THE CLOUD -- AND THE LADY

Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà

Growing up as a Protestant, however liberal and un-Calvinist, one doesn’t spend much time or attention on the Mother of Christ. Mainly in the Nativity story at Christmas. But Catholic Mariolatry (as Protestants call it) is vaguely distasteful and very, very foreign. I remember exchanging e-mails with a colleague, a former Episcopalian converted to Rome, about this: I told him that as an Anglo-Catholic I could go along with much of what I experience in the Roman churches to which, living in France, I now go, but that the whole BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) business still put me off.

            Yet as one deepens one’s faith, one cannot avoid it for ever. It must be faced and dealt with. And what better day to do it here than “le quinze août” as they call it, secularly, republicanly, in France, i.e. the Assumption of the BVM?

            Myriam, then. Small-town girl from Nazareth, Galilee. 18 or so, engaged to Yosef bar-Ya’akov the builder, perhaps about 25. And then, one day, the Cloud happens to her. Announced by a man-like figure all of light. And in the Cloud, as we know, the Deity very occasionally comes among humans. In this case, she is pregnant; she visits her cousin Elisheva, also pregnant, and poetry happens. And later she gives birth to the Meshiach, the Anointed of God.

            So far, so good. As a scholar and a Christian (Prot or not) I can follow this; and having seen evidence of the Cloud in other places in the Bible I can go along with the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity also. And, of course, she is so very touching. Not just in her small-town innocence, but in her unhesitating Yes to the proposed earth-shaking Event. In that, she is a female Abram. “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” And in her Magnificat, which shows her to be the greatest woman poet since Sappho.

            Now, though, minefields loom. I have serious trouble with the emphasis on her perpetual virginity. Not that it’s impossible; but it’s just so convenient to a Mediterranean civilization (owing much to Indian dualism) that esteems women only when they are virgins or mothers. You put those two categories together, and Wow, a new goddess. It has always struck me as undermining the whole concept of the Incarnation. (C.G. Jung admired it: he said Catholicism was psychologically right to complete the unstable male Trinity with a female fourth. Theologically, though, the problem remains.) Moreover, the Gospel itself mentions four brothers of Yeshua by name – Ya’akov, Yosef, Shimon and Yehuda – and throws in a few sisters (typically unnamed and unnumbered, but let’s assume two and call them Elisheva and Chana). The Church’s centuries-long hemming and hawing on the subject – they were cousins, all sorts of relatives were called “brother”, etc. – would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

            I find the picture of Myriam as a richly-fulfilled Jewish matriarch (Yosef seems to have died in his Forties), presiding over a Friday-night Sabbath dinner with her five sons and two daughters infinitely probable and attractive. And it in no way contradicts anything said later in the Gospels. She was with Yeshua at the wedding in Cana, and (like any mother) whispered to the attendants not to pay any heed to his demurral but to do whatever he told them to. She appears briefly with the others in a story of which the point is not rejection but every believer’s bond to Him. And she appears at the Cross, with a few other women, when everyone else – all those brothers and sisters, all the disciples except Yochanan – has skedaddled. She is the Blessed Mother of the Pietàs, of which Michelangelo’s Rondanini is the most suggestive and heartbreaking.

            Buoyed by Mediterranean virgolatry, the Church for centuries could not bear the idea that the Mother of God could just, like, die, and be eaten by worms. So various alternatives were considered, and spread everywhere in popular devotion. The Dormition, the Assumption, etc. And finally, as late as 1950, Pius XII declared the bodily Assumption of her into Heaven to be a dogma of the Church.

            Do we go along with this? An African priest this morning stated unequivocally – and perhaps rightly – that the Assumption was and is the inescapable accompaniment of the Resurrection. I’m not sure of this, but it is true that if you  can accept the second there is no inherent reason why you cannot accept the first.

            What, now I come gradually to pay much more attention to Our Lady, I find more important is her role as “la première de cordée”, the first on the rope, the one who leads the way of all other mortals in accepting her Son. That I can see, can admire, can even worship. I can pray a Rosary (though I keep forgetting the bits) without any qualm of conscience or scholarly mind. And I rather like the image of her being lifted out of our atmosphere into the glory of her Son and being close to Him for eternity. Where she can say Baruch atta Adonai for, and with, us.