Miracles & Mary the Virgin

Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the stars in the night sky “envoys of beauty, lighting the universe with their admonishing smile” and submits that if they appeared for a single night only every thousand years, we’d be on our knees in worship and would cherish the memory for the rest of our lives. But since they come out every night, the miracle goes mostly unnoticed. We watch television instead.

But, their beauty notwithstanding, shining stars are not the most prominent miracle which goes unnoticed. The greatest miracles have to do with gratuity, with love, with unfreezing a soul, with forgiveness. Our great poverty is that these go mostly unnoticed. There are much more astonishing things than the stars for which to be down on our knees in gratitude and there are more profound things to cherish in memory than a starlit night.

The Belgium spirituality writer, Benoit Standaert, suggests that the greatest miracle is “that the freely given exists, that there is love that makes whole and that embraces what has been lost, that chooses what had been rejected, that forgives what has been found guilty beyond appeal, that unites what had seemingly been torn apart forever.”  

The greatest miracle is that there’s redemption for all that’s wrong with us. There’s redemption from all we’ve failed to live up to because of our inadequacies. There’s redemption from our wounds, from all that’s left us physically, emotionally, and spiritually limping and cold. There’s redemption from injustice, from the unfairness we suffer ourselves and from the hurt which we inflict knowingly or unknowingly on others. There’s redemption from our mistakes, our moral failures, our infidelities, our sins. There’s redemption from relationships gone sour, from marriages, families, and friendships that have been torn apart by misunderstanding, hatred, selfishness, and violence. There’s redemption from suicide and murder. Nothing falls outside the scope of God’s power to forgive, to resurrect and make new, fresh, innocent, and joyful again.

Our lives, to a greater or lesser extent, all end up incomplete, broken, unfairly ripped away from us, and causing hurt to others because of our weaknesses, infidelities, sin, and malice; and still, ultimately, it can all wash clean again. There’s redemption, new life after all the ways we’ve gone wrong in this world. And that redemption comes through forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the greatest miracle, the pan-ultimate miracle, which, along with everlasting life, is the real meaning of the resurrection of Jesus. There’s nothing more godlike, or miraculous, than a moment of reconciliation, a moment of forgiveness.

It’s for this reason that when the Gospels write up the resurrection of Jesus their emphasis, again and again, is on forgiveness. Indeed, Luke’s Gospel does not distinguish the announcement of the resurrection from the announcement of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness and resurrection are inextricably linked. Likewise, in the Gospel of John, in Jesus’ first resurrection appearance to the assembled community (with them all hiding behind locked doors in fear) he gives them the power to forgive sins. The message of the resurrection is that a dead body can be raised again from its grave. But this isn’t just true for our physical bodies, which die, but it’s also true, especially, for hearts that are frozen and dead from disappointment, bitterness, anger, separation, and hatred. The miracle of the resurrection is as much about raising deadened souls to new life as it is about raising dead bodies to new life.

Despite being nearly overwhelmed by new inventions today, machines and gadgets that do everything including talking to us, in truth, we see very little that’s genuinely new, that’s not the norm. Sure, we see new innovations every day coming at us so rapidly that we have trouble coping with the changes they are bringing about.  But, in the end, these innovations don’t genuinely surprise us, at least not at a deep level, at the level of the soul, morally. They’re simply more of what we already have, extensions of ordinary life, nothing really surprising.

But when you see a woman forgive another person who has genuinely hurt her, you are seeing something that’s not normal, that’s surprising. You are seeing something that is not simply another instance of how things naturally unfold. Likewise, when you see warmth and love break through to a man who has long been captive of a bitter and angry heart, you are seeing something that’s not just another instance of normal life, of ordinary unfolding. You’re seeing newness, redemption, resurrection, forgiveness. Forgiveness is the only thing that’s new on our planet, everything else is just more of the same.

And so, in the words of Benoit Standaert: “Whenever we strive to bring a little more peace through justice here on earth and, in whatever form, change sadness into happiness, heal broken hearts, or assist the sick and the weak, we arrive directly at God, the God of the resurrection.”

