There is more to Mary
The current issue of NCR features an editorial entitled ' Seeking the Fullness of Mary '. In it the author expresses a desire to enlarge on the universal imagery of the Divine Feminine as expressed in the experience of Catholic devotion. Fr. Andrew Greeley has written an extraordinary exposition on this subject titled ' The Mary Myth '. He goes into the anthropological roots of the Feminine as Divine Image and gives compelling evidence for its value as a balance to the masculine dominance in place in the Church today.
A quote from Chapter 5 ' Madonna ; Dei Mater Alma '
' The Mary Myth is not the only one that can provide a restructuring of perceptions and illumination and direction to respond to the critical issues of our day. There may well be other symbols that work just as well or perhaps even better. Still, if we are going to save the earth, it damn well better become someone's garden.
As we try to sort out the meaning of masculinity and femininity in an era that is rethinking sex roles, Mary may well be the best available argument for the androgynous personality, the personality that combines the essence of each sex. For if God is androgynous-- and that's what the mother goddesses reveal to us-- then it is alright for humankind to be androgynous. In principle, almost any one of the female deities could underwritethe upgrading of women. There is no particular reason why it has to be Mary. But she is the only mother goddess currently available. Astarte, Lilith, Demeter, Isis, Ishtar , Nut, Kali, Coatlicue, Rati, Ceres, Tlazoltoatl-- that crowd -- are not around much these days. You might not like Mary particularly, but if you want someone to convey the idea that God is androgynous, she is about all you have ( unless you want to return to the mother goddesses of witchcraft, which not a few people seem to be doing ).
G. K. Chesterton finds in Mary the appeal of hearth and home and the traditionl wisdom of the fields :
The dark Diana of the groves
Whose name is Hecate in hell
Heaves up her awful horns to heaven
White with the light I know to well.
The moon that broods upon her brows
Mirrors the monstrous hollow lands
In leprous silver; at the term
Of triple twisted roads she stands.
Dreams are no sin, or only sin
For them that waking dream they dream;
But I have learned that wiser knights
Follow the Grail and not the Gleam
I found one hidden in every home,
A voice that sings about the house,
A nurse that scares the nightmares off,
A mother nearer than a spouse.
Whose picture once I saw; and there
Wild as of old and weird and sweet,
In sevenfold splendor blazed the moon
Not on her brow; beneath her feet.
" The White Witch "
G. K. Chesterton
' The Queen of the Seven Swords '
For women, Mary symbolizes the awesome power of femininity. To be a woman does not mean to be quiet, retiring, weak, diffident, inferior; it means to be strong, powerful, creative, dynamic. One can afford to be tender, gentle loving, caring because one knows that these are not signs of weakness, that they can coexist with agressive, strong, outgoing, directive behavior. If Mary reflects an androgynous God, femininity is as good as masculinity.
And if there is nothing weak or effeminate about life-giving love, about maternal love that is passionately tender and fiercely protective, there is no reason why a man must retreat behind the shield of hypermasculinity; he can afford to be tender, sympathetic, caring because Mary reveals to him that these qualities are signs not of weakness but of strength. If God can be tender and passionate, if God is reflected by Mary as a source of maternal life-giving love, then the tender gentle man is not weak but strong. In the God who is revealed to us in Mary, masculine and feminine are blended. Among the followers of Mary, sharp, exclusive and oppressive distinctions between men and women are not appropriate. As Professor Robert Higham has pointed out, the sharp demarcation line between men and women, against which the feminist movement is quite properly revolting, is a relatively modern development, a product of the Enlightenment passion for clear and sharp distinctions. Women did not lead armies into battle in the Crimean War. ( They certainly couldn't have done worse than the male generals did. ) Nor can one imagine cathedrals being built to women in the France and England of the nineteenth century.
James O'Connell I'm not sure
James O'Connell
I'm not sure that I have managed the technology properly. Here is a theology of the BVM in reply to a pastor who opposed having Marian hymns during May.
A letter to a parish priest on hymns to Our Lady during May
James O’Connell
Dear Parish Priest,
I understand your wish to emphasise Mary during Advent. That recalls how the pregnant Mary was in communion with her child as his birth approached. Coming as I do from a folk tradition I however also value the worth of Marian devotions during May. In the contrast between two emphases I have set about thinking on our traditions in a way that I haven't done for a long time.
Although dates within the solar year have influenced the making of the Christian calendar, the months in their present form have had little to do with that calendar. The great feasts of the Christian year come from the pivotal moments of the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern year; and they have also been influenced by the Northern Germanic/Scandinavian culture: Christmas (which belongs to the same tradition as the Maypole celebrations) grows out of the observances of mid-winter (and the Annunciation is fixed in relation to Christmas); St. John and his bonfires hail from the mid-summer feast; Candlemas (and the pagan Roman feast it replaces) fits with the spring return of light; the Assumption and Lammas are harvest feasts; Michael and Martin also fit in with the harvest; and All Saints (together with All Souls) which takes over from the Roman pantheon closes the year. The old English names are superb: Christmas, Candlemas, Lammas, Michaelmas, Martinmas.
