Isaiah 61:10-11 Clothed with liberation, covered with justice
Psalm 34 Benedicam Dominum
Galatians 4:4-7 Born of a woman
Luke 1: 46-55 Magnificat nima mea Domine: he has brought down the powerful and lifted up the humble.

Mary was (indeed, is) a Jew. We used to say Jewess, to diminish her and Judaism at once. As Harry Golden pointed out, we never talked about an Episcopalianess. Or maybe they're saying Episcopalienne when they invent that improper noun. No one ever heard of a Lutheraness, or a Baptistess, or a Methodistess. The sacramental bread in the hands of a woman priest does not become a hostess, or a twinkie. We are Anglicans, members of the Episcopal Church, a/k/a the Protestant Episcopal Church, and spiritually we are all Semites, as Pius XII expressed it. We have been adopted into Mary's family, not she into ours.

Mary so far as we know was never baptized, neither by immersion, affusion, nor aspersion, and never gave up being a Jew, nor did Jesus, though he underwent John's immersion "for the forgiveness of sins" which was at the time not footnoted to disclaim the implications. Baptism re-affirmed his Jewishness, as it gives us ours, in a decent substitute for circumcision, and a more inclusive one for the females of the species. The imperial Church nevertheless promoted our Jesus to be Pantokrator in the Greek Pantheon. Nor did Saulus ("slut-arsed") stop being a Jew when he changed his name to Paulus ("short stuff"). He indeed says Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law" -- the meaning is that he was born the same way we are born, not only biologically the same way (Paul, being a Jew, had no idea that virgins could have babies--it was a credential required by the pagans for dieties) but culturally in the same fix--"under the law." Not, like tyrants or fixers, "above the law", but born a minor, in solidarity with the rest of us who had no grown-up rights to assert, so that we nevertheless might be adopted as God's adult children and escape our slavery to "the elemental spirits of the world". The RSV asterisks this as "rudiments" of the world, and extends the invective: "enslaved to beings that are not gods, weak and beggarly elemental spirits" and again footnoted to "or beggarly rudiments". That means all the religion of paganism that Julian the Apostate lamented the passing of, and tried to revive, indeed did revive for a short spell. Except for the enchanting customs of the liturgical year which have saved us all from the ikonoclastic puritanism which nearly swept away all the dear of paganism along with the daft, we are bereft of our Olympian friends. I especially miss Pan, since I read that wonderful chapter in "The Wind in the Willows" that I sometimes use for lectio divino.

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean," wrote Algernon Charles Swinburne at last, "the world has grown grey from thy breath." So Romanticism also wept at the graves of the old gods. The sweet breath of Jesus, breathed onto his apostles in the Upper Room, soured on the nostrils of millions persecuted for dissent in the Church's imperial history.

In our time, kindly vegetarian wiccas with no fear of the Inquisition's flames, or the preacher's persecution, try to dance and chant the old "countryfied religion" of Nature and the gnostic spirits back to life, with candles, herb tea, and sympathy, but without much success. They forget or never knew the tyranny of the pagan establishment, any more than Gore Vidal does when he laments the rumored exit of polytheism and the entrance of monotheism and its perversions, like the line from Constantine to Adolph Hitler: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer". Sylvia Plath indicts it all in her poem, "Daddy":

     "I have always been scared of you,
      With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo,
      And your neat moustache
      And your Aryan eye, bright blue
      Panzer-man, panzer-man, You--
      Not God but a swastika
      So black no sky could squeak through".

All of us, each of us, lives "under the law", in some sense, for somebody else's rules are forced down upon some part of our lives at least. Some anarchists (no-rule-at-all) say we should ignore the calendar and the clock, for "time" is an idol we have set up and which now turns and rules us tyrannically. Our employer owns the time clock, and sets it to ticking over his custody of our labor. We are all wage-slaves. "Born of a woman" is liberative--it reminds us we are one family, with One Mother. On the cross, Jesus spoke to all of us when he directed his beloved disciple's attention to Mary: "Son, look at your Mother." And his mother's attention he directed to all of us when he said, "Mother, look at your child." But "born under the law" is not liberative; it is a diagnosis of our plight. The time clock, the calendar, the contract, the ukase, the directive, the required report, the playpen, the harness, the jail, custodial care, the pink slip, the farewell party and the gold watch, are all the sharp edges of whatever "arche", whatever authority, sits on us. All of this gives us all a taste of living under the law. But even living outside the law or above the law makes us slaves--to deception, to deceit, to offense, to the threat of discovery, the shadow of shame and disgrace when we are shown to be "out-laws."

