I’ll shortly begin adding to this blog some sonnets I’ve written for St. Mary. Advent, with Christmas quickly approaching, is a good time to reflect on her—on Mary of Nazareth, the Blessed Virgin, the God-Bearer, the Mother of God, Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven or by whatever title you know her. She has been a bone of contention, of course, between Roman Catholics and Protestants, with Anglicans caught, as often, somewhat uncomfortably in the middle. I find myself drawn to the long tradition of honoring her while also put off by many aspects of it. The problem, for me, is that her exaltation long ago seems to have passed the point where she could still seem authentically human.
The tradition certainly does recognize her human emotions of joy and sorrow. But what about our human capacity for uncertainty? Like other saints, Mary has been magnified into a paragon of dedication and commitment—one who mastered faith, hope, and love from the get-go. She had never a shadow of doubt, we are led to think—no questioning as to whether all this was really true, whether she had comprehended it correctly, whether God was really involved with her life in a way so completely unimaginable.
I took it as a gift, then, when, a few years ago, Nancy Kerr and I, in our ongoing project of reading Greek together, took up St. Romanos’s great kontakion (verse sermon) on Mary at the Cross. Romanos, a sixth-century deacon in Constantinople and a brilliant poet, was deeply devoted to Mary, but that created no difficulty to him in portraying her uncertainty and fear. In his poetry, she is the focus of the greatest mystery in all of creation, the incarnation. In her womb, God and humanity have become indissolubly united. She is a figure beyond our common humanity by virtue of this link which she was instrumental in creating. At the same, she is one with the rest of us in her inability to know the future or to enjoy a level of certainty that is in fact beyond our finite human condition.
It is this finite, even sometimes anxious Mary who is, at the same time, the sanctuary of God’s incarnate mystery that moves me mostly deeply. And I have tried to capture bits and pieces of her portrait in this series of sonnets addressed to her. They’ll be appearing at intervals on this blog over the next couple of months; and since they don’t represent quite the conventional approach to the saint, I thought this brief introduction might be useful to those interested enough to listen to them.
[For those who are interested, the kontakion I mentioned is no. 19 in the edition by Karl Maas and my teacher C. A. Trypanis. It begins To;n di j hJma'” staurwqevnta deu’te pavnte” uJmnhvswmen, “Come, let us all hymn the one crucified for us . . . ” In the Sources Chrétiennes edition, it is volume 4, number 35.]
