Relative to God: Mary & Ourselves
Fr. Donald Macdonald, SMM
The mother of the present Queen of Britain won the affection of the people during World War II, when she with her husband and children chose to stay in the capital city London, at a time when there was nightly and indiscriminate bombing in the city. She could have gone abroad. She could have lived safely in the remote countryside. That she stayed with her people and endured, worried and sympathised with them, registered. As Queen she was above politics. She symbolized the countries which made up the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, but by such behaviour, she became more than a symbol. She was seen as a person in her own right with a husband and family, and people liked what they saw. They could relate to her.
I venture that personal note as I reflect on Our Lady among her contemporaries—ourselves. While Our Lady is a symbol, she is primarily a person. An incarnational faith like Christianity inevitably is involved in ‘the scandal of particularity’. In Mary we refer to a person not an automaton. This is the first problem I have with much contemporary writing on Our Lady. So often it speaks of her as a ‘symbol’, a repository of categories, of which it is said that many properly belong to God, which leaves little trace of her as a person.
Mary: Our Lady of Perpetual Help
The first in a two part series of articles by Father Donald Macdonald, SMM.
A Loose Canon
Sister Elisabeth A. Johnston C.S.J.. writing on ‘Mary and the Female Face of God” (Theological Studies (50) 1989), illustrates this. Hers is a lucid and comprehensive overall view of the current situation. Writing of the attraction that Mary’s motherhood, compassion and nearness have for many, she uses phrases like, “transferring this maternal language back to God” . . . “returning this language back to God to whom it properly belongs. . .”. One feels bound to ask in response; “where did such devotion and the language which gives it expression come from in the first place?’ ‘Where was Mary discovered and by whom?’ ‘Did the devout faithful ‘leave God’ to find her?’ Surely she was discovered by the baptized in and through her Son.
It seems to be implied that Mary is like a loose canon on the deck of the Church, which in the days of ships under sail, meant that a canon
which broke from its moorings, could inflict more damage on a crew in the confined space of a gun-deck, than the canon fire of the enemy. Always unpredictable, it was capable of immense harm.
Over the centuries (and the first extant prayer to Our Lady, the ‘subtuum / we fly to your help . . .’, dates from the third/fourth century, a long time ago), as devotion has grown, Mary seems to have attracted to herself, it is alleged, much that belongs properly to God. In part, this is because some medievals separated mercy from justice in God, and the later Reformation presented a distant God. More particularly, biblical revelation is so masculine—God revealed as Father and Son, calling twelve men . . . – that ‘maternal’ qualities as such, though especially reflective of God as revealed in Scripture, could not be applied so easily to a ‘male’ God. People’s reaction to this, it is said, was to find the qualities of motherhood, tenderness and nearness in Mary not in God. Even the specific role of the Holy Spirit was taken over by her in people’s understanding.
Now, apparently, all such qualities guarded so long by the symbol of Mary can find their proper place in the divine mystery. It is time, “to
allow this imagery to disperse beyond Mary in the direction of the reality of the holy mystery of God” (p.520). Again one asks, ‘where is Mary found if not in the mystery of God as revealed to us?’ Does she exist apart from that?’ Where was she when motherhood, intimacy and compassion drew the Christian to her?’ ‘Are not such qualities intrinsically part of who she is as a woman, immaculately conceived and called by God to be the mother of his Son?’
If there is a problem here, clearly it will not be solved by taking the ‘feminine’ qualities from Mary to return them to God. It only has to be
stated to see how crude this understanding is.
The star role in the film musical is given to the film star with a name, at the box office, while the singing may be done off—camera by an understudy. If it is suggested that the balance is wrong because Our Lady finds herself in a false position, in the lime-light in center stage, where do we stand to find true perspective? If she has risen above her station in life, where can we see her, “relieved of bearing divine imagery”?
True Perspective
The twenty-first century contemporary of Mary viewing her from the perspective of baptism into Christ, has a valid insight into the relationship from within the imagery of the Vine and branches in the fifteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. There we can glimpse our relationships with God, Our Lady and each other. It is revealed there that we share the one organic life in Christ as Vine and branches.
To read there, for example, “Abide in me, and I in you . . . I am the vine, you are the branches . . .” (15.4.5), suggests a personal intimacy
expressed and understood only through knowledge and love. That is the way to the heart of a human being. All are called to that relationship in Christ. Given that as Christian reality, it is evident that apart from Christ we are as lifeless branches.
As symbol, that carries immense weight for anyone wondering what it is to be christened. But to experience in fact, through the insight of faith, something of the depths of its meaning, is to appreciate in wonder the presence that it attempts to convey. To do this effectively, we should receive those words now within the Church as from the Spirit of our risen Lord, who came through a grave to make the relationship those words imply a practical reality. This is not to accommodate Scripture to a meaning it was never meant to carry, but to be aware now of genuinely good news. Given the insight of faith, we are in a new dimension where such symbolism comes alive. It is no longer yesterday’s analogy, but a glimpse of how things are now in Christ. Such is the Christian perspective.
The invitation to make that reality ours is compelling as we are addressed by Christ: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you, abide in my love” (15:9). To seek to know how I am loved in Christ, I must first glimpse some realisation of the Father’s love for his Son -and there are no categories to take that in! But we stay and marvel at where baptism has placed us—“abide in my love.” Wonder, therefore, is the way into baptismal reality. Only then shall we see.
This is given “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (15:11). Once I see who I am and where I am in the love of God in
Christ, it follows that this joy should overflow to others—“that you love one another as I (Jesus) have loved you” (15:12). In so far as Christ is real to me in vine and branches can I attempt to express something of those riches~ “greater love has no one than this, (to) lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends . . .
(15:15:14).
Mary Found in Christ
Here are the categories of immanence, tenderness, recreative energy and liberating power, presumably in their proper places. They may be considered ‘maternal’ categories. They are the properties of God as revealed in Christ. They invite us to an intimacy within a relationship of knowledge and love. They may be expressed in the ‘masculine’ terms of ‘Father and Son’, but what is being offered is unmistakable.
If this ‘masculine’ imagery is off-putting, it is scarcely Mary’s fault. In the providence of God this reality is only possible because of her, when she said ‘Yes’ to God as the Spirit overshadowed her and, in due time, when she brought Jesus into the world. This loving, faithful woman, therefore, has left her mark and her presence on the entire reality of what it is to be baptized. The relationship continues and is to be recognized.
Reflecting on this over centuries, various Church Fathers noted that “the sanctifying intervention of the Spirit, in the Virgin of Nazareth, was a culminating moment in the Spirit’s action in the history of salvation . . . attributed to the work of the Spirit the original holiness of Mary in the Spirit’s intervention, an action that consecrated and made fruitful Mary’s virginity . . . in the mysterious relationship between the Spirit and Mary, an aspect redolent of marriage . . . the sacred character of the Virgin (is) now the permanent dwelling of the Spirit of God . . .” (Marialis Cultus 26). They were convinced that it was from “the Paraclete . . . as from a spring there flowed the fullness of grace and the abundance of gifts that adorned her. Above all (the Fathers) had recourse to the Virgin’s intercession . . . to obtain from the Spirit the capacity for engendering Christ in their own souls . . .” (Marialis Cultus 26).
(To be continued)
