MANY ADVENTS, ONE MARY
McCarthy, Abigail
MANY ADVENTS, ONE MARY As the residents of Cape Cod broke out the Christmas street decorations and the Advent wreaths and started the recordings of Christmas carols sounding through the...
...Brown was writing of an incident which took place at a liturgy celebrated in a barrio somewhere in Central America...
...There was no warrant for either in scripture...
...The message of Mary enthroned is the message of the viotory of the poor...
...The Mary of the gospels pondered things in her heart and meditated on the scripture...
...Why should the people be without the solace of the ancient litany: "Health of the sick, pray for us...
...The priest celebrating the experimental liturgy with the desperate poor there had initiated, evidently long since, dialogue homilies...
...That virgin was enthroned...
...Take off her crown...
...The hearers were unsure, and the verse from the Magnificat was read to them, He has put down the mighty from their seat, and exaRed the lowly...
...Perhaps they look on symbols and celebrations as enervating...
...We all need to be reminded of the Mary of the gospels--a poor girl who hastened into the hill country to help her cousin Elizabeth, who bore her child in a cave, who helped the neighbors at wedding feasts, who followed her son at a distance, who stood beneath the cross and waited for him once again with the apostles in the upper room...
...The settlers of Cape Cod came from "New Plimouth" across the bay where on Christmas Day in 1620, according to Willison's book, Saints and strangers, work began in earnest on December 25th...
...There are two truths...
...he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away...
...refuge of sinners, pray for us...
...The incident ends inconclusively...
...Did the day remind them only of death, asked the celebrant...
...Someone then remembered that it was also the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary...
...Everything, he assured the readers, was .true "but the facts" which had been altered to conceal the identity of the original narrator...
...They were reminded variously, first of the ABIGAIL MeCARTHY death of Allende, "which was followed by renewed oppression," then of the death of Mao, and finally that of Martin Luther King...
...It made no difference to the Pilgrims that it was Christmas for they scorned the celebration as a "human invention" and a Roman "corruption...
...On September 12th he had asked of his hearers what the date meant to them...
...There began an antiphony between the hearers...
...She would not wear a silk robe but like them old and torn clothes...
...Was there any connection between Mary and the fighters against oppression...
...But isn't it a serious thing to take away the age-old source of comfort and hope...
...It was as the fruit of meditation that the gospel ascribes to her the liberating stanzas of the Magnificat: My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaid...
...MANY ADVENTS, ONE MARY As the residents of Cape Cod broke out the Christmas street decorations and the Advent wreaths and started the recordings of Christmas carols sounding through the shopping malls, this year the newspaper, The Cape Codder reminded its readers that three hundred years ago it was not only imprudem to celebrate Christmas on Cape Cod but it was illegal as well...
...What had the girl who said that in common with the image of the virgin in the cathedral...
...Isn't it really what is now called the crime of deculturization...
...Revolutionaries are always Puritans, it seems...
...They were not 'true' Christians, he informed them, and would never be until they ceased celebrating Christmas--and Easter, too, for that matter...
...The girl of the Magnificat would not be enthroned...
...John Robinson, one of the early Pilgrim leaders, had criticized the Dutch...
...Take off her robe...
...Had she not been appropriated by the rich and the mighty and the men of the church who were unmindful of the plight of the poor...
...Or was she simply to disappear among them...
...But still I wonder if the liberation priest of the barrio-somehow I envision him as young and from the North'--didn't miss the poinL There are not two Marys...
...Without her assent, the gospel says, there would have been no coming of the Savior...
...corn(Continued on page 825) 23 December 1977:810...
...Behold, from this day forward all generations will call me blessed, Because he who is mighty, hath done great things to me...
...And so on...
...There is the literal truth of the poor woman of Nazareth and there is the mythic truth of the Mary, who has been called "blessed among women," from generation to generation just as she foretold...
...Reading this in this Advent season --which was in my youth thought of also as the time of Mary--brings to my mind an article by my friend Robert McAfee Brown in the October Chrls'tianity and Crisis, entitled "Two Marys--Two Gospels...
...It was not clear whether the dethroned Mary was to remain in the minds of the people of the barrio an advocate, the refuge of sinners, and the help of the poor...
...She would be down in the dirt and the dust like the people of the barrio...
...Many of us have rejoiced to discover her revolutionary words proclaiming the destruction of the.proud and the mighty...
...she wore a silk robe...
...she wore a crown and rings on her fingers...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