Forgiveness is the most astonishing miracle we will ever see or experience this side of eternity. It, alone, makes for the possibility of heaven – and happiness.

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THE MARY OF SCRIPTURE AND THE MARY OF DEVOTIONS

JUNE 25, 2018

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There’s an axiom that says: Roman Catholics tend to adore Mary while Protestants and Evangelicals tend to ignore Mary. Neither is ideal.

Mary, the Mother of Jesus, has, in effect, two histories within Christian tradition. We have the Mary of Scripture and we have the Mary of Devotions, and both offer something special for our Christian journey.

The Mary of Devotions is the more well-known, though mostly within Roman Catholic circles. This is the Mary invoked in the rosary, the Mary of popular shrines, the Sorrowful Mother of our litanies, the Mother with the soft heart through whom we can get the ear of God, the Mary of purity and chastity, the Mother who understands human suffering, the Mother who can soften the hearts of murderers, and the Mother we can always turn to.   

And this Mary is pre-eminently the Mother of the poor.  Karl Rahner once pointed out that when you look at all the apparitions of Mary that have been officially approved by the church you will notice that she has always appeared to a poor person – a child, an illiterate peasant, a group of children, someone without social standing. She’s never appeared to a theologian in his study, to a pope, or to a millionaire banker. She’s always been the person to whom the poor look.  Marian devotion is a mysticism of the poor.

We see this, for example, very powerfully in the effect that Our Lady of Guadalupe has had on much of Latin America. In all of the Americas, most of the indigenous peoples are now Christian. However, in North America, while most of the indigenous peoples are Christian, Christianity itself is not seen as a native religion, but rather as a religion brought to the native peoples from elsewhere. In Latin America, in every place where Our Lady of Guadalupe is popular, Christianity is seen to be a native religion.

But piety and devotions also run the risk of theological sloppiness and unhealthy sentimentality.  That’s the case too with the Mary of Devotions. We’ve tended to elevate Mary to divine status (which is simply wrong) and we have far too often encrusted her in so much piety that she, the Mary of Devotions, cannot possibly be the same person who wrote the Magnificat. The Mary of Devotions is often so enshrined in piety, over-simplicity, and asexuality that she needs to be protected from human complexity. Still, the Mary of Devotions offers us a lot vis-à-vis our spiritual journey.

Much more ignored is the Mary of Scripture and the role the various Gospels assign to her.

In the Synoptic Gospels, Mary is presented as a model of discipleship. More simply, she’s shown to us as the one person who gets it right from the beginning. But that isn’t immediately evident. On the surface, the opposite sometimes seems to be the case. For example, on a couple of occasions as Jesus is speaking to a crowd he is interrupted and told that his mother and his family are outside wanting to speak to him. His response: “Who are my mother and who are my brothers and sisters? It’s those who hear the word of God and keep it.” In saying this, Jesus isn’t distancing his mother from himself and his message, the opposite. Before this incident is recorded in the Gospels, the evangelists have been very careful to point out that Mary was the first person to hear the word of God and keep it. What happens here is that Jesus singles out his mother first of all for her faith, not for her biology. In the Synoptic Gospels, Mary is the paradigm for discipleship. She’s the first to hear the word of God and keep it.

John’s Gospel gives her a different role. Here she’s not the paradigm of discipleship (a role John gives to the Beloved disciple and to Mary Magdala) but is presented as Eve, the mother of humanity, and the mother of each of us. Interestingly, John never gives us Mary’s name, in his Gospel she is always referred to as “the Mother of Jesus”.  And in this role she does two things:

First, she gives voice to human finitude, as she does at the wedding feast of Cana when she tells her son (who is always divine in John’s Gospel) that “they have no wine”.  In John’s Gospel, this is not just a conversation between Mary and Jesus; but also a conversation between the Mother of Humanity and God. Secondly, as Eve, as universal mother, and as our mother, she stands in helplessness under human pain and withinhuman pain when she stands under the cross. In this, she shows herself as universal mother but also as an example of how injustice must be handled, namely, by standing within it in a way that does not replicate its hatred and violence so as to give it back in kind.

Mary offers us a wonderful example, not to be adored or ignored.