Bringing the Divine into our World

By Jacqueline Sanchez-Small, OSB

It’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s true: for a not-insignificant chunk of my childhood, I thought there was a good chance that I might be called upon to be a modern-day Mary of Nazareth, and grow up to give birth to the Second Coming.

The church I was raised in was extremely conservative, and sermons usually took an apocalyptic tone. To me, It didn’t seem too out-there to think that if a) Christ was coming back soon, then b) he would obviously need a mother like Mary, who was chosen to be his mother because she was sinless and c) here I was, five years old, very confident that I had never sinned, so d) if I stayed on the track I was on, I might get my own visit from an angel and give birth to God’s presence here on earth.

I remember holding the little blue and white figurines of Mary from Nativity sets, studying their folded hands and serene faces, searching for something—like how you might look at a sepia photograph of your great aunts, trying to recognize your own smile, your own eyebrows, a certain expression. As if this might give me some answer about where I was coming from or going to.

It’s not that I thought that it was inevitable that I would be the Virgin Mother 2.0. It didn’t seem like it would be a very happy development, either: I knew Mary took a real hit to her reputation in the village, and being a pregnant teen was probably not much better-regarded in my circles than it had been in hers.

But still, I cherished the possibility—that something sacred might happen and I could be a part of it. That the realm of the divine might not be that far away from me. That I might be able to maintain the inner certainty that I was really, really good.

Eventually, though, everybody sins, whether it’s lying to your parents, or hitting your brother, or finding that somebody has given you a good reason to feel real hatred.

Eventually, I had to realize I was no longer quite as sinless as I had once been, and probably had fallen out of the running for potential bearer of the next Christ Child. It wasn’t a huge surprise, but a bit of a disappointment.

I moved on with my life, grew up, kept sinning and repenting, ejected myself out of my fire-and-brimstone church and found my way toward a more progressive, liberating kind of faith, and mostly forgot about this whole delusion.

But I think about it sometimes, especially in December. Advent and the Christmas season are full of Mary, from feasts like the Immaculate Conception—celebrating not the virgin birth, of course, but her own conception without original sin—to a genre of rather treacly religious songs like “Mary, Did You Know” and “Be Born in Me,” that invite the listener to put themselves in her shoes, overawed and mystified.

And there are always critiques and commentaries from people who, like me, are trying to square their feminist convictions and their Catholic faith. You hear a lot of sighing about the whole virgin-mother thing: how it’s a standard no woman can ever fulfill, how the Church’s obsession with purity—especially sexual purity—has done irreparable damage to generations.

We progressive types tend to view the idea of sinlessness with a fair amount of skepticism, seeing it as an extension of the disembodied, repressive, hypermasculine framework we’ve all inherited and would like to dismantle. Instead, we put forth other images of Mary that speak to us today. We hold up Mary, the birth-giver, entering into the gritty, grueling, and dangerous realities of pregnancy and childbirth. We connect her labor to the Eucharist: what better example can you find of “this is my body, this is my blood,” than a mother looking at her newborn? We celebrate Mary, the girl-prophet under Roman occupation, courageously declaring that the poor will be fed and the rich sent away empty. There’s even a great illustration of Mary in combat boots stomping on a snake and a skull, surrounded by the words of the Magnificat, which has been quite popular online in recent years.

“Magnificat” by Ben Wildflower

These are valuable, exciting, meaningful ways of praying with Mary. They take her seriously as a model for all of us ordinary people today, taking her off a pedestal and making her more real and relatable.

But I don’t know. I’d like to think these images and sense of closeness could co-exist with the old idea of her absolute holiness and sinlessness. Mary, most pure, might be a reminder of that part of each of us that was there from the beginning, the place where we are nothing more or less than the image of God. Like Mary, each of us has infinite potential to say yes to the opportunities that we find to make the world more holy and loving.

I still believe, you know, that my heart is characterized by a very real goodness, even if I fall short of my ideals every day. Actually, I believe every single person’s heart is very, very good, capable of having miracles worked though it. When I try my hardest, I can even convince myself that people who are currently doing great harm to other people and to the world also have a heart that is inherently good, and could be oriented toward goodness and love again.

The probability of being asked to physically give birth to the Christ Child is, I think, quite low. But we still have the ability—the need—the responsibility to bring the divine into our world, to give life to the Gospel, to be mothers of the sacred, creating and nourishing and building up people and places that are holy and just and peaceful. Sin doesn’t have the final word. The pure, pure love of God does.

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AUTHOR

Jacqueline Sanchez-Small is a Benedictine Sister of Erie, her ministry is with Benetvision and Emmaus Ministries.