Lovely Lady Dressed in Blue

I admit it. I have issues with Mary, which is to say I have issues with how she has been portrayed, used, even exploited by “the church” over the millennia. Some of this misuse has been, in my opinion, accidental. The rest of it has been a convenience for the church to subjugate women.

Obviously, Jesus had to have a mother, and, even more obviously, his mother would be an important figure in Christianity. We do not meet Mary very often in Scripture. Luke, that old romantic, gives her a a lot of lines in the birth narrative, including her famous and song-filled visit to Elizabeth. John has her prompting Jesus’ first miracle at Canaan. 

Apart from that, she appears at the Temple where Simeon sings his great nunc dimitus and warns her of her coming sorrow. She is dismissed rather harshly by the pre-pubescent Jesus for worrying about his whereabouts. Then she is referred to parenthetically when Jesus makes his “Nazareth Manifesto” as N.T. Wright calls it, claiming that only those who do the will of God are his family. Then, of course, the faithful Mary appears at the cross watching her child be tortured to death.

From these brief appearances we derive the doctrine that she was a virgin (her whole life long if you ask Roman Catholics), sinless, mild, patient, faithful, and sorrowful. But then she is transformed into the glorified queen of heaven. We presume this glory and the sinlessness that prompts it from her role as the mother of God. There is something about Jesus’ having been made from her flesh that seems to require that Mary be a perfect human lest he be touched by or made from imperfection.

Her passive role in Scripture makes this conclusion easy. She does not quarrel as Peter does, she does  not doubt as does Thomas and she does not jockey for position as do James and John, nor does she grouse about work in the manner of Martha. The conclusion is that she is pure and sinless, preternaturally perfect.

To me this line of thought smacks of magical thinking. Theologians can talk themselves into all kinds of corners and, with Mary, I think they have tied their own hands and have muddled the thinking of generations of Christians, especially Christian women.

We can posit that Mary was the ideal mother because Jesus turned out so well. James, too if you’re Protestant, was exemplary, but her other children may or may not have been. Her marriage with Joseph was wonderful, we assume. But the fact is we just don’t know. 

Partly because of the meager attention she receives in Scripture and even more because the church has forced this ideal of sinless virginity and human perfection on her, we can never know the real Mary. 

Except that we can.

We know what marriage is. We know what giving birth and raising children is like. We know the dailiness of Mary’s life better than those Church fathers want to admit. I believe that their raising her up into glory was a means of dehumanizing her for the purpose of holding up an ideal of female perfection.

We know what it’s like to be young, alone, in trouble; we know what it is to be afraid, to love a spouse, to love a child and to lose the ones you love. Mary is the girl in the juvenile detention center who doesn't know what’s going to happen to her. She’s the girl in love with the football hero, the mother with the stroller and all the parcels spilling out of it. She’s the woman in the ER waiting to hear why her child can’t move her head. She’s me watching my son leave home. She’s me arguing with my daughter about smoking. She’s anyone of us watching our spouses grow old and weaken.

When I was a little girl growing up in the Church of Rome, I loved Mary. She was pretty, dressed in a lovely robe, approachable. I fancied she heard every word I said. Then suddenly, around 8th grade, she faded away. I knew I would disappoint her because I was not her kind of girl any more. Now I’m working my way back. We both love the same man, after all.

I invite you, reader, to make your way back to her acquaintance, too. She is as she has always been, a full-fledged human being given an extraordinary task which she, being full of grace, was just about equal to. She is our sister, our neighbor, our friend, maybe even our priest. We don’t need the church to define Mary. What there is in the New Testament is enough. Read those passages deeply. The Almighty has done great things to her. “They have no wine” she says.