January 1, 1997

Mary, Mother of God

Today, as I said, is the Feast now entitled the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God, so what I'd like to do is continue with what I started talking about on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Remember the reading, also from the Gospel of Luke, showed Mary at the scene of the Annunciation and talked about the centrality of Mary at that point in the church year. Well, again today we're going to focus, in a sense, exclusively on her. I mentioned on the Fourth Sunday of Advent this strange event having something to do with a projected talk on Mary to be given by Rosemary Radford Reuther at a Roman University, which was canceled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They apparently didn't like what she had to say about Mary in the North American culture, but I would like to talk about what she had to say, and perhaps amplify it, because I think it was extremely important.

What she was doing in the course of this talk, which was printed subsequently in another source, was to contrast an alternative view against the kind of classical Marian piety that I grew up with: namely, Mary as the absolute ideal, docile, supine, almost servile figure who was just kind of God's play-thing and was nothing but pure availability to God as if she were just a piece of Plasticene, and therefore moldable in any way. Without exaggeration, that was the ideal . Those of us who are old enough can remember that the central Christian virtue of Roman Catholics was not charity, it was obedience. To obey. I've told this story more than once, but I'll repeat it. Months before ordination, after eight and a half years and three different seminars, the rector of the University of Chicago said to me: "Ronald, if everybody just kept the rules, then we wouldn't have any problem." And that of course was the vision of the way things were to be. The assumption was that the rules were the voice of God and God had exhaustively articulated what She had in mind for people, and that was the end of it. All you had to do was stand at alert, get your marching orders, and then take-off.

Although it was intensified for those of us that were in the seminary, I think that was the general model of Mary that was presented. It was really important because Mary was the archetypal Saint, she was not just like any of the Saints that we have on the walls around us, she was the real thing, she was the quintessential Saint. And so to describe her in that way had enormous consequences, it seems to me, in our understanding of piety and sanctity. What Reuther was attempting to do in that talk was retrieve something having to do with Mary from that very sparse data in the New Testament. This little throw-away line in Galatians is typical: "God sent His Son born of a women, born under the law," and that's it. That's all Paul ever says about Mary: "born of a woman," he doesn't even name her. It's only in the Lucan narrative that we get the Annunciation and the Magnificat, and that's where we get all the Marian stuff that we've got today. So, if there were not the Gospel of Luke, Marian piety would of course take a quite different shape. Of course, it's from that Gospel that we have: "be it done to me according to Your Word." Now that's the archetypal Mary setting up: "just do it to me." Well, what Reuther wants to say is that Luke was saying far more than that. Luke was saying, in an intensely patriarchal world, things that always took great pains to equate the position of men and women by pairing all these little narratives: Zachary, Mary; Anna, Simean,... Over and over, the Parables are all set out in terms of male, female; male, female; male, female... Was that an accident? I don't think so. I mean he simply picked up an assumption made by the Christian movement that finds plastic expression in the same Letters of the Galatians that was read today and says that, in Christ, there is no longer male, nor female; slave, nor free; Greek, nor Barbarian. In other words, the very constituant statuses of the society were now radically altered, and God's intention for bringing everybody together in a non-hierarchical fashion was realized in Christ.

But there is yet another Lucan sub-theme here. On Christmas Day we saw more about this Lucan birth-narrative that is absolutely peculiar to Luke, nobody has anything like it in any of the other Gospels, about the appearance of the shepherds who were, of course, the great marginalized figures of the ancient world. It was to them that there went out the announcement of the birth of Jesus. Luke carries this through if you remember that Jesus' first public words at the synagogue in Capernaum were, according to Luke, from the Book of Isaiah: "The Spirit of God has anointed me to announce Good News to the poor and release their oppression." So this is what Reuther was drawing out of this. This woman, instead of being some nice kind of docile, harmless, and basically ineffectual figure was being high-lighted as a woman who made choices. "Be it done to me" was not some kind of reflex. Here is this woman to whom nobody had paid attention being given this moment and the opportunity to say "Yes." As a woman, nobody had otherwise paid enough attention to her to know if she had ever said yes, no, or maybe. Now this woman can say yes, and it is this woman's yes that becomes typical. No small thing...

Sanctity becomes what? Does sanctity take on another coloration in this light? Absolutely. It becomes what it has always been all through the New Testament and all through the authentic history of the Church. It has become profoundly counter-cultural to say yes to God in the face of all kinds of counter-indications, and sanctity consists of that. Sanctity is not just waiting to take orders from some hierarch. I mean the splendor of some of the women on these walls: Catherine of Sienna, Joan of Arc, Hildegard of Bingam..., all these women who got into considerable amounts of trouble precisely with the Church hierarchy said the yes of their lives to God. I am not trying to glamorize women here, but I'd simply like to make the point that God plays no favorites. God has no favorite gender. We are like one, and it's a pervasive neutral. What God expects of us is responsiveness to the world and what we understand to be the voice of God in the world. In other words, Mary didn't say: "well let me check with my husband to see if it would be all right." "Mary treasured all these things in her heart" is what it says in the Lucan passage for today. Here is a woman that was responsible for reflecting on her own life and on her own situation in the history of salvation, and acting out that reflection. Not that there is some kind of virtuosic one-up-manship, obviously. It is precisely this responsiveness to the world that she enacted. But we who have badly vulgarized the figure of this gallant woman need very much at the beginning of a new year to say: if I really want to be a Saint, must I really feminize myself in the worst possible sense of that term.

Kenneth Woodward gave a big talk a couple of weeks ago on the Feminization of Sanctity; there is also a book out called The Feminization of North American Culture. Which means what? That any kind of stamina, any kind of vigor, any kind of energy is not supposed to be feminine, although that's not what Woodward thought. But this has become the model of religious piety, which piety is not, and which it must not be. And so today at the beginning of the year there are questions: do I really want to be a saint? It is a crucial question. Do I really want my life to be transparent to God, and what is step 2 if I've made that choice? And then I can say "Mary, help us, refuge of sinners, help us," we'll be able to say the Litany of Loretto until our faces fall off, and all of those extraordinary and often glorious titles can resonate with us in our full humanity, which is of course what God calls all of us to do.

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