Letter #160: Marian Contrarian
A Rosary, A Revelation
Sprung.
Your response to this month’s essay hit an important nail headlong. “Church orthodoxy is so precious that any mention of its limitations can reek of subversion.”
Yes, absolutely. Which is why many religious people react with reflexive hostility when I insist that Jesus wants them to open their fists and let their judgments fly away. For now, my only response is: try it, and see if it does not bring you closer to Christ.
But there's also an addendum to my essay that enriches my point. It is a revelation I had shortly after my talk with Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas. But brace yourself! To hear it, you have to set judgement aside for a few hundred words.
Here goes.
I do not believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary. Mary is, to me, the model of mankind. She took God into herself and brought forth new life in his image. That is the task of every human, and the result of every human life lived well. But for me, the scripture is clear: she did not have sex with Joseph until after Jesus was born, then she did.
But more important than the historic yes-or-no of it, is what the belief says about feminine sexuality. I have often joked… (Again, brace yourself. I make jokes about things I love.) I have often joked that a virgin mother is a miracle but a virgin wife is a pain in the neck. Because of my high respect for Mary, I’d like to think that, after completing her unique role as the essence of human endeavor, she continued to exemplify feminine humanity by giving solace and children to her husband.
While talking to Matt, I mentioned that I’d never prayed the rosary, a meditative series of mostly Marian prayers. He generously gave me one with instructions on its use. I took it home and prayed it and found it very beneficial.
Later that day, a new thought came to me. God’s kingdom is eternal. Eternity is not a long time, but all time, outside the logic of time and so beyond linearity and causation. As you once remarked about quantum physics, we can understand this, but we can’t imagine it.
In such a kingdom, there is indeed a way in which Mary is ever-virgin. She is always the mother who never knew a man just as she is always the full wife of Joseph. In this way, her perpetual virginity is at one with her perpetual feminine humanity. I found this vision very deep and beautiful — enlightening about womanhood and life.
I don’t offer this as an alternative to Roman Catholic belief. In Anglican Catholicism, Mary’s perpetual virginity is a “pious opinion.” You can’t go wrong believing it, but it’s not required.
I only tell this story as an example of the ways in which orthodoxy and individuality can combine to create a profound vision greater than either one provides alone.
With which, I end this week’s conversation.
Love, Dad
While I don't agree that Mary and Joseph had an ordinary marriage, I think your proposal gets at the truth from the wrong end of the telescope and is thus a way of understanding it that is beneficial to anyone.
I grew up in a very secular household and it took me a long time to understand and accept the perpetual virginity of Mary. As I did, I came to think of it almost exactly as you wrote -- we all live in God's eternity so there's a sense that anything about us is eternal. I don't think that any more.
There's no one person or thought that made me think, "ah, I have it now!" but the one that came closest to that was a theologian (I don't remember who, Jaruslav Pelikan, maybe?) who said that by being both a virgin and a mother, Mary is uniquely herself--she doesn't belong to any man. Not to her father, not to her husband, not to her son. Not because she was a proto-feminist who hates men and no one was good enough for her, but because she belongs to God alone, and so God gave her all those things in a way no other woman has ever had them. A greater way. Sex is a good thing, but it's a thing of Earthly life that will pass away, and Mary was given MORE. She had MORE marriage and motherhood than we do. Assume Plato was right for a minute, and all women experience just slivers of the forms of "marriage," "virginity," and "motherhood." She participates in all of them at the same time, and to a greater extent. God gives her more, and gives them forever.
On a practical level, Mary bore Christ inside her for nine months and then fed him with her body for months after--it makes no sense to me to think she was the human equivalent of a lead-lined vessel impervious to the holiness of God, and just popped Him out one day and went on with her life. You're an artist, you know how artworks and buildings can give people a sense of awe and peace and holiness. I think Mary's body must have been transformed like that, but in a unique way. I don't think Joseph was just a hanger-on who followed her around like a slave because she was too holy to touch, I think she and Joseph had a marriage that was MORE than what we are granted. He had more of marriage and fatherhood than we do. Sex within marriage is a fantastic gift but it's only a shadow of what is to come, and I think they got more of what is to come.
But however we understand it, the perpetual virginity of Mary was for all intents and purposes universal East and West for most of Christian history, and so I accept it. Again, while I think your proposal is only part of the truth, that part is all true and will benefit people who come to see it that way.
Irish-Catholic here, which means Roman Catholic, of course. In all my time in St. Philip the Apostle School, I don’t remember being taught the perpetual virginity of Mary. I’ll admit there’s the tiniest possibility I didn’t pay full attention in theology class(es), and there’s a distinct possibility that a hungry boy, such as I was, also did not pay the strictest attention at mass each Sunday. Consequently, it was long after college that I first heard mention of it.
Well, you know, old dogs and new tricks. I still have a difficult time believing it. Joseph accepted his young wife had not been with another man. Okay, I get that. Christ’s conception was, indeed, a miracle. But I have a most difficult time believing the Lord God expected him to also go the rest of his life without “knowing” Mary.