felt exactly troubled and uncertain. Her fingers are interlocked, as if to keep herself from trembling. She is leaning over, almost bowing before this supernatural presence. This is an artistic portrayal I could believe. Why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one?

Mary obviously told someone, probably Luke himself, about the visit from the Angel Gabriel. In fact, the personal details in the Gospel of Luke not only in the Nativity story, but throughout, makes me suspect that Luke tapped her knowledge throughout the writing. They lack the vagueness of second or third-hand sources. Just think of Luke’s line: “But Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.”4 I can hear Mary tell Luke, “I treasured these things in my heart and pondered them.” How would he possibly know such a thing unless he’d either talked to Mary or someone to whom she’d given a very personal account? Treasuring and pondering are very specific and personal words. A second or third-hand source would most likely lapse into generalization and say something about how Christ’s mother was affected by events. But we get specific words that ring with the personal admission. The line itself is acknowledgment of how personal this all was to her. Much of the other detail in Luke’s Gospel has the ring of first-hand witness. I think there was a time and a place, perhaps in Ephesus, where Luke sat down with Mary and she told him what she remembered. And he used it in his Gospel. I’ve always thought of Luke’s Gospel as The Gospel of Mary.

I said before that I was unqualified. But that’s not strictly true. Certainly, though I took a few seminary classes, I’m not a Bible scholar, nor a theologian. By training I’m a literary critic. And that is how I will approach these texts—as texts that can be examined in the light of the times they were written. C.S. Lewis argues that one of the best indicators that the Gospel accounts are true are the amateurish way they are put together. They’re too sloppy to have been anything but reporting by their amazed amateur authors. Those authors were clearly unqualified. But that’s just the thing: God seems to love to select the unqualified. Look at Mary. Would any of us have picked a farmer’s daughter from a nowhere corner of a conquered country? So my approach is twofold: I look at texts as reportage from which we can extrapolate subtle facts. And secondly, I insist that this reportage is about real people, who act like real people do. Thus, Luke knows far too much about things that only Mary would have known, and therefore I conclude that Luke at some point had a long talk with Mary. But enough of this. Back to Mary.

Let us return to the moment, as Tanner’s painting portrays, Mary sat startled, and listened to this supernatural visitor. I suspect she didn’t run right away and tell her mother and father, Joachim and Ana, their names by tradition. Would you have believed your teenage daughter if she’d broken into your room and announced she’d seen an angel and was pregnant with the Son of God? More likely you’d get up and check to see if she’d gotten into the liquor closet. Then, as now, we are so accustomed to think that the humdrum pattern of our existence is rock-bottom reality, that we are rather confused by the miraculous on the rare occasion it hits us in the face.

In looking for a really solid book on Mary, I have looked at the images that artists have projected over the centuries. Mostly, unlike Tanner, they have painted Mary in their own image, conforming to their own image of perfection. So, Mary is always portrayed as the ideal of attractiveness by the standards of the day and the culture, and invariably she is the same race as the artist, her Jewishness being brushed aside. Even the Protestant images of Mary-the-Amish-girl make her sleepy and content, but always tremendously pretty and white.

And I could see all around me the representations of Mary in art. She is always calm. Most of the time she is looking away, or simply up at the sky. In some of the older Greek icons, she looks you straight in the eyes with a passionless, poker-face, like she just beat your full house with a straight flush. She is also always decked out either puritanically neat and trim—the way Protestants prefer to visualize her—or she is covered with gold and jewels, any one single gem of which would be worth more than all the wealth in her village, Nazareth. This is the way Catholics and the Orthodox like to see her. The puritanical, Protestant Mary always looks like a good girl, and here in America, her face tones are lightened and her hair is often shaded brown, in order to make her seem like a white girl.

However, European art beat us Americans to presenting Mary as a very white, European-looking girl, as in the many portraits of her as Madonna and Child. In them she most often looks a little sleepy, very unworried and relaxed, or at least I believe that to have been the artist’s intention. I am a painter myself and I would never take on the challenge of trying to paint Mary. For how do you portray in the muscles of the face the quality of spiritual intensity? Certain shameless wags have said of the Renaissance pictures of the Virgin Mary that she looked like she had a bad case of gas more than she looked spiritual. I am afraid I can quite see their point. The Protestant Virgin Marys are no better; they tend to look bored or a little sleepy, like they were on sedatives.

