Coming to terms with Mary

...We bring to her the scandal of the fallen world...

...In talking about Eve, the early writers gave vent to their disgust for sex, and for female sexuality in general...

...Who wouldn't like her...

...Grace, we call it...

...The second word I think about is grief...

...It is an innocence that lives with the knowledge of its own impending grief...

...This attitude of expectation, of readiness and receptivity to grace, this awareness that the ultimate thing is grace and grace alone, is something which, as an attitude of mind every Christian must have, even if it does not find concrete expression in virginity...

...The most interesting and sophisticated thought by feminists now sees that in rejecting those things that were traditionally thought of as female, we are going with the male system of values that rates them as inferior...

...The love of innocence is the celebration of grace...

...How do we bridge the gap between ordinary woman, that repository of phlegm, bile, rheum and the fluid of digested food, and the Tower of Ivory, the House of Gold, the "floures floure," the one of whom the twelfth century poet says: "Your breasts are as fragrant as wine...

...Not suggesting it was her idea, no, nothing like that...

...Mary the young girl looks amused...

...In an ancient and popular symmetry, the image of Mary as the second Eve has been present in Marian thought from earliest times...

...Only in the heart, the great music of a resignation that is anything but a flat giving in: a lifting of the heart to God in the face of the absurd...

...We must not forget the history of woman has been a history of degredation, oppression, the idealization whose other side is tyranny...

...Women who were independent and intelligent rejected the Virgin Mary in favor of her son in the way that some feminists, particularly in the beginning of the movement, felt it necessary to radically reject those things that were associated exclusively with the female: dresses, make-up, domestic work, relations with men, children...

...But any saint, however celebrated, is venerated out of choice, only by some...

...For women like me, it was necessary to reject that image of Mary in order to hold onto the fragile hope of intellectual achievement, independence of identity, sexual fulfillment...

...A mature grief, grief rescued from the danger of madness, not Clytemnestra raging, vengeful over her lost child, but a mother silenced by-sorrow...

...Contrast the image of the girl in Pasolini's movie, of Fra Angelico's virgin, of the thirteenth century young mother, the sensual curve of her hip ready for motion-contrast these images with the image of a young woman in Jerry Falwell's school...

...What hope is there for the rest of us, who eat, breathe, menstruate, make love, bear children...

...Innocence: it is a rare and a powerful quality...

...I think of the young woman in Fra Angelico's Annunciation...

...Yet we were offered no alternative to this Marian image...

...Her mouth, a thin indentured curve, turns up with pleasure...

...Spared nothing...

...For the purpose of them was to conceal the body, to underplay as much as possible, the natural allure of young female flesh...

...Her consent asked for by God, not enforced...

...The identification of women with the flesh, men with the spirit, was a commonplace of ancient thought, and thinkers about women have used this idea to depict woman as inevitably lower-by virtue of her physical existence-than men...

...one must be vigilant to ensure that the tendencies so inbred in all human beings-ourselves as well as men-are passed on as little as possible...

...MARY GORDON is the author of Final Payments and The Company of Women (Random House...

...The whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rheum, and the fluid of digested food...

...she does not weigh down sluggish limbs with an imprisoned embryo...

...thunderstruck from the force of the Angel's entrance, serene, and pleased...

...But for a Christian, the final nature of life is triumphant...

...It is an innocence saddened by much, surprised at nothing...

...Nobody I or my friends ever talked to would wear them...

...in Mary, Mother and Queen, we see, enfleshed in a human form that touches our most ancient longings, the promise of salvation, of deliverance, through flesh, from the burdens of flesh...

...If you consider what is stored up behind those lovely eyes, the angle of the nose, the mouth and cheeks you will agree that the well-proportioned body is merely a whitened sepulcher...

...There was one store-which girls in my school were urged to patronize-that had a special section devoted to what were called "Mary-like gowns...

...We can, in a romantic love of suffering, fixate on the Sorrowing Virgin, perverting even that image in the belief that we are facing the true nature of life...

...Matthew...

...She is the mother of the Resurrected Christ...

...their scent lovelier than flowers and balsam wood.'' WE MUST BEGIN by the radical and frightening understanding that the history of human thought about women has been a history of error...

...Henny Youngman in Carmel...

...we give our despair, the failure of all human consolation to assuage us...

...The appeal of Mary is that devotion to her is universal, ancient...

...Christ rises from the dead: his mother takes her place beside him at the Throne of God...

...Her example was held up constantly: an example of silence, of subordination, of the pleasure of taking the back seat...

...At ease in its own nature, swaying almost with the rhythms of maternal love, ready for life, radically open to experience, to love...

...But we must resist as well the temptation to reject the lovely, the exalted, the resonant life built up for centuries by living men and women...

...Innocence suggests an inviolable goodness, not striven after, but lavishly and freely given...

...What we are doing now is trying to salvage the valuable things that the past ascribed to females, and to say that, if they are valuable, why reserve them to only 53 percent of the human race...