Jesus comes to buy us back, his brothers and sisters, from slavishness as well as from slavery. He sealed his brotherhood, his siblinghood, to us on the Cross, when he proved that greater love has no one than this, and laid down his life for his friends. Being part of God's family means we no longer have to act towards God as if God were a slave-master, or an employer, or the high school principal, or Sylvia Plath's "Daddy". Jesus, Mary, and the saints show us what God is like. Mary never disowned her Child, Jesus. She literally "stood by him", when the world thought him mad, when the world slaughtered him. She had been with him from before his life on earth began and saw him beyond the garden of his friends' betrayal, beyond the place of the skull. . .

As Mary "broke her water" Jesus was baptised into our humanity before he was baptized by his cousin John in Jordan. Mary becomes the first Christian herself in that flood she let loose, and the first Christian priest, who consecrated the Eucharist in her womb and in her arms, as she offers him to us, the True Bread that comes down from heaven. The earliest revolutionaries were sure of this when they sang Magnificat with Mary and Elizabeth even before Luke copied it into his gospel. Babes leap in wombs, it tells us in an image only a mother could teach us When God becomes our Abba, as Paul tells us in Galatians, then Mary also becomes an Amma to us, the Semite lady who is our Mother. In the first reading, we learn of the joy that comes with the clothing of liberation, the kind of joy that is unabashedly gender-specific! the joy of the bridegroom ornamented with flowers, the joy of the bride decked with jewels, and the image is extended to Nature--the joy of a garden "as it causes what is sown in it to spring up." Fecundity and flowering are here with her faithfulness.

In the mural of "Visitation" at Casa Ave Maria, Mary half kneels in a birthing position at the Cross, birthing an adult Jesus, a suffering and resurrected Jesus with whom she is in solidarity in his suffering and in his glory. Issuing from her womb also is a cascade of the flowers of Nature on one side, and on the other a throng of young people crowding and clambering their way over the ruins of the old Managua cathedral on July 19, 1979, the triumph of the revolution. These images are fraught with meaning for us still. Thus Mary is both naturally and historically our Mother in faith and love. In the Magnificat, her song, we hear of the reversal of values that the gospel is all about, the lifting up of the lowly that makes it possible for a woman to be an agent of salvation, a co-redemptrix, a Theotokos. That we are included in God's scheme of things, that we are included in the rearrangement of history, is what the good news to the poor is, for us. God loves us most in our greatest need, as does a Mother, and Christians who forget the Motherly in God will forget the brotherly and sisterly and finally the Fatherly as well.

Mary appears to the poor of the earth at various times and places, usually to children, to young people, to women. Rarely if ever has she been seen by a field marshal or a banking superintendent. A hundred years ago, in the midst of the Potato Famine the starving people of Ireland saw her on the porch of their little country church in the village of Knock, where hungry peasants glimpsed her in the rain, at an altar on the outside back of the church, and with her were Saint Joseph and Saint John, and upon the altar a Lamb, slain and risen, triumphant over the famine in the land. And she was the celebrant, offering the Bread of Heaven to the starving. It was the first Roman Catholic church where a woman was seen vested for eucharist at an altar, even if it was outdoors in the rain. And the woman we are pleased to call our Lady.

We didn't wait for the impetus of "Globalization" to recognize the wholeness of the Catholic religion, that Our Lady of Knock, Our Lady of Walsingham, Nuestra Señora de Guadaupe, and Notre Dame de Paris, and a hundred more, are all as it were in hypostatic union with Mary of Nazareth. At the time of the protestant Revolt, the connection of these "localities" of various "Catholic Ladies" with the mother of the historical Jesus was so loose that Bishop Hugh Latimer called for the burning of the images: " Our Lady of Worcerster, our great Sybill. . . with her old sister of Walsingham, her young sister of Ipswich, their two other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster in Smithfield; they would not be all day a burning," he chuckled. And burn many of them did, but so did he at the last, on October 16, 1555, with Nicholas Ridley, to whom he said "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out." And so it hasn't, and our Reformation lives, but other candles have been lit as well, and some of them at the Anglican shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, where since 1130 pilgrims flocked as to a 'virtual' Holy House of Nazareth. For Richeldis de Favreches, a widow in Walsingham, once talked to an apparition of Mary there, who told her to set up a replica of her house and gave her the blueprints. Henry VIII levelled the site in 1538, but in an 'end run' around English ikonoclasm, Mary had already appeared in December of 1531 to Juan Diego, a Mexican peasant, wearing her traje, and talked to him in Nahuatl and they mispronounced it Guadalupe. Mary lives on too in a resurrected shrine at Walsingham, an English lady on a throne of grace.