In Latin America, she is Our Lady of Guadalupe and her selling point was that she appeared like a First Nations young woman, a Native American girl. This too seems a projection. But of all the projections out there, this one must be closer to the truth. A dark-skinned, black-haired Palestinian girl would be my model were I to dare to paint Mary. Native American is close, though the facial bone structure is different between Native America and the Middle East.

What strikes me in all of this is how much when we think we’re looking through a window at something outside of us, we unconsciously turn that window into a mirror, so that what we see outside of us is more likely just . . . us.

Mary I take to have been, and to still be a woman who prefers to peer through clean windows and shows no interest in mirrors.

Scott Hahn’s book Hail Holy Queen was very helpful, but his agenda was to explain to Protestants why Catholics were so in love with the Virgin Mary. Sadly, it wasn’t what I was looking for. Then I thought I’d found the book on Mary that I needed. It was Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother by Lesley Hazleton. Hazleton started off so well, acquainting the reader with the everyday life of a girl in Galilee in the first century. She had obviously done some real research, and was familiar with Israel and the history of the area. But Hazleton wrote from the perspective of the Jewish faith, and this only faintly. She explained how our name for Mary comes from the Hebrew name, Maryam, a form of Miriam, a name possibly meaning “bitterness”. Our current “Mary” is a lift of the name as it appears in two forms in the New Testament Greek, either “Maryam” or “Maria.”

But back to Hazleton, what began well, turned into a speculation of how Maryam of Nazareth really was a misunderstood herbal healer who taught herbal healing to her son, so that he could perform healings that others considered miracles. In the end, Hazleton’s Mary is a New-Age spiritual pilgrim. Hazelton turns another window turned into a mirror. I say this meaning no disrespect to our Jewish brothers and sisters. And if Jews are skeptical of Christ, it may have something to do with the appalling and homicidal way Christians have treated them over the last few centuries. The Holocaust was merely the frosting on a deadly cake of centuries of persecution. G.K. Chesterton said that the biggest argument against Christianity is Christians. For Jews, this has been tragically and lethally true for a very long time.

And it is even sadder when we think that this gilded Catholic or Orthodox Madonna, or this puritanical, white-skinned, virgin Mother of Protestant tradition, was and is actually a Jewish girl. Her son was and is still Jewish too. I have since found other books that have helped me. Sally Cunneen’s A Search for Mary: The Woman and the Symbol was almost the book I needed. It provides much useful and objective information. It lacked but one thing: it was not written from a standpoint of faith.

But even so, I wasn’t sure why Hazleton was writing. If Jesus of Nazareth, Jeshua of Nazareth if you will, was not the Messiah, the Christ, then, as C.S. Lewis has argued, he was a lunatic, or a fantastically gifted con-man. In either case, if Maryam of Nazareth is not the Mother of Christ, why should we have any interest in her at all? Why bother? Do we normally study the mothers of lunatics and con-men?

It is when the miraculous touches a rude, simple farm-girl, making her the Mother of God Incarnate, that we first are intrigued. Her? That simple country-bumpkin with the straw in her uncombed, long, straight black hair? Her? Still smelling like the dung she just shoveled out of the stalls? Not Maryam! She’s destined for some working man’s wife, driving away whatever youthful beauty she might possess with the brutal life of woman’s work in a poor agricultural village, popping out babies until childbirth or disease catch her and her life flutters out like a snuffed candle.

But I have to assume that there was a quality in this dark-skinned girl raking out the stalls that the Creator of the Universe, the God of Israel found compelling, that he chose her from all the young women ever born to humankind across all the millennia. To God, she was and is one women in trillions. To be chosen the vehicle by which the Creator invaded his own creation—the thought is beyond my grasp. But unlike Hazleton, I must write from a standpoint of faith. Otherwise, why bother? If you want a cold, scientific, or even New Age, or perhaps militant-feminist Mary, a “Historical Mary,” who can explain-away all the miraculous elements, Hazleton’s book awaits you. You can stop reading this book right now. If you just want responsible information, I recommend Cunneen’s book. I have been touched by miracle. I have to write from that place.