...I SEE BELLINI'S PIETA...

...To witness the ignominious death of one's most innocent child...

...For they are in all of us, blood and bone...

...Christianity is not unique in this error...

...we cannot expect them to disappear in a lifetime...

...one must travel the road of metaphor, of icon, to come back to that figure who, throughout a corrupt history, has moved the hearts of men and women, has triumphed over the hatred of woman and the fear of her, and abides shining, worthy of our love, compelling it...

...Much of the thought about her has been poisoned by misogyny, and a hatred of the body, particularly female sexuality...

...I offer here, no system, but a set of meditations...

...In my day, Mary was a stick to beat smart girls with...

...she is not depressed and worn out by its awkward weight...

...I note that in our culture, fixated as it is on youth, there are far fewer images of the sorrowing mother who would have to be at least middle-aged, than of the young virgin with child...

...she must take upon herself the ancient labor of women: she must become a gatherer, a hoarder...

...There were a few saints one could, in desperation, turn to: Theresa of Avila, who was reported to have a fresh mouth (If this is the way you treat your friends, Lord, what do you do to your enemies...

...One must forgive, or one must give up history...

...she presides over a feast, secure that all her children are, at last, well fed...

...Marina Warner notes: "In times of stasis and entrenchment, as under Popes Pius XII and to some extent Paul VI, veneration of the Virgin is encouraged, and in times of strong ecumenism and change, when the church is less self-righteous and assured, devotion to the Virgin, especially under her triumphant aspect, is restrained and declines.'' What can we make of this...

...I call up more images...

...Guiltily, you must bear its hardships...

...It has come to me, then, that one must sift through the nonsense and hostility that has characterized thought and writing about Mary, to find some images, shards, and fragments, glittering in the rubble...

...The sureness of the young Mary is a sureness born of grace...

...She must put out for those around her scattered treasure, isolates without a pattern whose accumulated meaning comes from the relations of proximity...

...The curse God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world...

...I see gold and ivory...

...the absence of the desire to inflict pain...

...A sensual girl, her wide mouth turned up in a smile of comprehending expectation...

...St Jerome informs us: "As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul...

...Yet these images have nothing to do with the false images of innocence used in our culture to sell everything from designer jeans to membership in the Moral Majority...

...I have chosen three qualities in my thoughts about her: innocence, grief, and glory...

...Towards the spring of the year, the approach of Senior Proms meant big business for the local merchants...

...The Mother of God is the Queen of Heaven...

...the threat and the horror are inherent in her physical nature...

...Yes, of course, if we confuse the Queenship of Mary with a human rule whose first goal is to keep everyone in line...

...Her downcast eyes show what might be fear, but finally is not, but only an inward looking, an understanding, wary, perhaps, but not overwhelmed...

...It is a kind of luck...

...Jean Eudes writes, touching on the unbaptized fetus as the victim of original sin, "It is a subject of humiliation of all the mothers of the children of Adam to know that while they are with child, they carry with them an infant . . . who is the enemy of God, the object if his hatred and malediction, and the shrine of the demon...

...I imagine her in one of Leonardo's Annunciations covered over with light, sure in her youthful self-knowledge...

...BUT THERE is still a problem...

...I think, finally, it is through poetry, through painting,' sculpture, music, through those human works that are magnificently innocent of the terrible strain of sexual hatred by virtue of the labor, craft, and genius of their great creators, that one finds the surest way back to the Mother of God...

...As Hopkins says: If I have understood, She holds high motherhood Toward all our ghostly good And plays in grace her part About man's beating heart, Laying, like air's fine flood, The deathdance in his blood...

...I have wanted to create for myself a devotion to Mary that honors her as woman, as mother, that rejects the wickedness of sexual hatred and sexual fear...

...With the kind of smile they would give to the behavior of Margaret the wife in "Father Knows Best," they talked about the one assertion of Mary's recorded in the Gospel: her request at the wedding feast at Cana...

...And she is the mother of God...

...Do you not realize, Eve, that it is you...

...We used to go and try the dresses on for a laugh...

...It is this impulse to re-examine and to understand in a deeper way the history of women, female genius, female work, often anonymous, hidden, uncredited, to look for new values that are not simply male values dressed for success, that is leading women back to Mary...

...But behind her, the winter landscape blossoms with the first flowers of spring...

...It is an innocence that knows it will be pierced by a sword, ground under by great scandal of an unjust world...

...The death of one's child...

...I imagine the music of Handel, Alexander's Feast...

...III IN THE END, it is beyond reason, beyond argument...

...it never forgets compassion...

...But the ideal of innocence has nothing to do with weakness...

...Mater Dolorosa...

...The hatred of women is the legacy of death...

...It is an innocence that is rooted in the love of the physical world...

...For this woman, there is no comfort...

...It is difficult to understand the transition between this disgust-filled thinking about woman and the veneration accorded to the Virgin Mary...

