Fourth Sunday of Advent, 1996

A feather on the breath of God

If somebody had told me five years ago that Mary was going to be on the cover of Time Magazine I would have been querulous at least. And, if they said she was going to take up two pages of the religious section of the most recent issue of Time, my wonderment would have increased... It seems that Mary, or at least the prominence that Mary had in the Church where she seemed to be the touch-stone of Catholic orthodoxy, has certainly altered in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and a whole bunch of other things. But, just like angels got rehabilitated two or three years ago, now we’re in the process of rehabilitating Mary. But the question is, of course, what Mary are we rehabilitating? And it’s an urgent question because Mary is presented to us in these readings today as the proximate figure in the preparation for Christmas. Just as a context for answering that question, or attempting to answer that question, I’d like to suggest two other facts which I think are very illuminating.

Mary has been appearing all over the place lately, as some people believe, on bathroom floors, on the plaster in the back of some church in Australia--she’s all over. And one may wonder what has excited all this activity, if that’s what it is. Of course the most noticeable recent event is this business in the former Yugoslavia, Metagorgi, where thousands, lots of them Canadians, go over there in the midst of war to go and see that place where Mary has appeared to these teenagers with astonishing regularity. Metagorgi has become a major pilgrimage site. So here we are in a town in the former Yugoslavia, and there’s war going on like mad--and here’s Mary, at least in the view of some people. About a year and a half ago there was a town just north of Metagorgi which was a Moslem town and there were all kinds of people, especially women and children, who were starving in that Moslem town. Some of the good ladies of Metagorgi, when they had heard that the UN high-commission, or the Red Cross, was sending a transport of food relief to those Moslems, went and kneeled in the middle of the high-way saying their Rosaries and telling Mary to keep these buses and trucks from going to feed these starving Moslem women... It’s a source of wonderment, I think, for Mary has been invoked in that context by that group of people for that reason.

Two years ago, Rosemary Radford, whom some of you may know, she’s been teaching at the Garret Theological School at North Western University outside of Chicago for years and years..., she’s a Roman Catholic Theologian in this Methodist seminary..., she was invited by one of the Catholic Universities to give a talk on Marian Culture in North America and then, when the congregation for the faith found out that she had been invited, they cancelled her appearance... One of the newspapers in the States, however, published the talk she was going to give. The talk basically had to do with the very issue that I’ve suggested is a really pressing theological issue: What Mary are we talking about? Is it the Mary of Popular Devotion; the Mary of the Sororal Mother Novena, which many of us sweated through for years and years, "nail my heart to your feet" is a line from that set of devotions that I will never forget...; Mary of the Scapular; the Blue Army; the Mary of Mary-like Dresses, you might recall that phenomenon where dresses had to be up to your neck to be properly "Mary-like..."

Well, what I would like to propose, and I don’t think this is just in the name of political correctness, is that there is a drastic malformation of the figure of Mary as we get her out of Scripture--and that’s the only place we know anything about her. Let me read this part of the Scriptural passage which is attributed to Mary, she probably did not say this but we can assume that when Luke created this little song that he did it as he understood it--in faithful witness to the kind of character Mary was: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour because He has looked with favour on the lowliness of His servants, and the Mighty has done many great things for me, and Holy is his name, He has filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich away empty, He has deposed the mighty from their throne and raised up the lowly"

That’s the Magnificat... What I’m suggesting is that the Mary I grew up with, the Mary of Louis de Monteforte, the Mary who is the neck of the Mediatrix of all Graces, the Mary of Mary-like Dresses, the Mary.. who was sexually fixated...,is not the Mary that we get out of the New Testament.

First of all, she is becoming the crucial agent in what we believe to be god’s intention for the salvation of humanity. Just as we had John the Baptist more remotely last week, now we have Mary. It’s very extraordinary. It is not just the Mary as the mother of an idealised, orphaned man, as our present Pope is, who lost his mother when he was a little kid, or Mary as part of the Papal Crest...We’re not just talking about maternal tenderness here; we’re talking about a quite astonishingly free woman who in the course of being addressed by God precisely exercised her freedom. And, as a good Jew, she knew what that was about, and what she was exercising her freedom on behalf of was precisely this same prophetic thing of filling the hungry with good things, sending the rich away empty, exalting the lowly, putting down the mighty, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... Why?--With the view of what I said last week in the context of John’s preaching; to bringing us all together. Because if the people on the margins are not in the margins anymore, then what we have is a real human community.

It is really important, I think, that just a couple of days before Christmas to rethink what this woman is about and why she is notable. And, I think, not only has Christmas been sunk, for all practical purposes, in a sea of commercialism--that battle has been long-lost, we don’t even have to worry about it..., somebody from Princeton University Press has published a book on the subject even, so notable is it that even the elevated ones in the Academy can deign to notice this interesting cultural phenomenon down here, we can be pretty sure that it was a fait accompli a long time ago... I think the greater danger, therefore, for us is one of sentimentalising this woman. I mean that in simply concentrating on all those warm and mothering images that we get out of the glorious repertoire of Christmas Hymns and Carol singing we forget what this woman wants, which is to take care of little kids. Why? So that little kids can grow up to be free enough to connect with all the other people, that’s why. We just keep stopping too soon, over and over. It’s just like "family values." What is the fundamental family value? To teach a kid to be brave enough to tell the truth all the time, that’s the primary family value, and therefore to be honest with other human beings so they can be known as loveable, and to be able to love other people who are also honest. If it’s not that, then what in God’s name are we doing? It’s become simply what all the great atheists have said: Christianity becomes merely a form of self-indulgence. We have to be in the name of our own integrity, be aware, not just of the fact that Wal-Mart is now more important than Jesus is, but that we have not had our brains emulsified and our hearts and our eyes blinded to the real world that we occupy... If Christmas is a time when we just walk out of the world to some rock-candy mountainland instead of coming to the point where we have the courage to really look at the world in its fullest... and seek to connect with it, then, you know, where are we, and what are we really?

So when we pray "Hail Mary..., Hail Mary..." we’re talking about this woman who stood very clearly in the Jewish tradition, and in the prophetic tradition, as a woman who’s God was not the God of, simply, woolly lambs and cute domesticated shepherds, but a God of the rough and tumble of human life who does become, finally, in that glorious metaphor of Hildegaard de Bingam "a feather on the breath of God." And this is the last thing that I’d like to suggest: Mary was a feather on the breath of God. But what does it mean to a feather on the breath of God?--To be denatured?--To become some kind of sentimental icon which just becomes an escape route for us because life becomes too hard and too brutal some times? Well, no. To be a feather on the breath of God means to be absolutely what Jesus was: an agent to bring us to each other..., to be utterly responsive to every impulse of grace, which is never an impulse to escape from the world that god has made, ...and that we have mis-made... To be a feather on the breath of God means to be co-agent with God in remaking the world... And that’s what Christmas is supposed to be about.

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