Mary, not Magic

By making Mary pseudo-divine, we rob ourselves of a model of our own humanity.  There.  If you’re in a hurry, that’s all this is about. 

When we were young and raising our kids we would visit my folks in Chicago, so the kids would know their grandparents and vice-versa.  Part of the weekend visits was going with them to 8:00 Mass at St. Stephens.  There was a 10:00 Mass, and a Noon Mass, but it was 8:00 Mass that they went to.  We Catholics come to know that wherever you are, these early, middle, and late Masses take place on different continents, the cultures being absolutely foreign to each other.  8:00 Mass takes place on a continent on which children are rare, where 80% of the inhabitants are 80, and brevity is the first rule.  10:00 Mass finds
a culture where procreation seems rampant, where parents are spacers between kids whose elbows can’t resist those of their siblings, where sandwich bags of cheerios and even the occasional game-boy keep the kids from revolting, where music and movement and self-expression lengthen the experience to the point that the kids’ timers begin going off after communion

but before the final blessing, while parents try to find their snooze-buttons so they can hang on just five minutes longer.  Noon Mass takes place on a continent where people sleep late, and except for their median age being much younger, are similar in many ways to the 8:00 Mass.

Oh, how do I admit that Kathy and I prefer the 8:00 Mass here at our parish in our new home town?  Here where marriage and procreation seem to have continued as it was we when we were young, the 10:00 Mass is just too noisy and busy and crowded for us, and Noon way too late.  But God, I feel like we are back in St. Stephens, in the old church where Mary is a goddess to be worshipped and not a human to emulate.

Yesterday was the annual celebration that I see as a red herring, a dogma tossed on the way of pilgrims to distract us from our quest for an authentically human life.  Was Mary taken bodily into heaven?  Geez, why do we ask that, or for that matter, why do we ask anything about heaven?  But in the old church, the continent on which many 8:00 Masses are celebrated, life on earth seems to be about earning heaven.  And Mary got the bonus of being able to take her body along.  That seems to me as inappropriate as burying a guy in his Mercedes….like it’s gonna run where he’s going.

What pickles my pixels about this is that this Mary-as-Queen-of-Heaven stuff deprives us of a great role model, a great example of humanity.  She said yes.  Greeted by the invitation and challenge of living a life impacted forever by the presence of God, she said yes.  Mary, by saying yes to accepting within her body the spirit of God, closed the relationship gap that Adam and Eve had opened.  By putting her on a pedestal, we reopen the wound, recreating the false dichotomy between humanity and divinity.  And we turn life into a competition for heaven, off the path that is the footsteps of God-with-us, his feet formed, along with the rest of his human body, in the womb of a young girl who said yes to the mystery of Holy, and in doing so showed us not the nature of a goddess, but of a human. 

Life is about learning to love, about loving, about building on earth the Kingdom of God, not piling up points to earn the kingdom of heaven.  It’s about saying yes…like Mary.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.