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A Reflection for the Feast of Mary All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. August 17, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
A Reflection for the Feast of Mary All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. August 17, 2014 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Mary:“I’m bursting with God-news; I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.”
I
have moved the lessons from the Feast of Mary the Virgin on August
15th
to today. Since we call ourselves All Saints, I like to recognize the
patronal days of different saints when I can. Saints are not perfect
people, but regular folk who have encounters with God. We are Saints,
and historical Saints remind us that God chooses all sorts of folk,
maybe even you and me, to bring in God’s Kingdom.
When
I get off center about things, I need to center myself by breathing.
I close my eyes and breathe in and breathe out; understanding that
each breath in is the breath, the pneuma,
the ruarch,
the spirit of God, that which is greater than myself, coming in to me
to give peace and to allow me to rest. This is what I call prayer;
where I approach God not with anything I know in my head but with a
heart full of longing. Sometimes I will add words of which two of my
favorites are the Hail Mary from the Roman Tradition and the Jesus
Prayer, an ancient prayer from the Orthodox Church tradition: “Lord
Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.”
I
came across that prayer in high school when I was reading the book
Franny
and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger, the author of Catcher
in the Rye.
At one point in the story Franny is reading a book called The
Way of the Pilgrim
about a Russian Monk who is traveling across Russia reciting this
prayer as a sort of mantra as part of his breathing until the prayer
moves from his lips to his heart, and then he is able to see God. He
no longer needs to use words. Franny’s longing for a mystical
relationship caught my imagination and I went out and got the book
and started to pray. One variation is to cut the prayer down every
tenth repetition:
“Lord
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
“Lord
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me,”
“Lord
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy.”
“Lord
Jesus Christ, son of God.”
“Lord
Jesus Christ,.”
“Lord
Jesus.”
“Lord.”
The
other prayer I got from my Roman Catholic grandmother, is the Hail
Mary: “Hail
Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst
women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother
of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen”
I
will say this prayer quietly and calmly until the calm in my
breathing, in my heart, in my soul matches the calm in my voice.
Two different prayers to the same God, but one uses the male side of my faith and the other uses the
female side of my faith. But God is
neither male nor female. One of the challenges of the western
patriarchal tradition is that we tend to use masculine pronouns when
we refer to God. What the
Trinity tells us is that God is relational.
When Michael
Downey talks about God in
his
book, Altogether Gift: A
Trinitarian Spirituality, he
uses the terms “giver, given and gift/ing”. He
also writes:
“The
Hebrew word for a woman’s womb and the word for compassion are
related, and both
are related to the word for mercy. Thus, the
mother’s intimate, physical relationship with her
newborn is the
prime image for compassion and, hence the compassion of God in
Christ. To
speak of the compassion of God is to speak of God’s
quivering womb — a womb that
trembles at the sight of the frailty,
suffering and weakness of the child.”
Therefore,
one way I understand God is through praying with Mary. The ancient
religions all had a male - female pairing of God energies; there were
Osiris and Isis, Zeus and Hera, Shiva and Kali, Mars and Venus,
Baal
and Ishtar,
Yin and Yang which were seen not as competing but as complementary
forces that created a whole. The Hebrew insistence on the Monotheism
of God with the patriarchal priestly caste tended to eclipse the
feminine aspects of God’s mercy in daily life. Jesus tries to
return that feminine of compassion when he says things like
“Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are
sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not
willing”.
When
the followers of Jesus took over the family business of the church,
they emphasized the masculine again. However, there was a strain that
held on to the feminine and that coalesced around the icon of Mary.
Over the centuries the men of the church didn’t know what to do
with a full woman, so they focused in on divorcing Mary from sex with
increasing doctrines like perpetual virginity, where she never had
any children and remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus, to the
Immaculate Conception, where Mary’s parents, an old couple, never
had sex. But I like to see Mary as full of life and blessing all of
life. I like to see her as Eugene Peterson translates the Magnificat
in his translation called The
Message:
I’m
bursting with God-news:
I’m
dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He embraced his chosen child, Israel;
he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.
It’s exactly what he promised,
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
 |
| from enemylove.com about the subversive Magnificat |
I
like to see her singing and dancing lustily. I like to see her
wrapping up the baby Jesus and leaving Bethlehem just before Herod’s
soldiers get there to kill the babies. I like to see her ripping
Joseph a new one when he loses track of the young boy Jesus on the
trip to the Temple. I like seeing her going around the wedding party
at Cana of Galilee and telling her son to get busy and help the
guests have a good time. I like to see her showing up at Jesus’
place and telling him that he was causing the family too much grief
and he needed to get his butt home. I like to see her with a group of
friends and just laughing up a storm at a bawdy joke. I like to see
her hurling insults at the religious rulers and hypocrites that lined
up against her son. I like to see her crying at the loss of her
husband and her son because she knew how to love deeply.
I like to see her, not as a white marble, perfect, patient goddess,
but as a full-blooded sister, mother, wife who cares what happens to
people - full of compassion. The kind of person I need on my side as
she prays for us sinners now and at the hour of our death - and
beyond.
Andrew
Greely, a Roman Catholic Priest and storyteller, relates a tale about
Mary as all compassion:
Once
upon a time the Lord God went out on patrol of heaven just to make
sure that it was still a city that worked. Everything was fine, the
hedges trimmed, the grass cut, the fountains clean, the gold and
silver and ivory polished, the mall neat (Of course they have a mall
in heaven. Where else would they put the teenagers!). He stopped by
to listen to the angel choirs sing and they were in great form. Then
on one of the side streets he encountered people who had no business
being in heaven, at all, at all. Some of them should have been
serving a long sentence in purgatory, others would not get out
until the day before the Last Judgment, still others would make it
into heaven only on very special appeal. So he went out to complain
to St. Peter. “You’ve let me down again”, he said “and
yourself with the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” “I have not”,
said St. Peter. “Well, how did they get in?” “I didn’t let
them in.” “Well, who did?” “You won’t like it.” “I have
a right to know how they got in”. “Well, I turned them down and
didn’t they go around to the back door and didn’t your mother let
them in!”
“Hail
Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst
women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother
of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen”
“Lord
Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
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