Mary

I'll jump right into the theology posts. I spent this evening at St. Joe's Benedictine Monastery in Covington. I arrived early to read a new book I finally convinced myself to buy - a critical edition of Hildegard's Symphonia, a pseudo-mystical collection of songs, antiphons, psalters, and everything else sacramental spoken word and/or singing. My, she is way into Mary, specifically the virginal mediatrix version of Mary that was popular then, and which Hildegard helped popularize in her surprisingly widely distributed work. So what about Mary ever virgin?

On the one hand, I can dig Mary. She is Christianity's response to the universal need for a religiously significant woman. She is our goddess, our eternal feminine, our universal womb, etc. Mary has a lot of traction in that psychology and the religious language stemming from it. Hildegard likes to consider Mary's womb as parallel to the universe of raw matter from which God formed all of creation; in both cases God produces the Word, in flesh as Jesus or in the world as Truth, out of something not God. Hildegard adds a certain metaphysical importance to what I would be comfortable leaving as simply a psychological necessity: Mary as mother-goddess ala Freud and Jung.

And Mary is kinda important. She (thought to be) more easily identifiable as human than Jesus, which is why some ask Mary to intercede on their behalf to Jesus, as if talking to Mary is easier than bringing up human crap to Jesus. It is true that, while Jesus was/is God, and had the direct line, so to speak, Mary was not part of planning process. She was out of the loop in the Gospels. In that way, she is a model for us as Christians, who are also out of the loop but want to do right. As she says at the wedding feast, "Just do whatever Jesus tells you." So she is a model for Christian faith as well as a psychological mother Goddess.

The first claim is too vague and latent for me to have problems with. So people treat Mary as they would a co-redemtrix (the custom-coined word for 'also God') - big deal. I could use some more vaguely theological references to a feminine pantheon in art and writing. But as soon as anyone tries on a specific metaphysical system that spins around Mary, I slam the brakes. Systematic ontologies are entirely masturbatory to begin with, but add Mary's foundational involvement based on minor, spurious or invented sources and I read the signature of someone with too much time and not enough to do. Have a sense of Mary the goddess, not a guidebook to Mary's Cloud. I feel much the same way about God in general.

Mary as Christian example is more troubling. It is the more prevalent occasion for Mary-worship, and the more diversified. Mary is an ideal mother, and ideal wife, an ideal Christian, and ideal teacher, an ideal teenage girl.... Mary is everything someone desires to be, or pushes someone else to be. The key to why this is, and paradoxically why it unravels, is Mary's virginity.

The ideal and perfection afforded by virginity is an untarnished, unblemished understanding of the divine. Purity-obsession plays with soul/body dualism and an uber-transcendent vision of God. But Mary ever-virgin is not a good model for motherhood, or women in general. Virginity is too unreal, unblemished. It smacks of the old-school Christian obsession (and heresy) of denying Christ's incarnation. Christ pooped. Mary had a vagina. Neither wore white linens all over Jerusalem. They probably stank of olives.

The truth is, Mary seems like a bit of a badass. Gets pregnant, has child, raises child with someone she doesn't necessarily like very much but who provides. Puts up with ontological differences with child. Able to take drastic measures like birthing in a stable and moving to Egypt. Hosts angels regularly. Helps found religion named after child's gruesome execution. In short, Mary does not need our help to be a role model. We don't need to invent ways in which she is cool. The virginity is not her, its us, and its something else entirely.

We like to get it. We like to understand things. We do not like them to change, or be subtle, or relative. When we say Truth we mean Defined Block of Stuff, not relation dynamic love. But that is what we get, I think. Virginity feeds into our hope for simple answers through static, flat characters. But Mary was a person, a woman, before she was a character in the Gospels. She was real, multi-faceted, vibrant, and dynamic. Saying 'Ever-Virgin' is just a plea for a simple universe from its anxious creatures.

PS - my first post over 750 words.