At one point, my favorite Christmas carol was, pardon my pronunciation, Un Flambeau, Jeannette Isabella. In English, it’s called Bring a Torch. I liked this carol so much that in the February after the first Christmas I heard it, I named my new dog, with a fluffy white tail that swished like a torch in the night, Flambeau, meaning flame. This name lasted a day before someone was able to hammer some good sense into me that Flambeau is a silly name for a dog, so I named her Jeanette Isabella. Just kidding, I named her Billie, which has seemed to work okay for the last 13 years.
The carol depicts a scene recently after the birth of the Christ child, and one woman calls to another to bring a torch to see the beautiful mother and child, but Hush! Hush! Quietly now he slumbers; Hush! Hush! Quietly now he sleeps.
A few years ago, this carol must have been on my mind when I bought this old print in a little shop in a town in Italy that used to be famous for prints like this. I initially was drawn to the depth of color and the detail, but I also just loved the scene, of Jesus asleep in his mother’s arms; of John, already in his camel hair, just wanting to touch the sleeping child, with just one finger. And then with Mary gently admonishing him, Hush! Hush! Quietly now he slumbers; Hush! Hush! Quietly now he sleeps.
Now, I offer this depiction of Mary, as the Protector of Quiet, with joy, because it’s joyful to share the things you enjoy, and also, with some hesitation, because I know there is a justifiably mixed relationship to the depiction of Mary and what about her the church centers. Here in The Episcopal Church, I would say that in this moment our relationship with Mary is largely open to being defined, as we lack an established tradition of Marian devotion, like the Catholics, nor do we fear that any interest in Mary is a distraction or threat to our focus on Jesus, like some Protestant traditions. So we are empowered to, and responsible for, imagining a Mary that gives life to all members of the church, in tune with the feminism that has undergirded our full inclusion of women at all levels of sacramental and institutional leadership, for the past fifty-two years. With this in mind I want to look at how we understand Mary as the theotokos, the God-bearer. I want to see see how imagining Mary as a vessel for the divine has relevance for how we understand all humans today, and our spiritual lives.
This part of the story begins with the angel Gabriel announcing to her that she would bear a child, and that this child “will be called the Son of the Most High,” and that his kingdom will have no end. She then questions how this will come to be, since she is a virgin, and the angel affirms that she will conceive by divine initiative, and therefore the “the child to be born will be holy.” Mary responds, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be according to your word.” Mary makes space in her life in the most literal sense, in her very body, for God.
In her book The Reed of God, first published in 1944, Caryll Houselander speaks to this space within Mary as a very specific type of emptiness. “It is not a formless emptiness, a void without meaning,” she writes, “on the contrary it has a shape, a form given to it by the purpose for which it is intended.” Houselander gives three examples of things in the world that require emptiness to be what they are: a reed flute, a cup, and a nest. She ascribes all of them to Mary: “a reed through which the Eternal Love” would flow; the chalice “into which the purest water of humanity was to be poured, mingled with wine, and changed to the crimson blood of love;” and “the warm nest rounded to the shape of humanity to receive the Divine Little Bird.”
In the Magnificat, the hymn of praise we heard in the Gospel reading today, we hear the fullness of Mary’s understanding of who she contains within her. She has traveled to see her relative Elizabeth, and when Mary enters and greets her, the child who will become John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, recognizing the voice of the Mother of the Lord. Elizabeth says, “For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” Mary’s response, the Magnificat, begins with the personal but quickly expands to include the full scope of the Jewish people’s understanding of God’s history and plan for redeeming Israel. She shows her faith in the great reversal of fortune that God will bring about in Jesus, bringing down “the powerful from their thrones” and “lifting up the lowly,” and “filling the hungry with good things” and sending “the rich away empty.” And she understands this action, and her role to play, within the long arc of salvation history, “in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” From this, I don’t think it’s a a great risk to project forward into Jesus’s childhood and imagine the wisdom and knowledge, in addition to faith, that would have permeated their home.
Houselander understands this space within Mary, that she’s able to give over to be filled by God, through her virginity and her youth. This gives me pause, as maybe it does you, too. She understands this, however, through Jesus’s repeated statements about the Kingdom of God being for the young, which we interpret in both literal and metaphorical senses: that young people have unique access to understanding the ways of God, and that there’s a way for us older adults, to, in a spiritual sense, become like children, innocent as doves, as trusting as lambs. In response to the question of whether this is possible for us, she writes frankly, “Of course it is; if a bird’s nest has been filled with broken glass and rubbish, it can be emptied.”
We strive after this emptiness because only be clearing away the clutter, from within and without, can we see the type of container that we are. And knowing this, we have a chance to see the divine purpose for which we are fit. As Christians, we die to new life, we become less, so that, through us, God can do more.
Given the bulk of the church’s history in which we could only imagine a limited number of roles for women, it deserves to be said explicitly that we believe there is an infinitely wide array of shapes that a person’s soul can take, many more roles than mother, caregiver, and teacher. So there are many more metaphors to imagine than the reed, the cup, and the nest, and so an infinitely wide array of divine purposes, many ways to be, for women and for all people. So if this spirituality of emptiness is true for women beyond motherhood, then it’s applicable for men as well; we, too, nourish and protect, and enter into extended phases of uncertainty and doubt that require us to call upon our faith.
Houselander says this succinctly: that there is “one thing that we all have to do, namely, to bear Christ into the world.” So while for Mary it is miraculously literal, for us it is metaphorical, but no less capable of miracle, as anything that involves God can be. Who we were each born to be, and how we’ve been shaped by all the experiences we’ve had in this life, we are each a container to be emptied of the distractions from God, so that we can be filled.
This doesn’t just have to be conceptual, though, just passively waiting for God’s initiative. There are ways to do the clearing. The feminist theologian Sarah Coakley writes that we can practice this self-emptying, and so grow in it, by contemplative prayer. She writes that “this vulnerable activity of ‘space making’[…]whilst risky, is profoundly transformative, ‘empowering’ in a ‘Christic’ sense.” She continues, “it is a feature of the special ‘self-effacement,’ this gentle space-making, this yielding to divine power which is no worldly power, that it marks one’s willed engagement in the pattern of cross and resurrection.”
In my experience, as imperfect as I am at keeping it, a practice of this kind develops an obedience to God that will never become subservience to others. It clarifies what is solid within us—our unqualified and indestructible belovedness by God—and what is light and immaterial, to be carried away on the next wind. Houselander, in a phrase that I’m still trying to plumb to its full depths, calls that which is at the center of each of us, “that still, shadowless ring of light, round which our being is circled, making a shape which in itself is an absolute promise of fulfillment.”
Coakley asserts that through silent contemplation, apropos to the concerns of feminism but applicable to all, there are fruits of the spirit beyond those given by Paul, such as love, peace, and gentleness; these include “personal empowerment, prophetic resistance, courage in the face of oppression, and the destruction of false idolatry.” This isn’t silent contemplation for a marginal improvement in concentration or equanimity, good as those both are, but an invitation for the God who made his covenant with Abraham, who brought Israel out from the Egypt, and who gave his son so that we might know fully his grace and and receive his spirit, to work in you.
Arriving here, I look again at the image of Mary, and want to say she is not just fulfilling the parent’s role of protecting the child’s sleep, but encouraging all of us, to quiet. To silence. To clear the space within you. To bring a candle, to illumine the beauty of Christ, and to be with him, in silence.
Let us see what God does next.
Leave a Reply