...The yardage of material could have dressed even an Irish family for a year...

...Humble-"Behold the handmaid of the Lord"-yet never cringing, always aware of the great dignity of her position: "All generations shall call me blessed...

...You are the devil's gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the law of God, you softened up with your cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force...

...it is a sureness that never excludes understanding of human suffering, that does not assert with every flick of its coiffed head, the exclusive lightness of its position...

...Making him think it was his decision...

...It is the inborn lack of that instinct to touch others for their harm...

...THE GRIEVING MOTHER...

...Those of us whose hearts are moved by those who have gone before us, who wish to keep the connection with them alive, must reject the temptation of historical romanticism...

...The Mary-like gown was an invention of nuns and a coalition of sodalists, and its intent, I think, was to make prom dresses as much like habits as possible...

...In the seventeenth century, St...

...John Chrysostom, speaking of women's physical nature, opines...

...In the end, the devotion to Mary is the objective correlative of all the primitive desires that lead human beings to the life of faith...

...Mary embodies our love for this instinctive purity of life...

...The Fathers did not like women-and in setting Mary apart from the rest of the female sex what they were saying was that she was only acceptable because she did not share the corruption that was inevitably attached to the female condition...

...Then disappearing, once again, into the background, into silence...

...Most of what we know about Mary we know from men...

...I listen to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater...

...How easily that too can be perverted to the trium-phalism that attaches to the Queenship of Mary when the church sees itself politically beleaguered, in danger of losing its power on earth...

...I think of the curve of the body of a thirteenth century statue of the young Mother with her child...

...talked back to bishops, reformed her order, had visions whose power and authenticity were unassailable...

...On the contrary, real innocence is capable of understanding and confronting evil in its most radical terms: it is undeceived about the Powers of Darkness, and does not confuse them with human frailty...

...The sweet compassion of the innocent girl deepened beyond our comprehension...

...Augustine refers to the "feces and urine" of childbirth...

...In Mary we have the emblem of all human sorrow, innocence victimized by injustice, by the incomprehensible exigencies of the cruel God who is the God of love...

...The Virgin is bent over the dead body of her Son...

...I remember the face of the young Mary in Paso-lini's Gospel According to St...

...the notion of disobedience is a paltry irrelevance if one imagines choirs of angels and the mother of God enthroned, not above her children, but in the midst of them, their voices raised in a harmony impossible to them in their life on earth...

...It is not the virtue some of us struggle a lifetime trying to attain...

...their whiteness whiter than milk and lilies...

...it is not the failure of the imagination to imagine wrong, but the naturally bestowed inability to choose malice, selfishness...

...A sixteenth century sculpture I saw in Winchester Cathedral...

...I offer no final words, since, for a woman to come to terms with this woman who endures beloved despite a history of hatred, she must move lightly and discard freely...

...This radical openness is what Karl Rahner sees as the importance of the idea of virginity for Christians regardless of their sexual vocation...

...The heart pierced with the sword, now open to the world...

...Consider Tertullian...

...The tradition suggests that Eve, is cursed to bear children, rather than being blessed with motherhood...

...The image of the woman brought out as a weapon to threaten the rebellious...

...But how ridiculous...

...Hence we value it...

...In the sixth century, Venantius Fortunatus writes, "Happy virgin...

...It was noted that she didn't ask her son directly for anything...

...A girl of the Middle East, of the warm air of a temperate climate, picking fruit, walking on warm nights under stars we can no longer in the modern world imagine...

...The triumph of Mary is beyond law, and lawlessness...

...We always figured that people who bought prom dresses like that were going to the prom with their cousins...

...But life has changed...

...I longed for it with a special poignance as I experienced motherhood for the first time...

...They were unbelievably ugly...

...Triumph...

...The beautiful idea of innocence can be perverted, in the face of a generalized hostility to female power, to an ideal of subservience, of a loss of individual identity and autonomy, of an enforced childishness which barters the responsibilities of freedom for the privileges of a protected object...

...she merely said: "They have no wine...

...II INNOCENCE, GRIEF, GLORY: they are potent words, ideas, and like all human things that take on power are susceptible to perversion and corruption...

...One must find isolated words, isolated images...

...Woman does not have to be sexually active to be threatening and disgusting...

...But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called man...

...that too is in her fate as she lies holding her dead child...

...She embodies our desire to be fully human yet to transcend death...

...It is, for many of us, the worst we can imagine, the greatest stumbling block to faith...

...I wanted this particularly as I grew older...

...For a woman to try to take her place in any tradition, taking seriously that tradition's history, the only option is a forgiving vigilance...

...I see her overcome with grief, swooning from the violence of the blows of God, her Father and her Son, in Grunewald's rendering of the Sorrowing Mother...

...it is possible to say that its ideas about women are slightly more humane than those of many groups in history...

...hence, we were denied a potent female image whose application was universal...