Saturday, May 17, 2014
Dormition ~ notes on Mary Immaculate
There is a verse in the Te Deum that
has always intrigued me because of the strange choice of words:
when thou tookest upon thee to deliver us, thou didst not despise
the Virgin’s womb.
What’s to despise? Is this just a reflection of
some patriarchal distaste for the female sex? Is there something degrading
about getting that close to a woman? Well, maybe that’s part of it. But what
about this: Mary, Virgin or not, was nobody: an everyday,
unremarkable village girl. The Incarnation could have been accomplished
otherwise. The Godman could have just appeared out of nowhere, with
no private history at all, as in fact He does in the accounts of Mark and
John. But evidently God wanted to make another point about His Son:
He was really human and His sacred humanity was entirely
ordinary, because His Most Holy Mother was entirely ordinary. Her ordinariness is
what God did not despise.
Our art tries to make
her extraordinary – clothed with the sun, with the moon at her feet, an
allusion to the Apocalypse – and that is
appropriate, given what we now think about her Baby, but only as long as we also
remember that this Queen of Heaven was an ordinary person, one of
billions of people unknown to history. She who is exalted is humble
and meek. That is part of the Mystery. Before the Incarnation, she was
of no account. The medieval fondness for depicting her reading a book is all
wrong, because it sets her apart and above other women. But like all Jewish
women, the Mother of God was certainly illiterate, not a scholar. This is
what God did not despise when He came to visit us in
great humility: not womanhood, but ordinariness.
Understanding this, many
modern theologians and scholars come to doubt the dogma of the Virgin Birth:
it’s too much Queen of Heaven and not enough Village Girl. But like the Incarnation, which that doctrine expresses,
the reality is not either/or; it’s both/and, I think.
The One conceived is both human and
divine; His Mother is both ordinary and extraordinary: both Village Girl and Queen of Heaven, both Virgin
and unwed Mother. But part of the supernatural joy is the fact that in this
world, the Queen of Heaven had no status. In fact, the circumstance that makes her
the Queen of Heaven is a disgrace in her own society: a life-threatening
disgrace, but for the unusual righteousness of Joseph.
The Gospel for her feast is her response to the
greeting of her relative, Elizabeth. St. Luke wasn’t there to hear their conversation,
but according to tradition, he visited Mary
in her old age, which would have been when she was living in Ephesus with St.
John the Divine, also according to tradition. There the Evangelist could
have learned private details, such as her recollection of her feelings at the
time, which were feelings of inexpressible joy, expressed in the Magnificat. St. Luke’s record is hard to
beat: joy in the fulfillment of promise and the triumph of the ordinary in the
great judgment that scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
casts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek, fills the
hungry with good things, and sends the rich empty away.
Is it true or is it just
wishful thinking? We cannot say in a way that will convince the world –
but then why should any regime accept the announcement of its own overthrow?
This is part of the hidden aspect of the Gospel proclamation. We may proclaim the
secret of God With Us from the rooftops, but it is still not
heard. Those with ears to hear, however, will notice one remarkable
fact: with the spread of Christianity around the globe, it is safe to say that
there is not a minute in the day in which her words are not repeated somewhere
in the world, at Vespers. And amongst all of her extravagant images, our Lady
offers one particular prophecy that is already objectively fulfilled: Behold,
from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
Our faith is all about the promises of God and their
fulfillment. We expect that which cannot be expected – or even imagined. Just as Mary was asked to
do. That is one reason we regard the Bl. Virgin Mary as the archetype of the
Church. Mary represents the Church in her willingness to believe the
impossible, to expect the fulfillment of God’s promises, to consent to their
fulfillment whatever the cost to her personally, and to help God, voluntarily,
to fulfill them. That will, expectation, and consent are all hallmarks of the
Church.
