Simply Mary. James Prothero
Catholic experience teaches me that she has made herself known from time to time and place to place across the last two millennia in various locations. I’m not alone in being visited. Still, why visit me? Why would she do that? I thought myself then and even now as just one more person in this wide world, just one nobody among billions, beloved by friends and family perhaps, but beyond that no one significant. There was a line in the old Lone Ranger show that we used to watch as kids. When the Ranger and Tonto (a poor name choice for his friend, if you know Spanish) finished saving the day and rode off into the sunset, often some bystander would say, “Who was that masked man?” The answer always came, “That was the Looooooonnnnneeee Ranger.”
Well, I have to ask: Who was that woman?
1. 1 John 4
Meditation Two: Who Is That Girl Anyway?
So, I suspect that I was healed by the prayers of Mary, but of course, there’s no way I can prove that. But then that is always the pattern, is it not? God seems determined to flaunt our need to nail down objective, scientific proof. Revelations are made to those who have ears to hear. There is no mass campaign to prove God’s miraculous powers. If there is any password into the Grace of God, it’s not anything your lips could utter; it’s having an open heart. If God has to put on a show for your insistent demand for proof, he’s not going to bother. Jesus himself performed many signs, but never when they were demanded—only when they were unexpected.2 Even as the Apostle Paul was seeing Christ on the Damascus road, none of his companions heard or saw anything they could make out.3 God doesn’t dance on command. He speaks to whom he will and when he does, we alone may be the only ones to hear.
As for Mary, Gabriel told her his news exactly in a way that would make everyone she cared about, her family and her fiancé, to doubt her. I can just imagine her thinking, “Just great. No one is going to believe me.” I recently saw a painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which I think the best Annunciation scene I’ve seen so far.(see the cover) It is by Henry Ossawa Tanner, and in it Mary is off to the right facing a blinding light to the left. She is dressed in simple, woolen robes. She is dark-skinned with coiling black hair. She is not particularly pretty in any current sense, nor does she have the Amish-girl, Caucasian look of Protestant Marys. All around her are the trappings of a poor woman’s bedroom. Her face is troubled and uncertain, as we know from her own account of the event, conveyed in the Gospel of Luke, that she felt exactly troubled and uncertain. Her fingers are interlocked, as if to keep herself from trembling. She is leaning over, almost bowing before this supernatural presence. This is an artistic portrayal I could believe. Why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one?
Mary obviously told someone, probably Luke himself, about the visit from the Angel Gabriel. In fact, the personal details in the Gospel of Luke not only in the Nativity story, but throughout, makes me suspect that Luke tapped her knowledge throughout the writing. They lack the vagueness of second or third-hand sources. Just think of Luke’s line: “But Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.”4 I can hear Mary tell Luke, “I treasured these things in my heart and pondered them.” How would he possibly know such a thing unless he’d either talked to Mary or someone to whom she’d given a very personal account? Treasuring and pondering are very specific and personal words. A second or third-hand source would most likely lapse into generalization and say something about how Christ’s mother was affected by events. But we get specific words that ring with the personal admission. The line itself is acknowledgment of how personal this all was to her. Much of the other detail in Luke’s Gospel has the ring of first-hand witness. I think there was a time and a place, perhaps in Ephesus, where Luke sat down with Mary and she told him what she remembered. And he used it in his Gospel. I’ve always thought of Luke’s Gospel as The Gospel of Mary.
I said before that I was unqualified. But that’s not strictly true. Certainly, though I took a few seminary classes, I’m not a Bible scholar, nor a theologian. By training I’m a literary critic. And that is how I will approach these texts—as texts that can be examined in the light of the times they were written. C.S. Lewis argues that one of the best indicators that the Gospel accounts are true are the amateurish way they are put together. They’re too sloppy to have been anything but reporting by their amazed amateur authors. Those authors were clearly unqualified. But that’s just the thing: God seems to love to select the unqualified. Look at Mary. Would any of us have picked a farmer’s daughter from a nowhere corner of a conquered country? So my approach is twofold: I look at texts as reportage from which we can extrapolate subtle facts. And secondly, I insist that this reportage is about real people, who act like real people do. Thus, Luke knows far too much about things that only Mary would have known, and therefore I conclude that Luke at some point had a long talk with Mary. But enough of this. Back to Mary.
Let us return to the moment, as Tanner’s painting portrays, Mary sat startled, and listened to this supernatural visitor. I suspect she didn’t run right away and tell her mother and father, Joachim and Ana, their names by tradition. Would you have believed your teenage daughter if she’d broken into your room and announced she’d seen an angel and was pregnant with the Son of God? More likely you’d get up and check to see if she’d gotten into the liquor closet. Then, as now, we are so accustomed to think that the humdrum pattern of our existence is rock-bottom reality, that we are rather confused by the miraculous on the rare occasion it hits us in the face.
In looking for a really solid book on Mary, I have looked at the images that artists have projected over the centuries. Mostly, unlike Tanner, they have painted Mary in their own image, conforming to their own image of perfection. So, Mary is always portrayed as the ideal of attractiveness by the standards of the day and the culture, and invariably she is the same race as the artist, her Jewishness being brushed aside. Even the Protestant images of Mary-the-Amish-girl make her sleepy and content, but always tremendously pretty and white.
And I could see all around me the representations of Mary in art. She is always calm. Most of the time she is looking away, or simply up at the sky. In some of the older Greek icons, she looks you straight in the eyes with a passionless, poker-face, like she just beat your full house with a straight flush. She is also always decked out either puritanically neat and trim—the way Protestants prefer to visualize her—or she is covered with gold and jewels, any one single gem of which would be worth more than all the wealth in her village, Nazareth. This is the way Catholics and the Orthodox like to see her. The puritanical, Protestant Mary always looks like a good girl, and here in America, her face tones are lightened and her hair is often shaded brown, in order to make her seem like a white girl.
However, European art beat us Americans to presenting Mary as a very white, European-looking girl, as in the many portraits of her as Madonna and Child. In them she most often looks a little sleepy, very unworried and relaxed, or at least I believe that to have been the artist’s intention. I am a painter myself and I would never take on the challenge of trying to paint Mary. For how do you portray in the muscles of the face the quality of spiritual intensity? Certain shameless wags have said of the Renaissance pictures of the Virgin Mary that she looked like she had a bad case of gas more than she looked spiritual. I am afraid I can quite see their point. The Protestant Virgin Marys are no better; they tend to look bored or a little sleepy, like they were on sedatives.
In Latin America, she is Our Lady of Guadalupe and her selling point was that she appeared like a First Nations young woman, a Native American girl. This too seems a projection. But of all the projections out there, this one must be closer to the truth. A dark-skinned, black-haired Palestinian girl would be my model were I to dare to paint Mary. Native American is close, though the facial bone structure is different between Native America and the Middle East.
What strikes me in all of this is how much when we think we’re looking through a window at something outside of us, we unconsciously turn that window into a mirror, so that what we see outside of us is more likely just . . . us.