SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

 

As the movie title tells us: there is something about Mary. Three things in particular, for us to reflect on. And the first concerns Mary’s voice.

Research repeatedly shows how men interrupt women in conversation, both privately and professionally – far more than women interrupt men. To take one example from the medical world: it is shown that male patients interrupt female doctors, male subordinates interrupt their female bosses and male students their female teachers. It happens in the Church, too, and I am sure I have been responsible for it over the years. The journalist, Mary Ann Sieghart, has written a book called ‘The Authority Gap’ setting out the subtle and not so subtle ways in which conversation is shaped and controlled by men.

 

Luke’s Gospel starts with the story of two pregnancies: Elizabeth and Mary. In time they would give birth to John the Baptist and Jesus. This was, by any human standard, an over-achieving family. Both births were entirely unexpected: Elizabeth was old for childbearing and Mary was a virgin. Luke records an encounter between the two women at Elizabeth’s home in the hills. Elizabeth prophesies a great future for Mary’s unborn child and Mary eulogises how God turns the world upside down, taking power from the powerful and giving it to the powerless. Their husbands,

 

Zechariah and Joseph were good men, who doubtless proved good fathers. But round the pregnancies of their wives, both men are silent in scripture. Zechariah had been serving in the Temple sanctuary when an angel had appeared to him to say Elizabeth had conceived and would give birth to a child who would be ‘great in the sight of the Lord’. Zechariah is a bit iffy about this news and as a result is rendered speechless by the angel for the duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Elizabeth becomes the narrator of her son’s birth.

 

Meanwhile, Joseph is not recorded in scripture as saying anything. It is Mary whose song of joy is sung across the world every day in the words of what we call the Magnificat. She is the house theologian. In time, Zechariah would praise God in his own song of triumph, but the narrative of these two births had already been established by Elizabeth and Mary. The story of the long hoped for Messiah was told by a comms team staffed by two women.

 

But what of the second thing about Mary: her dislocation?

 

Bringing a child into the world is an astonishing experience and people do this every day not just because it is coded into us to reproduce but because of an innate hope about the future. And yet there are risks at every turn. Mary’s birth is the best documented in history and it was nearly a disaster. Surrounded by clumsy farm animals and zoonotic germs, Mary and her son were also deprived of female midwives and female relatives who would have nurtured and protected them. With respect to the nativity, it seems to be a succession of men who are recorded visiting Mary. She would have been acutely aware of this.

 

When Herod sought the life of Jesus following news from the politically naïve wise men, Joseph and Mary do not return to their home town, but flee for their lives in the dead of night, according to Matthew’s Gospel. The refugee experience is scary and disorientating. Your home is no longer secure. When political assassinations happen, witnesses are murdered, too. Mary, Joseph and Jesus were each in Herod’s crosshairs. The refugee trail is fraught with danger. A refugee has little to no experience of the culture and expectations of the people they meet; no handle on how much people can be trusted. Predators lurk in the margins.

 

Jesus survived and grew, thanks to the quick-wittedness of Mary and Joseph, but Mary’s disorientation would have persisted. In the early stages of his public ministry, according to Mark’s Gospel, people accuse Jesus of having lost his mind. Mary and the family hear this rumour and go to find Jesus, who promptly seems to disown them when he claims his mother and brothers are really those who do the will of God instead. This comes on top of the exchange with his mother in John’s Gospel, where Mary points out that the wine has run out at the wedding and in response Jesus says: ‘woman, what concern is that to you and me?’.

 

We guide our children, but we can’t control them, however much we might like to. Many parents are amazed at how their children turn out, for better or for worse. Our children assume an identity or a role we did not see coming and at times it unsettles us, especially when the wider world relates to them in ways we don’t recognise. Mary was an archetype of this. She also belongs to the baleful cohort of parents – mothers – who see their children die before they do. It is the greatest lurking fear of a parent, and Mary inhabited its darkest place as a mother of the disappeared; those the state wants dead because they pose a threat to corrupt powers.

 

And finally, there is Mary’s worldview. Had her story landed in the twenty-first century, she would have been ruthlessly attacked online for: allegedly being a loose woman; for not having control of her son; for having pretensions for her son; for simply being the mother of her son. Women disproportionately face abuse online compared to men. It’s a way of trying to silence women; of intimidating them out of public life back into a private world where they supposedly belong. But here is Mary, loud, unsilenced and unapologetic in the early stages of her unplanned pregnancy shaping the way the world to come would view God.

 

Our familiarity with Mary’s song, the Magnificat, can desensitise us to its radical force. God brings the powerful down from their thrones. Even those whose thoughts are proud are scattered by the wind of God’s Spirit. It feels a partially fulfilled promise. From time to time in our world, despots are unceremoniously removed from power, but often only after ruining the lives of millions. In Mary’s prophecy, the rich are sent away empty, but we live in a world where the rich seem to know how to play the system to become richer. Mary’s song is a rebuke to the shoulder-shrugging we do at the state of the world. It is a rallying cry from the heart of God. And I wonder: is it a call from a woman whose world was built round men to see women in the lowly and the hungry who will be lifted up? Because women disproportionately make up these numbers globally.

 

Mary adjusted to the meaning and destiny of her son, in the end. She was there in the upper room on the day of Pentecost, filled with the Holy Spirit and present at the birth of the Church. It is an arc of victory, from the unmarried pregnant teenager to the mother of the Messiah and pioneer of the early Church. As Gloria Gaynor sang, in slightly more prosaic words than Mary:

 

I’ve got my life to live, and all my love to give and I will survive.

 

Because Mary is the mother of surviving women as well as of our Lord.