Simply Mary. James Prothero
me to the second reason. As the quote above says, for the Jews, the holiest state was matrimony. This would have been Mary’s mindset. Why should she try to remain a virgin in a married household? And third, in the Jewish understanding of the time, not only the marriage feast, but the sexual consummation were necessary for a marriage to have taken place. I can understand Joseph waiting till Mary was no longer pregnant, but what reason would he have to wait after that? To be called her ‘husband’ as scripture does, is to say that they were man and wife in the flesh, given the Jewish meaning of the word.
It was Roman Empire era sect called the Manichaees who thought life-long virginity equaled holiness. It was also a Gnostic idea, and they got it from the Docetists, who believed Jesus was too holy to ever have had human flesh. All these groups thought that the human body, and therefore sex, were inherently evil, while the spiritual side was inherently good. And though the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches officially declare sex within marriage to be a good and holy thing, they both have echoes of the Manichaee/Gnostic beliefs, mainly in the stories of the saints, who not only have sexual self-control, a long-standing Christian virtue, but are totally free of all sexuality. Thus, we hear of this or that saint, followed by “virgin”, as if it was a credit to them that they did not commit the sin of having sex.
It is a curious thing how this contradiction in church teaching versus popular perception arose. The rise of monasticism led to the logical mistake that celibacy was a holier state. So as Mary receives more and more attention with the theological debates of the 300s and 400s, Mary has to be ever-virgin in order to have been holy enough to be the mother of Christ at all. More than this, a form of Christianity that believed that Jesus was just a man, son of Joseph and Mary, called “Arianism”, became very popular for a while, and threatened to drown “catholic” Christianity, that is Christianity as we know it today. In those hot debates it was either Mary was never a virgin or forever a virgin. All nuance was dismissed and people faced off on extreme sides of the issue. Anger makes people simplify and oppose.
The Middle Ages in many cases moved rituals that had once been worship of pagan virgin goddesses, almost unchanged into veneration of Mary. That’s how we got the glowing Madonna and we lost the country girl from Nazareth. Though I should point out that Protestants with their puritanism didn’t do a whole lot better when it came to avoiding the Manichaee belief in the wickedness of human flesh and the embrace of an extreme asceticism.
I agree with the Jewish position quoted above: God made married partners to join in fleshly union and declared it good. Even in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul calls believers to whatever life God has ordained for them, celibate or family. Neither is superior nor inferior—just different. Yes, one might dedicate oneself to God and never marry, as monks and nuns do. But that is about focusing one’s life, not about sex being somehow evil or spiritually inferior. Too many people fail to see this distinction. And making Mary of Nazareth into some super-virgin with virgin super-spiritual-powers is a blurring of the truth. A think our Protestant sisters and brothers have a point: we do the truth and Mary herself no favors by effectively making her a goddess.
But on the Other Hand . . . .
She is the Theotokos, the God-bearer. There is no getting away from that. The Orthodox, like their Catholic sisters and brothers, stand by this, as they do her ever-virginity. So, once again, I’m dancing here in double-heresy, from both sides of my faith. I must be one of those crazy Anglicans.
Part of the Protestant problem with this is the rejection of asking prayers of the dead who are with Christ, that is, the saints. Their rejection of this is understandable, given how badly this belief was abused by the time of the Renaissance. Phony saint’s relics were a major market in the Middle Ages, as Chaucer likes to satirize in his Canterbury Tales. And there are still places in the world where pagan festivals have been turned into saints’ festivals with very little difference. For some peoples of the world, the saints are seen to be minor gods, and this Protestants find offensive. I don’t blame them. But it may be another case in history (and there are many) where we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. What the Catholic and Orthodox churches actually teach is that those who have gone to be with the Lord, through the medium of the Holy Spirit, can still pray for us. This belief is known as “the Communion of Saints.” And just as I might ask for the prayers of someone I feel is close to God in preference, so the saints are close to God. You can argue with it, but if you take the time to talk to enough people who do it, like my heart healing, it is a mystery why so many prayers have been answered this way.
And face it, to Bernadette at Lourdes, Mary said, “I am the immaculate conception.” I don’t see why she needs to be, but then most things God does I cannot claim to understand. If I’m going to credit my small visitation, I can hardly throw rocks at Bernadette. As I said above, I wonder if some of our theological language like “immaculate conception” really is a near miss or a symbol for the reality. I have little problem with the immaculate part; what I can’t accept is the conception part. This immaculately conceived, ever-virgin vision of Mary is of a detached woman, if she’s really a woman in any sense that we know, born perfect, living in meditative bliss, at least if the paintings are to be believed, giving birth by teleportation and then topping it all off with turning her husband’s home into a convent for her and a monastery for him. And she does this in the face of all the Jewish teaching she’s grown up with, that a husband and wife should become one flesh.
I cannot believe she was and is that detached. And I cannot believe that for at least two reasons. First, she was promised a sword in her soul. She did not have an easy life. And second, like many who have experienced great pain and tragedy, her empathy for those who are poor and suffering is born of her own poverty and suffering. The book of Hebrews says of her son: “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”7 If the eternal Son of God had to learn obedience from suffering, why should his mother, Mary, escape the common suffering of humanity and live on a cloud of perfection? These things don’t happen abra-cadabra Poof! and all of a sudden Mary knows about empathy. Her Son, our Lord, was not spared pain, nor did he seek to avoid it. Why should she float effortlessly above the dirt and blood and hunger? Some people think that’s what holiness looks like. But we should know better. Her son, our Lord, exhibited holiness by feeding the hungry and healing the sick, not by sitting in some permanent, painless meditative state. As did he, so I have to believe, so did she.
So I believe Mary’s vast empathy, which is a common element in all her later appearances, came the hard way. I believe she became immaculate, but the way most of us grow, through pain. Mary paid her dues and it became holiness for her. This is the grace she was given, the grace that fills her. And if she likes to appear these days to poor children and children out watching flocks, that may have something to do with Mary the little poor girl in the hills around Nazareth, watching flocks. Those are her kind of people. And Simeon promised that a sword would pierce her heart and soul. But I believe this was more than witnessing the horrible execution of her son; this was all her life. Still, still, I am convinced that an unusual grace was and is granted to her, who knows, perhaps at birth. And she doesn’t need to be ever-virgin for this to be true.
In the end, I’m one of those crazy Anglicans, asking questions and reluctant to queue up in anyone’s pre-set line of march. So, if you will, bear with me. I want to do what I hoped Hazleton and Cunneen had done: through the eyes of faith, I want to go through the life of Mary, minus all the unbelievable, gassy spirituality of writers like Catherine of Emmerich and Maximus, and really explore who this first-century peasant woman had to be from what we know, and how that expanded into the woman who just doesn’t seem to want to leave us alone, and hasn’t taken her death as a halt on her activity on this small planet. I hope that in doing so, those who have rejected her in their minds, might find a way to see her at work in the world without all that imagery and theology that make her look like some disconnected goddess, and instead see her as a woman, and all that comes with being a woman.
I realize this is a rather odd sort of biography, which is why these are meditations, and not a claim to know that everything I’m about to propose is historical fact. For one thing, most of my assertions are speculation based on what we do know, and I do not pretend they are more. Except for Herod’s land grab, most of this