A Day After the Feast of the Immaculate Conception
Yesterday was celebrated by millions of believers as a feast day: The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. My mom was raised in the Catholic church, and I remember sitting in the holy hush of my grandparents church where Mary was venerated and her image repeated around the space in art and statues and song.
I had fully meant to write a reflection about Mary yesterday on the feast day closest to Christmas (yesterday, December 8) but it seems fitting that the job of being a mother filled up my day so much that I couldn’t find space to write. And then, I realized (insert face palm) that the Feast of the Immaculate Conception actually celebrates Mary’s conception, not Jesus’, which is a whole theological debate upon which I am in no way qualified to comment.
Still, the idea, however misguided on my part, got me thinking about Mary, and the ways her story stirs our imaginations and our faithfulness, as well as tying the experience of mothers everywhere to the story of Immanuel, God-With-Us.
These aren’t meant to be exhaustive but instead, what I’d share with you if we had a cup of tea could take time to savor these together.
These songs about Mary: Among my Advent songs are these songs, an hour and a half in total, that explore Mary, her Magnificat and acceptance of God’s role for her in the story of God breaking in to our reality.
Icons from Kelly Latimore: My favorite modern iconographer, Kelly Latimore, has so many images I could mention that invite us to imagine the intersection between our world and the stories of the saints. These are those of Mary that have stirred me recently, especially in light of weeping mothers and those displaced around the globe.
This Devastating Poem by Thomas Merton:
To the Immaculate Virgin, On a Winter Night
Lady, the night is falling and the dark
Steals all the blood from the scarred west.
The stars come out and freeze my heart
With drops of untouchable music, frail as ice
And bitter as the new year's cross.
Where in the world has any voice
Prayed to you, Lady, for the peace that's in your power?
In a day of blood and many beatings
I see the governments rise up, behind the steel horizon,
And take their weapons and begin to kill.
Where in the world has any city trusted you?
Out where the soldiers camp the guns begin to thump
And another winter time comes down
To seal our years in ice.
The last train cries out
And runs in terror from this farmer's valley
Where all the little birds are dead.
The roads are white, the fields are mute
There are no voices in the wood
And trees make gallows up against the sharp-eyed stars.
Oh where will Christ be killed again
In the land of these dead men?
Lady, the night has got us by the heart
And the whole world is tumbling down.
Words turn to ice in my dry throat
Praying for a land without prayer,
Walking to you on water all winter
In a year that wants more war.
Imagination and the Annunciation: My current favorites
Betony Coons 2016 Collage and acrylic paint
from “Annunciation” by Denise Levertov
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–
but who was God.
This was the moment no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
____________________
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.
Overshadowed Patty Wickman 2001 Oil on canvas
Tanja Butler, Oil, acrylic and gold leaf on panel, 2005
An Article on What Mary Might Mean for the Mennonite Church (an old one but a good one). It features a piece by our own Jerry Holsopple. You can also see some of Jerry’s art, including pieces about Mary, at The Church of the Incarnation, the Sanctuary Gallery!
And finally, a poem I wrote in the Advent of COVID lockdowns and missing our neighbors. I still hear Mary’s song of hope when I think of the lives of my refugee and immigrant mama neighbors and long for the liberation she proclaimed to be realized here, now:
Magnifica…
Genet is swaying heavy down our street,
overshadowed by the hanging pines
that line our neighborhood.
I didn’t know her expectation:
We’ve all been cocooned
three months (more) in our houses.
Baby one was born among red dust,
amid Amharic ululations, Before
flight through Egypt, bodies
tucked inside the tomb
of an oil tank for three days across desert.
Baby two was a tentative resurrection in Israel,
Pentecost tongues of hidden hotel workers
clucking delight.
And baby three will be
Here.
Will He bring down rulers from their thrones?
Will the hungry be filled with good
things?
Her belly stretches