But as I said, I have to assume that there was a quality in this dark-skinned girl that Almighty God chose. What would it look like? I dare not try to paint it. I’m not sure I could improve on the Italian Renaissance and their gassy Madonnas, nor our current crop of Protestant, sedated Marys. But I do suspect that it would be surprising to us, not what we would expect. If we walked into a room with Jesus’ family, un-introduced, we probably couldn’t pick her out. We’d either be looking for the Protestant Virgin, whom to our minds would look faintly Amish, or the Catholic and Orthodox Blessed Virgin, who would overwhelm everyone in the room with her golden glow and opulent clothes. We’d probably all miss the dark girl in the corner, talking to her friends, wearing plain, undyed woolen robes. I like her in blue, as all the pictures portray, but dye was for rich people—poor people like Mary’s family used their money to buy food, and there was never enough for that. Whatever they might spare financially was sucked up by Roman taxes. Rich girls wore dyed robes. If the Virgin Mary ever had blue robes, it was and is only in Heaven. Perhaps Mary is a little distracted, or perhaps looking at all the people in the room with love, but at the same time all too aware of what makes a small town odious: the petty jealousies, the gossip, and the pride. There would be a sadness in her eye to see this all around her. She would not stand out, nor be primly puritanical. She would just be, to our eyes, yet another poor young woman among her family.

So, imagine how much faith it took for her to say yes to the angel, knowing full well that an unwed mother-to-be might be stoned by those who follow rules without love. It would mean she would have to stand out for once. And I suspect she was more of an introvert. This was cruelly hard for her, but she took it on. I think you would see determination in her face. You may not notice her, but you’d think twice about messing with her. Intensity, not sleepiness or gassiness is the quality that emanates from her. Her son “set his face” to go to Jerusalem, crucifixion and death.5 We have to think, especially with the Spirit of God for a father, that the genetic side of Our Lord came from Mary. I tend to think that she too could “set her face” to do something, including risk her life to assent to be an unwed mother for God. I think she was—and still is, very formidable. But how to portray that in art without making her look like she just missed her bus and was ticked off about it? Well, that’s the hard part. Human emotions are many and varied and telling a story in paint by a face could have many interpretations. If we had spent any time with Mary during her life here, I think we would find that she surprised us at every turn; we would feel that we could never get to the bottom of her. And we’d be right.

Why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one?

Why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one? And here I immediately come perilously close to the minefield of Protestant versus Catholic. Protestant artists, writers, and theologians view Mary as a mere woman, a sinner like the rest of us, though probably better than most, chosen to bear the Son of God. Catholics by official dogma, hold Mary to have been “immaculately conceived”, without sin, and assumed into Heaven at death. The Orthodox agree with them. Much of that gassy Renaissance art was meant to portray a perfect, superhuman, and blonde-north-Italian Mary. And even though my Protestant friends do not hold to the concept of immaculate conception, they still portray her as patient, silent, and supportive of her son. I don’t wish to even try to weigh in on one side or another in this issue. I would rather explore why we have such a fissure in world Christianity over a peasant girl from Nazareth, and what we do actually know or can surmise.

