And Mary said. . .

“And Mary said. . .”

I have been stuck on these words that come just before the Magnificat. Imagine being about to say something so good, true, and beautiful, history remembers it as “The Magnificat.”

I once knew a professor, generally a very wise and good man, who said that Mary was not so important, was much less interesting than Saint Paul. The apostle had, after all, written so much of the New Testament and Mary was hardly mentioned at all.

This was a catastrophic misjudgment.

If all you get to be, if your entire role in the written story, is the Mother of God, speaker of The Magnificat, and spirit filled Mother in the Upper Room, that is more than enough. Mary spoke, consented, endured and so everything changed. She stood at the pivot of history and said “let it be done” and all was well. She heard the Word of God and obeyed.

God, omnipotent and omniscient, is the focal point of Christmas: The plan was God’s, but as the good God does, a human was allowed to participate and Mary said “yes” to the plan. All generations should call her happy, blessed amongst women.

This does not distract from our worship of God: to God alone be the ultimate Glory. Yet the good God allows an appropriate honor, a reasonable veneration, for those who are the Image of God. These saints, men and women, allow the rest of us to see, hear, and feel God’s glory.

If we only hear the male, then we miss the female. If so, then we are sons and daughters of Adam, but are rejecting Eve. We create a rift and deny reality.

This is why the voices of women must be heard, are heard, at the heart of any true Church. These voices are not reduced  or made less than they are. When Saint Nina converted a nation, she was equal to the apostles, but she was not an apostle.  Blessed Nina was her own self, out arguing her critics and instructing an ancient kingdom miraculously. When Holy Helen helped end persecution and built a Christian civilization, she was not her son, Constantine, but gloriously Helen. When Lucy, seemingly weak, faced a pagan Emperor, she endured fierce and unafraid. They burned her body, but she lit a lamp of truth that has not been extinguished to this day.

This is the voice of humanity. This is the voice that must be heard to hear the full image of God. This is not a voice that can be reduced to equality with any other voice or can be chosen. This is the voice of those born of woman as women. They created civilization often in noble arts, spinning, weaving, quilting, that are ignored by the unwise. These are the nuns, like Elizabeth New Martyr, who served the poor so effectively that the Bolsheviks had to murder them.

These are women of my home state West Virginia who did whatever needed to be done for the family. These are the Black women who endured and built a Christian witness in America that ignored them. This is the voice of Japan, Ethiopia, China, Russia, Greece, England, and the Americas.

This is the voice of the Queen of Heaven. “And Mary said. . . “

Are we listening to the whole voice of God in the Earth?