The variety of Marys is shocking to protestant sensibilities, and even to a spiky Anglo Catholic like me, a good deal of reflection and synthesis are required to deal with the phenomena. One December here in Managua, on the 8th, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin--an old Anglican feast, too, even in the 1662 Prayer Book--I brought out to the front patio my statue of our Lady of Guadalupe for the occasion, and started to set it about with flowers and candles. Later there would be firecrackers, and lots of children singing for sweets out front. Guadalupe is not a queen, but a campesina, who spoke Nahuatl to Juan Diego that day in Tepayec in 1531, and has become the symbol of Mexican nationalism and the struggle of the poor throughout Latin America. The Episcopal Church of Nuestra Señora de las Americas in Chicago was dedicated to her when my friend Rex Bateman was its vicar. A picture of Guadalupe, touched to the very image in Mexico City, hangs in the church now, a miracle in itself. But that feast day of our Lady is December 12, and I was surprised when Managua neighbors said it was too early for her statue to be honored on the 8th, that I could borrow a proper Purísima statue from one of them for the occasion. This is the representation of Mary for the Feast of the Conception, in flowing robes, flying up a stairwell of clouds, like Judy Garland on the yellow brick road in Cinemascope. It's a confusion of the celebrations they were objecting to--in a way, it would be like putting out Easter eggs on Good Friday, or a picture of Jesus weeping in Gethsemane to celebrate Pentecost.

Jeremy Sheehy, in "Mary and Locality"¹ cites the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx about this phenomenon of the dozens of local devotions to Mary, that 'Love gave her a thousand names': "Theology has to be critical in its attitude towards the thousand names bestowed upon the Virgin Mother by popular devotion. But theology lives in and draws its sustenance from the life of faith led by the members of the Church community, and theologians should realize that this life is more powerful than all the feeble efforts made by theology. That is why theology, in exercising that criticism which is its rightful task, should never criticize in a spirit of self-satisfaction or theological 'pride'." Sheehy also quotes Canon A.M.Allchin:

"Mary in the infinite variety of her involvement with place, 'our Lady of this, our Lady of that', embodies in herself this qualitative catholicty which, far from being opposed to outward catholicity, is its safeguard and protection. In her we see that in creation as in the Godhead itself, identity and distinction, unity and multiplicity, are not in opposition to one another."

Today as I write this in Managua our e mpleada, our housekeeper Silvia, comes to tell us that an apparition of our Lady has been seen, apparently formed from humidity in the plaster, on the walls of a church in Masaya. Which reminded me that some years ago, I brought home from Africa a mahogany statue of the Madonna, as a Black woman, which a Muslim woodcarver had made for me from a photo of a woman in the parish that I had with me. When I got back to Chicago, I bathed the image in linseed oil before it was mounted in the church, and one day drops began to appear at the corners of her eyes, and formed themselves into tears where the wood had been incised by the carver, and fell away. At about that time there were a half dozen weepy statues all over the United States, and some folks in our little mission church thought that we might have a hot property to draw pilgrims. My old presbyterianism surfaced and I debunked the lacrymose linseed oil and put Madonna in the sun to dry her tears. But the devotion to our Lady survived at St Andrew's, and in my heart as well, and she will live 'ad multos annos' in all the sacred shrines where her family turns to her as the mother of Jesus and our own Mother as well, our little sister of Guadalupe, our regnant queen of Walsingham, Nuestra Señora, Notre Dame, our Lady. The poet Robert Lowell tells us how this happens.

                     Our Lady of Walsingham

There once the penitents took off their shoes
And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English lane,
Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make glad
The castle of God.  Sailor, you were glad
And whistled Sion by that stream.  But see:

Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar.  There's no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with is heavy eyelids.  As before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God:  it goes
Past castled Sion.  She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.
 

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

• The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
• The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

Please sign my guestbook and view it.

Statistics courtesy of WebCounter.