But I have to get back to my question: why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one? The question may seem to be pointed squarely at Catholics, but the Protestant Mary is rather super in her own different way. The Protestant problem with the Catholic veneration of Mary, and “Mariology” is that they fear it is heresy, if not idolatry. They believe that Catholics have made Mary the fourth member of the Trinity, a goddess. Certainly, all the Orthodox and Catholic art with a glowing, gilded Virgin Mary, heaped up with jewels leaves this impression on Protestants, which may explain why they always go out of their way to portray her in very modest and plain first-century costume. I would say the Protestant portrayals were more accurate if they didn’t try so hard to make Mary look Caucasian. In either case, we’re taking a country girl from Nazareth and turning her into something far more. But I don’t mean to laugh at either my Catholic, Protestant, nor Orthodox sisters and brothers. I think the answer is that we all sense there is something special to this girl, beyond just who her son is. And our art reflects our understanding. If Catholic and Orthodox Marys are glowing and jewel-bedecked, it is merely the clumsy way of the artist trying to portray what paint can never portray, the inner qualities of the woman. With my Protestant sisters and brothers, I have to hold that Mary was no goddess. And the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach that she’s not, even if in some less developed parts of the world, syncretism has set in, and festivals once held for goddesses are now held for the Virgin Mary. It seems to me that we are all grasping after something, in very awkward ways that reflect our own cultures more than we’d like to admit. We are all trying to grasp the something special in this unremarkable peasant girl. It’s a puzzle.

And the biggest piece of the puzzle is that she won’t leave us alone.

But more on that point in separate chapters. In the meanwhile, what do we know or think we know about her life?

The Protevangelium of James and other biographies

Somewhere around 145 CE someone, pretending to be the James who wrote the New Testament letter, wrote the Gospel of James. It contains a story of Jesus’s youth and before that, Mary’s. Most of what it claims is hard to believe, not because I distrust the supernatural, but because it doesn’t ring true. Test the spirits. In fact, some elements are so incredible and so out of consonance with the real Gospel, that it reads like somebody’s comic satire. In this writing, Mary is born and raised exactly like Samuel in the Old Testament. She is the result of the prayers of a barren mother. She is presented at the Temple at age 3 and grows up a temple virgin. Though the united church of the first millennium condemned this book as not credible, its general pattern found its way into the writings of other mystics over the centuries on Mary. Maximus the Confessor writes a similar glowing story of a Mary who is superhuman and unnaturally pious. A visionary nun named Catherine of Emmerich did much the same in the Middle Ages. In all these stories, Mary is far beyond human. She spends all her time in meditation and prayer, unmoving, hands palm together, eyes closed, almost a perfect female Buddha. One wonders if she moved to eat, to relieve herself. Did she bother to breathe? I mean no irreverence, but I cannot believe in such a person. That is a clumsy cartoon of holiness, not holiness itself.

One version has her not only a Temple virgin, but living in the Holy of Holies, that place in the Temple where only the High Priest went, and him only once a year. I understand the symbolism in this: God was extremely present in the Holy of Holies and in the womb of Mary. I still don’t think Jewish priests are going to let a small girl into the Holy of Holies, far beyond the Court of Women, never mind that she’s not even a priest, but of the family of David, and therefore of the tribe of Judah, and not Levi, as priests were.

For anyone who is a skeptic, these tales are not helpful, for it would be easy to conclude by looking at these that the Gospel itself was the fabrication of pious fantasy and extremism. Even the most basic research shows it up. One internet site I easily found cast some interesting light on the whole idea of Mary being raised in the Temple:

Did the Herodian Temple have virgins? The answer is almost certainly no. The only real support for Jewish temple virgins is found in Roman Catholic writings in support of the Catholic doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. This doctrine has no basis in the canonical scriptures, but only in non-canonical early writings, most of which were influenced or produced by the Essenes and similar mystical and ascetic quasi-Christians sects that existed in the first few centuries of the Christian era. Jewish scholars and historians, by contrast, give a definitive “no” to the question of whether there were Jewish temple virgins.

But included in this was something I thought far more important.

Unlike in Catholicism, in Judaism marriage is considered the most holy state, pursuant to the first commandment of God given in the Hebrew Bible: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). In Judaism[,] celibacy is frowned upon and even considered sinful. To have consecrated virgins at the Temple would violate Jewish sacred law and custom. No Jewish writings, ancient or modern, provide any support for the idea that there were temple virgins at the Temple in Jerusalem. (StackExchange: Christianity)

And here I am going to step squarely into the minefield. Both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have come down believing that Mary was ever-virgin, and between them they constitute the vast majority of the world’s Christians. Protestants doubt this, probably because part of the Protestant revolution was a rejection of the perpetual celibacy of priests and monastics, modeled in part on this idea that the Mother of God in her excessive purity, was ever-virgin.

