VIRGIN MARY AND ME
As part of returning from travel to a place that I now see for a while as a foreign place, I went to the Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church Sunday morning. I like going to church to see friends, and because Kathe sang in the choir and church was a big part of her life and I feel her presence there. I also went for a practical reason, I wanted to talk to John Laney, who supervises the Warren Wilson cemetery, about placing Kathe‘s gravestone, that was completed while I was gone and this was an easy face to face way to connect with him.
But the main reason was to continue my puzzling about the quandary I’ve put myself in about making a connection between QAnon conspiracy theories which enliven some people by heightening their fury at elites through concocted stories accusing elites of pedophilia and the very different mythical Biblical stories that enliven people by bringing them into the presence of God and their own best emotions of love and caring. I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately. I’m wondering about the connection between stories intended to arouse us to fury and stories intended to arouse us to love when both kinds of stories seem to be unverifiable and from a completely objective perspective a little nuts.
It turned out that it was a good Sunday to go because the sermon focused on the Virgin Mary and her pregnancy as a 14 (or at least very young) year old and her visitation by the angel Gabriel, all part of the advent season leading up to the birth of Christ.
I have heard this story a number of times and never questioned it, it was simply a story told over and over at Christmas.
Lately I have connected my TV over the Internet to great art from around the world through a program called Artcast. The great paintings of Western Art come on for 60 seconds apiece in vivid color. It is better than visiting the museums they are in and a lot easier. Many of the the paintings were painted for churches and are of Biblical figures and saints. Others are of Greek mythology where I was month ago. One of the things that I have noticed is how violent and cruel some of the paintings are, eliciting intense emotion. But a great number of them are paintings of Mary and Jesus, Jesus as a baby, Jesus breastfeeding and being nurtured, Jesus being sorrowfully attended by Mary after the crucifixion. Mary is usually a very pretty, very young, very innocent looking woman looking adoringly at the fat little baby Jesus. She is always referred to as Virgin Mary, I guess to emphasize Christ’s divine birth, but maybe also to emphasize her innocence.
But this time the woman preacher talked about what it must have felt like to be 14 year old Mary. After church I began to imagine for myself what it must have been like to have been a 14 year old provincial girl living through the experiences described by Luke. What was it like told by an angel, certainly frightening in itself, that you were going to have a baby without having had sex with an older husband that you barely knew and then being told by an angel to visit Mary’s older cousin Elisabeth, who was too old to have a child, but who through divine intervention got pregant, through sex with her husband Zacharias but in a way a divine birth. When the two met Elizabeth’s unborn baby, who was going to be John the Baptist, leapt in her womb. Mary stayed with Elisabeth for three months instead of going back to Joseph. And then finally Mary was taken away from home into the unknown by the older Joseph and suddenly the baby was about to push out and she was in the dark on a donkey, in pain and probably scared to death, and the baby finally dropped out in a stable. And on top of that were heavenly hosts singing away and shepherds visiting and intimidating wise men and finally Herod was out to kill her baby but they escaped just before he killed all the babies in Bethlehem under the age of 2.
What in the world did it feel like to be Mary, at least Mary as I imagine her? What was going through her head? How did she keep from flying apart or going mad. But instead she sang praises to the lord, the Magnificat, the first advent hymn.
The whole story is too wild to be believable and yet here we were, mostly older masked people spread out through the church with experience of life and, not easily duped, and we were swallowing this wild story whole. The angels, the virgin birth, the coincidence of John the Baptist and Jesus meeting while still in the womb, the evil King Herod, the shepherds also being guided by angels, the killing of the innocents. None of that is believable, but it certainly is emotional and stirs us up. It is a marvelous story.
I confess that I slept through part of the sermon so I may not have gotten everything straight, and so this was my take and not the preacher’s, but I did go home and buy the King James Version of the Bible on Kindle for $1.99 and read through the story a couple of times so I’m pretty straight on the facts, which from a common sense perspective are not facts at all. But for the scared to death 14 year old, frightening enough to have this child forming within her for which she is not responsible, the prospect of the pain of childbirth, being separated from her parents with this older man whom she might have been glad to get away from for three months, and all of the wild events she went through just seems overwhelming, at least from a everyday point of view.
But of course, this story is a myth, and from my perspective as I was trying to puzzle my way through in a post a couple of days ago, myths to me are about finding ways to be fully alive in some inner visceral way. QAnon conspiracies are for me a way of enhancing feelings of fear and fury that make some people, whose identities are being threatened, feel fully alive with fury and ready to fight back. Biblical stories are a way of feeling fully alive through touching us in some deeply personal way, which makes us feel the loving presence of God. So it seems to me the story can be completely fantastic, in fact almost needs to be completely fantastic, to reveal the depth of the mythical projection of how we can feel most intensely and be fully alive, rather than being a story of verifiable everyday events. From this mythical perspective Mary is not a frightened, confused 14 year old. She seems to me to be an embodiment of the feminine, in her fragile innocent asexual beauty, and also the embodiment of feminine maternal caring, the loving and accepting and nurturing mother, often depicted in paintings breast feeding Jesus. She is intensely real as many mythical figures are, more real than actual people that we know, and has some of the same intense emotional power that Jesus has which is being celebrated during the Advent season and Christmas.
Which brings me back to the connection between the Christmas story and QAnon stories. Both are not verifiable, both stir us up through intense emotion that lifts us out of the conventional world. But the QAnon stories mire us in fear and fury and hate and are harmful both to the believers and the people they are furious at, while the story of Mary releases us from conventional routine and steers us toward love and joy, a celebration which makes us feel more fully alive and is good for us and for the people whom we respond to. In one way they are similar kinds of stories, and in one way they are the opposite from each other. And after all of this I am still confused and still wondering.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 