These Christian solemnities that spring from the nature festivals belong to the people as much if not more than to the clergy. They form an almost separate cycle from the official liturgical year: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost: which owes more to the abbeys than to other parts of the Church. It is in the spirit of the nature feasts baptised by the Church that Pope St. Gregory gave the advice, recorded in Bede, to Abbot Mellitus on his departure for Britain:
The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there dedicated to the service of the true God. In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there. They are no longer to sacrifice beasts to the Devil, but they may kill them for food to the praise of God, and give thanks to the Giver of all gifts for the plenty they enjoy.
In terms of Christian devotion only two months as such have, I think, been taken into devotions: May and November. The latter from its first two days has become the month of the Holy Souls. May has obvious links with the virginity/fertility rites of Northern Europe. May, as the month of Mary is however, as far as I know, relatively recent. Christians have however taken it up in many countries. Hopkins’ poem, "The May Magnificat", catches its spirit:
"May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why;..
His poem is rooted in the finest use of English language; and it pulsates with faithful veneration of the Mother of Christ. Interestingly, under Leo XIII, an endeavour was made to foster October as a month of devotion to Mary and the recitation of the rosary. Though the October devotions were well attended in Ireland when I was young, the month itself did not take on the hue of devotion that May did. A third month that has had some claim on devotion is June: the Sacred Heart. It has not however exercised as strong an attraction as the other two months. Devotion to the Sacred Heart did however play a role in humanising the face of God and in shifting people away from the rigours of Jansenism.
The three roles of Mary: virgin, mother and disciple
To look at themes more theologically: There are three roles of the historical Mary that are venerated in Christian tradition: virgin, mother and disciple/follower. From these roles derives her role as intercessor with intimate access to her Son. The problem with restricting the veneration of Mary to Advent is that while we wait with her for her child and our Saviour we wait with a young woman – though we might also remember that while the last weeks of waiting heightened expectation, Mary was waiting for nine months. It is right to venerate the young pregnant mother of Jesus and to wait with her but it is important to venerate too the woman whose heart was transfixed, who grew old in worry and sorrow, who stood beneath the cross, who waited with the disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit; who was in some way taken body and soul into the heavenly company of God; and who now, though a mere creature like us, intercedes with and through her Son. The breviary with its different hymns suggests how part of the Christian tradition has consistently retained hymns to Mary and varied them according to the season.
Perhaps another reflection on veneration of the Mother of God is important. What we know about Mary can be written on the back of a postage stamp. Yet there are libraries crammed with books of Mariology and Marian devotion. I still remember my first discovery of St. Alphonsus' Glories of Mary. Why is there such a contrast between paucity and abundance? The answer is at least two-fold. The first part of the answer must relate – as anybody who knows Italian anthropology and its salience in the development of devotion – to the Mediterranean worship of the earth goddess that the cult of Mary took over from. The second part is however more profound. The God we inherited from the Jews had profoundly masculine features. What the veneration of Mary helped Christian worshippers to do was to discern the feminine features of the divinity. In this lay a sure religious instinct which grasped that on the one hand God belongs to no sex and on the other hand God possesses eminently (to use the scholastic term) the fullness of human goodness and beauty. Only after I had come to understand both the scriptural roles of Mary and her reflection of the divine reality did I come to terms with devotion to her. In earlier years I had been put off by the exaggerations of the Grignon de Montfort 'true devotion' that was being pushed in certain quarters when I was young.
Fostering local traditions in an era of centralisation
Let me end with another quotation from Bede, the monk of Lindisfarne and the first great English historian. It is one of the answers to Augustine from Pope Gregory that Bede thought it 'proper to record in my history'.
My brother, you are familiar with the usage of the Roman Church, in which you were brought up. But if you have found customs, whether in the Church of Rome or of Gaul or of any other that may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of them, and teach the Church of the English, which is still young in the Faith, whatever you have been able to learn with profit from the various Churches. For things should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Therefore select from each of the Churches whatever things are devout, religious, and right; and when you have bound them, as it were, into a sheaf; let the minds of the English grow accustomed to it.
One of the considerable contributions of the Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition to the Western world has been the concept of pluralism and the open-minded tolerance involved in it. I wish that modern liturgical practice in the Church had learnt more about the uses of diversity and the worth of tolerance. So to come back to our local problematic: in the past a month of May saturated with Marian hymns may have exaggerated but a month of May denuded of Marian hymns may also be a form of exaggeration.