And this goes back to my first question: why do we need Mary to be superhuman?

The answer, I submit, is both simple and intrinsically confused. We deck Mary with gold and diamonds, and also we contemplate theological formulas like immaculately conceived, and ever-virgin, for the same reason. We know no other way to paint a quality we cannot easily grasp in words.

Holiness.

Wait, says the reader. Are you telling me she was sinless all her life? Are you coming down on the side of immaculate conception and ever-virginity? Are you, O writer, siding with the Catholics and the Orthodox against the Protestants? Minefield again.

No, I’m not. I have left my jury out on those questions, mainly because though I point out the words and images we wrap around Mary, and their weakness, I doubt I’m any better or wiser, that I can substitute any better. I want to clarify, not just replace the images. What I do hold is that something—holy—I’m sorry, but there just isn’t any other word that will do; something holy hangs about her both in the past and the present. And I think she had this quality, though I doubt the formulas of immaculate conception and ever-virginity. I have to wonder if the belief in perpetual virginity isn’t theologically not too different from the work of those Italian Renaissance painters who in their quest for portraying beauty and spiritual depth, ended up making Mary look northern-Italian, blond, and a bit gassy. We exaggerate, as the artists did, to portray something we can’t quite name. For some people, understanding how Mary is so pro-active in our lives needs her to be rather unique. After all, as a feminist might point out, a woman who is celibate is a woman who is not ruled by a man. Even our feminine super-heroes, like Wonder Woman, stay unattached. And those first century Christians were often Greeks who were used to very moral and self-possessed goddesses, like Artemis and Athene, being virgins. Virginity was a symbol of feminine strength and independence.

I hope to avoid the trap of taking the Protestant or the Catholic/Orthodox point of view myself, and the only way I can do that is to only claim to know what I can extrapolate from what we do know, or to talk of what others have witnessed.

Going back to the Gospel of James that I mentioned above, it is rife with absurdities that smack of Manichaee and Gnostic thought: Ana and Joachim conceive Mary at a distance of many miles, as Joachim has gone out into the desert for 40 days to pray about his childlessness. (Some later accounts have the conception as a result of the couple kissing). When Mary finally does give birth to the Lord Jesus, Joseph is away looking for a midwife, and when he returns the baby Jesus is lying there, clean as a whistle, no blood or amniotic fluid around, and Mary has birthed him without pain and miraculously teleported him out of her womb. Perhaps she called up to the Enterprise and had Scotty beam Jesus out of the womb. I know that sounds absurd, but no more absurd than the Gospel of James itself. It reads on one hand as if it were a ribald satire written by Monty Python, and on the other hand like the tale of a goddess who hovers above human suffering, untouched. And the reason for all this absurdity is the silly conviction that Mary must remain a virgin at all costs. The Manichaee/Gnostic sentiment is so strong in this ancient document that we are told that after the birth, Mary was “intact.” In plain language, the birth of her son had not split her hymen and it is implied that nothing ever, ever did.

None of this makes any sense at all except for the Manichaee and Gnostic concept, the primitive human concept that sex and spiritual power are mutually exclusive. The Apostle Paul didn’t believe it.6

That’s a human idea.

It’s not God’s idea.

Which is why I don’t see why Mary cannot have been sexually active with her husband after Jesus’ birth and still have an aura of holiness about her. Why does she need to be ever-virgin, except for the notion that sex saps spiritual power? And that brings me to the second reason. As the quote above says, for the Jews, the holiest state was matrimony. This would have been Mary’s mindset. Why should she try to remain a virgin in a married household? And third, in the Jewish understanding of the time, not only the marriage feast, but the sexual consummation were necessary for a marriage to have taken place. I can understand Joseph waiting till Mary was no longer pregnant, but what reason would he have to wait after that? To be called her ‘husband’ as scripture does, is to say that they were man and wife in the flesh, given the Jewish meaning of the word.

