in defense of cherishing the virgin mary...

NOTE: This is a bit of a rant so be forewarned.

Yesterday I read what often strikes me as an annoying, post-modern, humanist assessment of ancient Christian doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary. Let me state at the outset that many such articles seem well-intentioned yet intellectually incomplete to me. They tend to strike me as theologically adolescent, too. That is, long on passion but short on historical and spiritual depth. To be sure, I acknowledge and openly confess my spirituality is decidedly mystical. I resonate more with the apophatic wisdom of Eastern Orthodoxy than rational Reformed theology. I am more at home in the poetry, liturgy, music, smells and bells, and mystery of high church worship than the accessible sermons of self-help Protestantism and its praise and worship hymnody. And I cherish icons, incense and silence more than Western demythologizing or the sanitized sanctuaries of my Congregational heritage. (Just listen, if you can, to what is arguably the most stunning musical composition in all of Christian liturgy: Rejoice, O Virgin, Theotokos by Rachmaninoff.)

Such liturgical aesthetics alongside my mytho-poetic theological sensibilities, therefore, makes it tough to grasp why anyone would spend their time dumbing down the subtle yet robust paradoxes of our tradition. To suggest, for example, that we simply give up talking about the virginity of Mary because: 1) it doesn't make sense to modern people; 2) it violates the integrity of contemporary science; and 3) it might contradict a simplistic notion of Christ's incarnation for some reduces God talk to bottom-line utilitarianism. I am all for tossing our superstition into the dustbin of history. I celebrate rigorous reflection on the sacred mysteries of our faith that always vex novices. But to boldly posit that human life will be better when the outmoded doctrinal poetry of our past is relinquished and buried as intellectual detritus is misguided at best. There is no empirical evidence to support such specious and simplistic speculation. Nor is there any popular clamoring for demythologizing Christianity. Or Judaism. Or Islam. Or Buddhism for that matter. (see "Eight Things We Gain When We Lose the Virgin Birth" https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unsystematic theology/) 

T.S. Eliot, of course, prefigured this argument when he wrote "The Rock" in 1934 (as did Orwell in 1984, Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, and Huxley in Brave New World.)

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

There is simply no evidence that demythologizing reductionism gives birth to a wiser, happier, healthier or more peaceful people. Better than most. C.G. Jung grasped that "since the beginning of time, humankind has centered and located itself in the sacred." (Gertrud Mueller-Nelson, To Dance with God, p. 11) When we deconstruct the sacred from our habits, removing mystery, poetry and awe from world view with mere utility, human beings create pathological practices that replace our religious rituals. Instead of living into the rhythm of creation with holy days of feasting and fasting, we have 24/7 dieting and excessive eating disorders. Where once we honored the wisdom of Sabbath rest, now we are addicted to stimulants so that we can work well into the darkness every day of the week.

Now, in very recent history, we have created as wholly a secular or desacralized world as there has ever been. We have evolved a new, non-religious society where we think ourselves to be free and unencumbered by taboo and by the irrational, a world where we think that we can create ourselves. To see evidence of this progression, one need only look at the medieval cathedral in the center of the square, with the rest of the city oriented around it. Move over sea and time and see the little white churches at the heart of the New England village. And then go west, to California, where the restless freeways are strung along the coast, punctuated periodically with food-shop-and-rest stops. Along the old road, the early missions are now engulfed by urban sprawl. (Mueller-Nelson, p. 11)

This is not to romanticize the brutality of our collective past. Rather, as the Hopi people of the desert Southwest confess, the way of contemporary culture has become koyanisqatsi - life out of balance. Not life in harmony with the holy as it was created. Climate change and the fires, floods, and droughts we have seen over the past five years alone should stand as warning. The rational way alone is incomplete. It evokes for me the furor of an adolescent who knows part of the truth and sees it as universal. Think "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in Disney's Fantasia. Or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Or any of the dystopian films of the past 50 years. "Without a way to consciously feed and express our naturally religious nature, we create a vacuum, a void which is quickly filled in with its unconscious counterparts. Our religious hunger is not passing away; rather, our loss of a religious nurturance only makes us more aware of our hunger. We want meaning, fulfillment and wholeness." (Mueller-Nelson, p. 12)

Please remember that the rise of Maryology did not occur from the top down. It has never been a doctrine to control the masses or subvert science. Instead it has been the popular Christian expression of our intimacy with the holy feminine. Think the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Americas. Or the Theotokos of Eastern Orthodoxy. Or the Black Virgins of Montserrat, Barcelona and Częstochowa. Look at the most recent visual protests against the Trump regime's cruelty at the US/Mexico border, too for signs of the Virgin's vitality and value. To be sure, the various creeds of Christianity contain references to the Virgin Mary - the Apostle's Creed being the earliest - yet all do so only to confirm the holy/human paradoxical nature of Jesus. Besides, as Karen Armstrong writes in her insightful book, A History of God, at their core the creeds are brilliant, spiritual poems using simulacrum to evoke mysteries that will always be too great for explanation. 

Why not give up our Western obsession with dualism and embrace the Virgin in all of her wisdom and worth? The Spanish mystical genius of the 16th century, St. John of the Cross, gets it right in ways we need today:

If you want, the Virgin will come walking down the road pregnant with the Holy and say, “I need shelter for the night. Please take me inside your heart, my time is so close.” Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime intimacy, the divine, the Christ, taking birth forever, as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us is the midwife of God, each of us. Yes, there, under the dome of your being, does creation come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim, the sacred womb of your soul, as God grasps our arms for help: for each of us is His beloved servant never far. If you want, the virgin will come walking down the street, pregnant with Light, and sing.