How Do We Know the Other?

A Reflection for the Feast of Mary the Virgin           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC August 14, 2016                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 61:10-11           Galatians 4:4-7             Luke 1:46-55               Psalm 34

How do we really know the Other?

Last week I spoke of the commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6^th a day late on August 7^th. Today I am reflecting on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin a day early on August 14^th instead of August 15^th, the day of the Feast. It all averages out!

How do we get to know Mary, the mother of Jesus?

There is a wonderful movie from 1947 called A Double Life staring Ronald Coleman, the man said to have had a velvet pillow voice. In the movie Coleman plays an actor, Tony John, who gets so into his characters that the characters take over his life. While playing Othello, his imagination takes over and he enters into Othello’s murderously jealous soul and strangles his oh-so-cheap girlfriend played by Shelley Winters, and later, trying to replicate the action in the play where Othello strangles Desdemona, he attempts to kill the actress in that role, Tony John’s ex-wife.

The movie is enjoyable melodrama, but it contains a kernel of cautious truth for to really know another person is to step away from the rational, to be willing to no longer rely on the masks we wear of being a “good” person and to admit the deeper hunger to know another from the inside out. Sometimes shame gets in the way of our dropping the mask, but when we know that we are forgiven for being the limited people we are, we are free to admit our shortcomings and failures. It is the movement away from being “in love” with an outside façade to being loving with each other.

There is a poem, if there are any heavens, by e.e. cummings about the holiness of that kind of love:

            if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one.            It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose

tall like a rose)

standing near my

swaying over her

(silent)

with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which

is a flower and not a face with

hands

which whisper

This is my beloved my

                                  (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

&the whole garden will bow)

How do we know another? Too often we try to get inside their heads as we try to figure out the other, but we only get to the outer shell, the persona, the construction of the ego of another. I can get all the facts and figures about another, I can describe how they physically appear or the actions that they take or the words they say, but each person is a mystery and the only way to encounter a mystery is to get inside of it by an act of intuitive imagination, a union of souls each giving graceful allowance to be known while maintaining respect for the other. Each must be willing to let go of all the “head” kind of knowledge and see the true self buried underneath all the layers of ego. This is how soul friendships begin and, it is also the beginning of worship.

How do we get to know Mary, the mother of Jesus? If we use our rational mind, then we accept the explanation of church theologians:

(a)    Mary is a substitutionary “Mother Goddess” figure the church used to help pagans wean away from the many Goddess cults in the ancient world. Or/and

(b)   Mary is a model of how women are supposed to bend to the will of predominantly male figures in her life. Or/and

(c)    Mary is the officially authorized motherly bosom in whom we can go for comfort. Or

(d)   She is a peasant woman who lived two millennia ago who claimes she had a mystical union with God and a child was born which she named Jesus.

Out of that rational thought, the Roman Catholic theologians made the first three views into dogma - Pope Pius IX in 1854 proclaiming the Infallible Dogma of Immaculate Conception which said the Mary was conceived without recourse to sex and therefore was sin free, pure enough to have a mystical union with God, and Pius XII in 1950 proclaiming the Infallible Dogma that Mary was assumed into Heaven in bodily form and therefore her body did not see corruption.

Jung responded to the 1950 action suggesting that the Trinity had become a Quaternity by writing in his Answer to Job:

One could have known for a long time that there was a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the ‘Queen of heaven and Bride at the heavenly court.’ For more than a thousand years it has been taken for granted that the Mother of God dwelt there.  I consider it to be the most important religious event since the Reformation.

I tend to be moved by the fourth option of the simple peasant woman who dared to have union with God. The Virgin Mary stories give Mary as the model for union as she says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”  How do we have union with God? We do as Mary does - open ourselves and allow God’s love to flow over, in, under and through, knowing that there is respect and love for another. See how the other lessons for today reflect that same theme of union. Isaiah sings of how the Divine wraps us up in wedding garments as God’s chosen one for a wedding festival. We are used to hearing of the Bride of Christ.  How about being the “groom of Christ”? How does that make you feel? We are so used to viewing “Union” as reflecting a sense of domination, but how about a joining of two lovers? The people chosen as bride and groom are not especially pure; they are simple people risking irrational connections with God. The Psalm uses the startling imagery of using the bodily sense of tasting God and finding God good as God found each step of creation good. How can we taste God? In his letter to the Galatians, Paul uses the imagery of us being the children of God. All of these are irrational, but we accept them as true.

As a result of her union with God, in today’s lesson Mary sings a song of defiance of the establishment. Mary is not meek and mild; she is a tough broad standing up to a male-dominated culture and saying that she and the God in whom she has union have a plan to take down the thrones of the mighty and to scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. I would suggest that the union is so strong that that she goes beyond gender. Every time the word Greek word “hautou” is translated by most official translators it is he, him, and his, but the word can also be translated as she, her, and hers. She and God enter into one. She does not relate what exactly happens in the union for it is beyond creeds and dogma of the rational mind.

Evelyn Underhill in her study of Mysticism calls that union “that perfect unity of consciousness, that utter concentration on an experience of love, which excludes all conceptual and analytic acts.” She quotes St. John of the Cross about what happens after the moment of union with the divine:

“All things I then forgot,
My cheek on Him Who for my coming came,

All ceased, and I was not,
Leaving my cares and shame
Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”

The mystics, male and female alike, speak of the deeper hunger for union with God and they call it ecstasy, which many assume has sexual overtones. That longing for union is the erotic element of love as C.S. Lewis says that love which is eros is a gift that is given not a thing that one gets. Its danger for being sidetracked is when one is influenced by the “Natchez Syndrome”,  from the line by Ogden Nash; “When ah itches; ah scratches!”

 John Donne wrote a poem called The Ecstasy which starts off with two lovers in each other’s arms, but they realize there is something else is going on;

When love with one another so

         Interinanimates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow,

         Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know

         Of what we are compos'd and made,

This union stuff is inviting and dangerous and yet life giving. Mary leads the way and invites us to follow, allowing ourselves to be loved and ravished by the Divine as we really are so that we might be outward and visible deliverers of the love of God to this broken world.

How Do We Really Know the Other?

On the Eve of Mary Day 2016 (poem)

Begging bow to me not comfortable plea

letting my love entwine you in soul deep

as morning dew within my pores to seep

letting me be one with you, you with me

grow with and within me new each day

each thought leaping over synaptic cleft

that you surround me both right and left

as you form me anew to make body pray

no longer bound to know a casual muse

each song note I’ll shimmer in response

in Your heart flow my blood to ensconce

so please never leave or seek to recuse 

letting it be to me as Mary that your will

dwells within us as a blessing to distill.