It was Roman Empire era sect called the Manichaees who thought life-long virginity equaled holiness. It was also a Gnostic idea, and they got it from the Docetists, who believed Jesus was too holy to ever have had human flesh. All these groups thought that the human body, and therefore sex, were inherently evil, while the spiritual side was inherently good. And though the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches officially declare sex within marriage to be a good and holy thing, they both have echoes of the Manichaee/Gnostic beliefs, mainly in the stories of the saints, who not only have sexual self-control, a long-standing Christian virtue, but are totally free of all sexuality. Thus, we hear of this or that saint, followed by “virgin”, as if it was a credit to them that they did not commit the sin of having sex.

It is a curious thing how this contradiction in church teaching versus popular perception arose. The rise of monasticism led to the logical mistake that celibacy was a holier state. So as Mary receives more and more attention with the theological debates of the 300s and 400s, Mary has to be ever-virgin in order to have been holy enough to be the mother of Christ at all. More than this, a form of Christianity that believed that Jesus was just a man, son of Joseph and Mary, called “Arianism”, became very popular for a while, and threatened to drown “catholic” Christianity, that is Christianity as we know it today. In those hot debates it was either Mary was never a virgin or forever a virgin. All nuance was dismissed and people faced off on extreme sides of the issue. Anger makes people simplify and oppose.

The Middle Ages in many cases moved rituals that had once been worship of pagan virgin goddesses, almost unchanged into veneration of Mary. That’s how we got the glowing Madonna and we lost the country girl from Nazareth. Though I should point out that Protestants with their puritanism didn’t do a whole lot better when it came to avoiding the Manichaee belief in the wickedness of human flesh and the embrace of an extreme asceticism.

I agree with the Jewish position quoted above: God made married partners to join in fleshly union and declared it good. Even in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul calls believers to whatever life God has ordained for them, celibate or family. Neither is superior nor inferior—just different. Yes, one might dedicate oneself to God and never marry, as monks and nuns do. But that is about focusing one’s life, not about sex being somehow evil or spiritually inferior. Too many people fail to see this distinction. And making Mary of Nazareth into some super-virgin with virgin super-spiritual-powers is a blurring of the truth. A think our Protestant sisters and brothers have a point: we do the truth and Mary herself no favors by effectively making her a goddess.

But on the Other Hand . . . .

She is the Theotokos, the God-bearer. There is no getting away from that. The Orthodox, like their Catholic sisters and brothers, stand by this, as they do her ever-virginity. So, once again, I’m dancing here in double-heresy, from both sides of my faith. I must be one of those crazy Anglicans.

Part of the Protestant problem with this is the rejection of asking prayers of the dead who are with Christ, that is, the saints. Their rejection of this is understandable, given how badly this belief was abused by the time of the Renaissance. Phony saint’s relics were a major market in the Middle Ages, as Chaucer likes to satirize in his Canterbury Tales. And there are still places in the world where pagan festivals have been turned into saints’ festivals with very little difference. For some peoples of the world, the saints are seen to be minor gods, and this Protestants find offensive. I don’t blame them. But it may be another case in history (and there are many) where we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. What the Catholic and Orthodox churches actually teach is that those who have gone to be with the Lord, through the medium of the Holy Spirit, can still pray for us. This belief is known as “the Communion of Saints.” And just as I might ask for the prayers of someone I feel is close to God in preference, so the saints are close to God. You can argue with it, but if you take the time to talk to enough people who do it, like my heart healing, it is a mystery why so many prayers have been answered this way.

And face it, to Bernadette at Lourdes, Mary said, “I am the immaculate conception.” I don’t see why she needs to be, but then most things God does I cannot claim to understand. If I’m going to credit my small visitation, I can hardly throw rocks at Bernadette. As I said above, I wonder if some of our theological language like “immaculate conception” really is a near miss or a symbol for the reality. I have little problem with the immaculate part; what I can’t accept is the conception part. This immaculately conceived, ever-virgin vision of Mary is of a detached woman, if she’s really a woman in any sense that we know, born perfect, living in meditative bliss, at least if the paintings are to be believed, giving birth by teleportation and then topping it all off with turning her husband’s home into a convent for her and a monastery for him. And she does this in the face of all the Jewish teaching she’s grown up with, that a husband and wife should become one flesh.