So also is pregnancy. As
the BVM carried the Godman in her body, so does the Church. Within this Body,
we also conceive the Incarnate God, in all the fullness of His humanity as well
as His divinity, really present in us in the secret chambers
of the inner life of our Divine Liturgy. We also bring Him forth into the
world, where we proclaim the Kingdom of the Word Made Flesh. The Kingdom of His
ancestor David that will have no end.
But we are His Body, also. Within the womb of the Church, we
are formed into a New Creature – humanity in the image of Triune God, Who said
in the Beginning “Let US make humanity in OUR own image.” The One of
Whose image we are is a multipersonal Society, inseparable but unconfused. This
New Creation takes shape in the amniotic waters of Baptism, and struggles
through the travail of centuries – maybe even millennia – to be Born Again, to
be Born Anew, to be Born, as Christ said to Nicodemus, from Above.
For if the Church is the Body of Christ, we are also the World,
the New Creation, the New Heaven and
the New Earth. The Church is firstfruits of the transfigured cosmos.
That is the other way Mary is a figure of the Church: she too represents the
earth, creation, the whole created order, now in obedience and coöperation with
God, instead of rebellion. Like her, the Church is not merely instrumental, but
an end in itself. Mary, the humble provincial girl, is the pinnacle of the
Hebrew religious tradition – the end toward which the entire holy
history had been pointed from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses to
David and the Prophets right up to the Sixth Month in which the Angel Gabriel
was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth.
From ancient times, she has been called “spotless”, amolentos,
bezistlennaya, immaculate. And this refers not only to her
virginity, but to the purity that God nurtured in Israel, preparing humanity to
receive Him. In a way, God couldn’t have come before she was ready.
Or rather, maybe He could have, but no one would have known about it. The human
imagination and will had to be prepared first, for it to matter. That is what
Mary, the Immaculate Mother of God represents. I like to think that any number
of Jewish girls could have fulfilled that role. Mary wasn’t alone. There was
Elizabeth, for example, the joyful recipient of another impossible pregnancy.
But only one of those girls could actually do it. God could choose only one of
them.
Although Mary Immaculate is ancient poetry, the Roman
Catholic dogma of the Immaculate
Conception is an innovation, because in order to accept it one has to accept
the Latin view of Original Sin. Furthermore, it makes Mary metaphysically
unique and unlike the rest of us. But a less juridical and more cosmic view of
her spotlessness involves the process
of preparation that went on for centuries and millennia in the meaningful
history of salvation, beginning with Creation itself and culminating
in that Sixth month in Nazareth, 2000 years ago, when Creation, conscious of
itself and of God, said “YES”. All glory be to God because His Spotless
Mother is exactly like us, not because she is different
from us by special dispensation!
So the BVM represents the religious tradition of Israel and
the Church which is the New Israel and the New Jerusalem. She also represents
the whole Creation: the New Eve, undoing the calamitous disobedience of our
common, mythological mother. But Mary is
NOT a myth. She is the culmination of the history of salvation. But
she is not the conclusion of it. She is a crucial
turning-point, but not the final consummation. She is the Mother of Christ, so
she is the Mother of His earthly Body, but also of His Mystical Body, the
Church. And the Church is destined by God to become the transfigured Creation
she typifies. It is the Mission of the Body of Christ to incorporate the whole
universe, so that God may be All-in-All: the cosmos transfigured, become His
Body.
To say so is not ridiculous triumphalism or cultural imperialism, but we
do well to be careful about proclaiming that we know the content of this Cosmic
New Jerusalem. We do not know. We trust the promise – the promise of the
impossible coming true.
But we will, I think, recognize the contours, if not the
content, of the transfigured cosmos: it will be something like a weak,
inconsequential, vulnerable country girl –
pregnant out of wedlock – enthroned above the cherubim by her Almighty
Son, Who has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, who
has put down the mighty from their
seat and exalted the humble and meek, who has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich empty away.
O higher than the cherubim,
More glorious, beyond compare than
the seraphim,
Who, without spot, bore God the Word,
Very Mother of God, we glorify you!
