Mary had never been central to my worship. I have been inordinately fond of Eve; it was she, my comprehensible sister, who had planted in my blood and bones and flesh a variable human love, the intoxication of the body. Eve’s fall from grace–her radical curiosity–set in motion the wheels of salvation.
My bedridden grandma would have considered my love for Eve idolatry, were she capable of making such a harsh judgment. Inseparable from her rosary, she lit candles to the Virgin every hour of every day; her sickroom, with its plaster Madonna and its sickly sweet incense and her murmuring commiserating friends, was to me a kind of brown doom. I was a religious hybrid: my mother and I were Jehovah’s Witnesses, the rest of the family Roman Catholic. I thought my grandmother was an idolater, worshiping a denatured (and scary) Mary.
When I shucked off my fundamentalist Protestantism, the focal point of my worship became Jesus, fully human, fully divine. Between us and God there is such a distance; we curl into Jesus or–as I have now come to do–we curl into Mary, knowing that our gifts and our griefs are acceptable to them; the distance to them is navigable.
Mary exists to be used. She appears to us in the light of our own desires and imaginings. She has been used by feminists, by conservatives, by anti-communists. In her recent ““appearances’’ (unvalidated by the church) in Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and in Bayside, Queens (N.Y.), Mary speaks in end-of-the-worldese–she is used to satisfy the terminators.
About 10 years ago, I went to Medjugorje. Yugoslavia was on the verge of tribal implosion. ““How much is that scarf in the window?’’ I asked a shopkeeper in Dubrovnik. ““The Serbs! They breed like rabbits!’’ was her reply. My guide in Medjugorje said: ““You see where Mary appeared? On our side of the mountain, the Croat side. The Serbs don’t see her.’’ Neither did I. I expect she was there. She is everywhere.
She was also seen, corporealized, in a verified miracle, by a poor Indian in colonial Mexico. She appeared, not to a haughty Spaniard, but to a dark-faced peasant. Mary was a peasant. She is the champion of the poor, the needy, the young, the disenfranchised. One hesitates to say she is used by the poor, who are entitled to use anything they can. Mary was a poor woman and as such was also used, which is to say embraced, by Liberation theologians. I am using her. ““Now and at the hour of our death.''
She is hope. She does not have to explain or defend herself, as a suffering God does, against the charge that evil is permitted in the world, which makes our relationship with her so much less troubled than our relationship with God. She, born without the stain of original sin, teaches us that to be fully perfect is not to be a cipher but to be fully human–her sinlessness did not diminish her grief, her suffering, her yearning, her bewilderment. She offers us hope that we, too, might become co-workers with God, an imperfectly understood God. She offers us the hope that we may, as she immediately upon her death did, ascend into the heaven of our longings.
One hears that some in the church–including the pope–want to give her even greater stature, more titles. I’d be more pleased if, here on earth, ordinary women could more freely explore their callings to priesthood with the bishops and the hierarchy. The most lovable thing about Mary is her intimacy. Couldn’t piling more honorifics on her damage that intimacy? Except for that one trenchant fact about her, she is an ordinary woman. She was flesh, female flesh, and she enfleshed the body of her God. Her flesh anchors the church in the material world. Without Mary the church would be suffocatingly male, airlessly abstract.
On the doors of the Baptistery in Florence, Ghiberti has sculpted Eve and Mary. He sees them, beautifully, as twins. Arms entwined, they ascend, together, into heaven. What this tells us is that sinlessness and imperfection are braided, that it is possible to love Mary and to love Eve. The mingling, melding, braiding of good and mischief in every human soul is what makes us recognizable (and delicious) to one another. Without this knowledge of good and evil, genetically transmitted by Eve, we should not desire to know and to love God; we should have no need of Him. We should have no need of one another, or of one and perfect Other. Without Mary we should have no hope of one day knowing Him.