I cannot believe she was and is that detached. And I cannot believe that for at least two reasons. First, she was promised a sword in her soul. She did not have an easy life. And second, like many who have experienced great pain and tragedy, her empathy for those who are poor and suffering is born of her own poverty and suffering. The book of Hebrews says of her son: “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”7 If the eternal Son of God had to learn obedience from suffering, why should his mother, Mary, escape the common suffering of humanity and live on a cloud of perfection? These things don’t happen abra-cadabra Poof! and all of a sudden Mary knows about empathy. Her Son, our Lord, was not spared pain, nor did he seek to avoid it. Why should she float effortlessly above the dirt and blood and hunger? Some people think that’s what holiness looks like. But we should know better. Her son, our Lord, exhibited holiness by feeding the hungry and healing the sick, not by sitting in some permanent, painless meditative state. As did he, so I have to believe, so did she.

So I believe Mary’s vast empathy, which is a common element in all her later appearances, came the hard way. I believe she became immaculate, but the way most of us grow, through pain. Mary paid her dues and it became holiness for her. This is the grace she was given, the grace that fills her. And if she likes to appear these days to poor children and children out watching flocks, that may have something to do with Mary the little poor girl in the hills around Nazareth, watching flocks. Those are her kind of people. And Simeon promised that a sword would pierce her heart and soul. But I believe this was more than witnessing the horrible execution of her son; this was all her life. Still, still, I am convinced that an unusual grace was and is granted to her, who knows, perhaps at birth. And she doesn’t need to be ever-virgin for this to be true.

In the end, I’m one of those crazy Anglicans, asking questions and reluctant to queue up in anyone’s pre-set line of march. So, if you will, bear with me. I want to do what I hoped Hazleton and Cunneen had done: through the eyes of faith, I want to go through the life of Mary, minus all the unbelievable, gassy spirituality of writers like Catherine of Emmerich and Maximus, and really explore who this first-century peasant woman had to be from what we know, and how that expanded into the woman who just doesn’t seem to want to leave us alone, and hasn’t taken her death as a halt on her activity on this small planet. I hope that in doing so, those who have rejected her in their minds, might find a way to see her at work in the world without all that imagery and theology that make her look like some disconnected goddess, and instead see her as a woman, and all that comes with being a woman.

I realize this is a rather odd sort of biography, which is why these are meditations, and not a claim to know that everything I’m about to propose is historical fact. For one thing, most of my assertions are speculation based on what we do know, and I do not pretend they are more. Except for Herod’s land grab, most of this cannot be proven from the written record, apart from the Bible. But I am extrapolating from two sources. First, we know much about the personality of Mary’s son, the Son of God. And since all his human DNA came from Mary, I think we can assume much of his behavior came from her as well. As a father myself, I have seen proof in my daughter that some behavior is genetic. So I am assuming that Jesus acted a whole lot like his mother. The second thing that makes this odd is that I am not trying to portray too many day-to-day events. Sholem Asch has written a biographical novel, titled Mary, but neither is that what I’m trying to do here. I am taking points from what we know of history and archaeology, and what we know of Jesus, and the “mere Christianity” as Lewis called it, the common beliefs of all the branches of the church, and trying to find the real woman there, who lives now in Heaven and seems so very active in our world. Throw the “feminist” word at me if you like, but women are equal to men, (on the occasions when they’re not superior) in spite of the convictions of our ancestors that they were not, and Mary has shown herself to be an incredible and triumphant woman. Got that? Woman. Not a glowing female Buddha or a subservient and silent kitchen-worker-good-girl. Not Northern-Italian nor Amish. Jewish. Woman. Dark-skinned. Poor. Incredible. Woman.

I want to write about Mary from a vantage point of faith, without the symbolic hyperbole that makes her less a real woman and more a glowing, feminine Buddha. If Mary is first among women, first, she was and is, a woman.

2. Matthew 12:38,39

3. Acts 9:3-9

4. Luke 2:19

5. Luke 9:51

6. 1 Corinthians 7:5

7. Hebrews 5:8