Simply Mary. James Prothero
a woman who prefers to peer through clean windows and shows no interest in mirrors.
Scott Hahn’s book Hail Holy Queen was very helpful, but his agenda was to explain to Protestants why Catholics were so in love with the Virgin Mary. Sadly, it wasn’t what I was looking for. Then I thought I’d found the book on Mary that I needed. It was Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother by Lesley Hazleton. Hazleton started off so well, acquainting the reader with the everyday life of a girl in Galilee in the first century. She had obviously done some real research, and was familiar with Israel and the history of the area. But Hazleton wrote from the perspective of the Jewish faith, and this only faintly. She explained how our name for Mary comes from the Hebrew name, Maryam, a form of Miriam, a name possibly meaning “bitterness”. Our current “Mary” is a lift of the name as it appears in two forms in the New Testament Greek, either “Maryam” or “Maria.”
But back to Hazleton, what began well, turned into a speculation of how Maryam of Nazareth really was a misunderstood herbal healer who taught herbal healing to her son, so that he could perform healings that others considered miracles. In the end, Hazleton’s Mary is a New-Age spiritual pilgrim. Hazelton turns another window turned into a mirror. I say this meaning no disrespect to our Jewish brothers and sisters. And if Jews are skeptical of Christ, it may have something to do with the appalling and homicidal way Christians have treated them over the last few centuries. The Holocaust was merely the frosting on a deadly cake of centuries of persecution. G.K. Chesterton said that the biggest argument against Christianity is Christians. For Jews, this has been tragically and lethally true for a very long time.
And it is even sadder when we think that this gilded Catholic or Orthodox Madonna, or this puritanical, white-skinned, virgin Mother of Protestant tradition, was and is actually a Jewish girl. Her son was and is still Jewish too. I have since found other books that have helped me. Sally Cunneen’s A Search for Mary: The Woman and the Symbol was almost the book I needed. It provides much useful and objective information. It lacked but one thing: it was not written from a standpoint of faith.
But even so, I wasn’t sure why Hazleton was writing. If Jesus of Nazareth, Jeshua of Nazareth if you will, was not the Messiah, the Christ, then, as C.S. Lewis has argued, he was a lunatic, or a fantastically gifted con-man. In either case, if Maryam of Nazareth is not the Mother of Christ, why should we have any interest in her at all? Why bother? Do we normally study the mothers of lunatics and con-men?
It is when the miraculous touches a rude, simple farm-girl, making her the Mother of God Incarnate, that we first are intrigued. Her? That simple country-bumpkin with the straw in her uncombed, long, straight black hair? Her? Still smelling like the dung she just shoveled out of the stalls? Not Maryam! She’s destined for some working man’s wife, driving away whatever youthful beauty she might possess with the brutal life of woman’s work in a poor agricultural village, popping out babies until childbirth or disease catch her and her life flutters out like a snuffed candle.
But I have to assume that there was a quality in this dark-skinned girl raking out the stalls that the Creator of the Universe, the God of Israel found compelling, that he chose her from all the young women ever born to humankind across all the millennia. To God, she was and is one women in trillions. To be chosen the vehicle by which the Creator invaded his own creation—the thought is beyond my grasp. But unlike Hazleton, I must write from a standpoint of faith. Otherwise, why bother? If you want a cold, scientific, or even New Age, or perhaps militant-feminist Mary, a “Historical Mary,” who can explain-away all the miraculous elements, Hazleton’s book awaits you. You can stop reading this book right now. If you just want responsible information, I recommend Cunneen’s book. I have been touched by miracle. I have to write from that place.
But as I said, I have to assume that there was a quality in this dark-skinned girl that Almighty God chose. What would it look like? I dare not try to paint it. I’m not sure I could improve on the Italian Renaissance and their gassy Madonnas, nor our current crop of Protestant, sedated Marys. But I do suspect that it would be surprising to us, not what we would expect. If we walked into a room with Jesus’ family, un-introduced, we probably couldn’t pick her out. We’d either be looking for the Protestant Virgin, whom to our minds would look faintly Amish, or the Catholic and Orthodox Blessed Virgin, who would overwhelm everyone in the room with her golden glow and opulent clothes. We’d probably all miss the dark girl in the corner, talking to her friends, wearing plain, undyed woolen robes. I like her in blue, as all the pictures portray, but dye was for rich people—poor people like Mary’s family used their money to buy food, and there was never enough for that. Whatever they might spare financially was sucked up by Roman taxes. Rich girls wore dyed robes. If the Virgin Mary ever had blue robes, it was and is only in Heaven. Perhaps Mary is a little distracted, or perhaps looking at all the people in the room with love, but at the same time all too aware of what makes a small town odious: the petty jealousies, the gossip, and the pride. There would be a sadness in her eye to see this all around her. She would not stand out, nor be primly puritanical. She would just be, to our eyes, yet another poor young woman among her family.
So, imagine how much faith it took for her to say yes to the angel, knowing full well that an unwed mother-to-be might be stoned by those who follow rules without love. It would mean she would have to stand out for once. And I suspect she was more of an introvert. This was cruelly hard for her, but she took it on. I think you would see determination in her face. You may not notice her, but you’d think twice about messing with her. Intensity, not sleepiness or gassiness is the quality that emanates from her. Her son “set his face” to go to Jerusalem, crucifixion and death.5 We have to think, especially with the Spirit of God for a father, that the genetic side of Our Lord came from Mary. I tend to think that she too could “set her face” to do something, including risk her life to assent to be an unwed mother for God. I think she was—and still is, very formidable. But how to portray that in art without making her look like she just missed her bus and was ticked off about it? Well, that’s the hard part. Human emotions are many and varied and telling a story in paint by a face could have many interpretations. If we had spent any time with Mary during her life here, I think we would find that she surprised us at every turn; we would feel that we could never get to the bottom of her. And we’d be right.
Why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one?
Why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one? And here I immediately come perilously close to the minefield of Protestant versus Catholic. Protestant artists, writers, and theologians view Mary as a mere woman, a sinner like the rest of us, though probably better than most, chosen to bear the Son of God. Catholics by official dogma, hold Mary to have been “immaculately conceived”, without sin, and assumed into Heaven at death. The Orthodox agree with them. Much of that gassy Renaissance art was meant to portray a perfect, superhuman, and blonde-north-Italian Mary. And even though my Protestant friends do not hold to the concept of immaculate conception, they still portray her as patient, silent, and supportive of her son. I don’t wish to even try to weigh in on one side or another in this issue. I would rather explore why we have such a fissure in world Christianity over a peasant girl from Nazareth, and what we do actually know or can surmise.
But I have to get back to my question: why do we need Mary to be superhuman from day one? The question may seem to be pointed squarely at Catholics, but the Protestant Mary is rather super in her own different way. The Protestant problem with the Catholic veneration of Mary, and “Mariology” is that they fear it is heresy, if not idolatry. They believe that Catholics have made Mary the fourth member of the Trinity, a goddess. Certainly, all the Orthodox and Catholic art with a glowing, gilded Virgin Mary, heaped up with jewels leaves this impression on Protestants, which may explain why they always go out of their way to portray her in very modest and plain first-century costume. I would say the Protestant portrayals were more accurate if they didn’t try so hard to make Mary look Caucasian. In either case, we’re taking a country girl from Nazareth and turning her into something far more. But I don’t mean to laugh at either my Catholic, Protestant, nor Orthodox sisters and brothers. I think the answer is that we all sense there is something special to this girl, beyond just who her son is. And our art reflects our understanding. If Catholic and Orthodox Marys are glowing and