![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/174\/2020\/08\/jianxiang-wu-38w1dXFSRw-unsplash.jpg\")
<\/a>Church folklore is replete with delightful stories of Mary in the daily life of the Church.\u00a0 One story tells of an old man, intent on receiving a special favor, who prayed fervently every day at the shrine of Mary, the Mother of God.\u00a0 Impressed by such devotion, Jesus himself, the story continues, decided to reward such faith by appearing in person to assure the man of the blessings that would come to him.\u00a0 Seeing the Christ Child standing above the altar where he was accustomed to seeing the statue of Mary, the old man, intent on his prayers and irritated by the interruption, barked, \u201cGo away, little boy.\u00a0 I wanna talk to your mama.\u201d[i]<\/a><\/p>\nDo you now?\u00a0 Talking to Mary can be a dangerous thing to do.\u00a0 She knows things about the spiritual life that can be disconcerting.\u00a0 And \u2014 if you listen to her too closely \u2014 she will get you into trouble.\u00a0 She will raise difficult questions.\u00a0 So don\u2019t be so sure you \u201cwanna talk to his mama.\u201d<\/p>\n
One problem with Mary is rooted in a lack of respect for the ordered nature of things.\u00a0 The hymn that Luke attributes to her is filled with reversals (1:39-49(50-56).\u00a0 The arrogant are put to rout, mighty rulers are dethroned, the lowly are exalted.\u00a0 \u201cHe has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary\u2019s words have been cast in purely socio-economic terms from time to time and described as if they were part of a political manifesto.\u00a0 As a consequence they have often been appropriated as something of a map for modern politics. \u00a0But reading Mary\u2019s words in such narrow terms misses the point.\u00a0 The gift of her son signals the coming of God\u2019s Reign and with it, the need to attend to God\u2019s way of ordering the world.\u00a0 The change in Mary\u2019s own life is emblematic of the change that will come.\u00a0 Any order and any ideology that presents itself as a substitute for that order is subject to reversal in God\u2019s Kingdom.<\/p>\n
So, if you talk to his mama, you could find yourself asking questions about the things you value most and the things you take for granted.\u00a0 Your order could undergo a reversal.\u00a0 The order of everything, not just politics, can be up-ended.<\/p>\n
So, it is worth asking ourselves, What do I value and why?\u00a0 Did I inherit those values from my family?\u00a0 From my friends?\u00a0 From the cultural and social air that I breathe?\u00a0 Do those values stand up to scrutiny in the light of the Gospel?<\/p>\n
Those are not easy questions to ask, and most of them lack obvious answers.\u00a0 Nor are the results always welcome.\u00a0 Answer them well and you may find people saying the same thing about you that ancient writers said about ancient Christians:<\/p>\n
They pass their days upon the earth, but they are citizens of heaven.\u00a0 They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their own lives.\u00a0 . . .\u00a0 They are spoken evil of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and yet they bless; they are insulted, and they repay the insult with honor . . . What the soul is to the body, that the Christians are to the world.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n If you talk to his Mary, a second challenge you will encounter is her willingness to be overwhelmed by the power of God.\u00a0 Another, less fashionable word for it is submission.\u00a0 And that\u2019s really a difficult one for us to swallow.<\/p>\n We tend to think of submission as surrender to our circumstances, tyrants or bullies.\u00a0 We are fairly sure that only the weak submit and when they do, they lose their rights and their freedom.\u00a0 But for Mary submission isn\u2019t surrender to circumstances or bullies. \u00a0Submission is a matter of surrendering to God whatever our circumstances.\u00a0 And by submitting to God in the midst of her circumstances, Mary finds the freedom to act in ways that break with the strictures imposed upon her by custom, age and gender.\u00a0 She realizes that no matter how many strictures life may place upon us that there is a more deeply rooted and radical freedom that only God can give.<\/p>\n That realization may be at the heart of the ancient church\u2019s fascination with the connections between the burning bush of the Moses story and the life of Mary.\u00a0 The church fathers argued that both the bush and Mary were filled with God but not consumed.\u00a0 So widespread was this conviction that no small number of ancient icons pictured the burning bush, not with Moses, but with Mary.<\/p>\n Imagine what it would mean, then, to burn, but not be consumed with a freedom that only God can give.\u00a0 Here again are challenging questions: What would you do \u2014\u00a0 what would you do differently \u2014 what would you not do at all \u2014 if that kind of freedom shaped your life?<\/p>\n Then, finally, there is his Mary\u2019s notion of what constitutes a blessing.\u00a0 In common parlance, we think of blessings as good fortune.\u00a0 It\u2019s a gift, a serendipity.\u00a0 To be sure, even that kind of blessing is given by God.\u00a0 But for us the blessings are often things that we can name: good health, the well-being of our children, satisfying work, a roof over our heads.<\/p>\n But for Mary a blessing is something entirely different.\u00a0 She could not have named the gift she was given.\u00a0 And the blessing had nothing to do per se with bearing a child.\u00a0 The blessing arose out of her new found role in the God\u2019s work, in the coming of the Kingdom of God, in the birth of the people\u2019s Savior.\u00a0 In short, for Mary to be blessed was to serve God\u2019s ends, not her own.<\/p>\n Mary\u2019s willingness to be overwhelmed and blessed by the power of God was a source of fascination to both the ancient and medieval church.\u00a0 And that fascination led the church to draw countless comparisons of Mary\u2019s behavior with the behavior of Eve \u2014 who was also blessed, but refused to accept it.\u00a0 That is why in more than one case, Mary is described as \u201cthe mother of the church.\u201d<\/p>\n A model for every disciple, ancient and modern, Mary precedes Peter and Paul in modeling a faithful \u201cyes\u201d to the prompting of the Spirit.\u00a0 Meister Eckhart went so far as to say that all believers are \u201c\u2019mothers of Christ,\u2019\u201d because they are meant to be bearers of the incarnate Word.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n In other words, Mary had what Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard described as a \u201c\u2019passion for the impossible.\u2019\u201d And therein lies yet other questions we could ask ourselves today: Am I a bearer of the incarnation?\u00a0 Is God\u2019s presence in the world diminished by my life, or is it given new expression?[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n Reversal \u2014 submission \u2014 blessing \u2014 these are words that are at odds with one another in the lexicon of American life.\u00a0 But they are deeply rooted in the movement of the Holy Spirit. It\u2019s a dangerous thing to say, \u201cGo away, little boy.\u00a0 I wanna talk to your mamma.\u201d<\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief\u00a0 <\/em>(Ligouri: Ligouri\/Triumph, 1999):93.<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> From The Epistle of Diognetus, written in AD 130.\u00a0 See: John R. Tyson, ed.\u00a0 Invitation to Christian Spirituality<\/em>, An Ecumenical Anthology<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 59-60.<\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> Matthew Fox,\u00a0Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations\u00a0<\/em>(New World Library: 2011), 148.<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a> For the quotations cited above, see: Robert Barron, The Strangest Way, Walking the Christian Path<\/em>\u00a0 (Maryknoll: Orbis, Books, 2002): 117-118.<\/p>\n Photo by Jianxiang Wu<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n