April 1, 2004
Mary, Mary
New books about the Virgin
reviewed by Stephanie Hiller
In her new book, Missing Mary, Charlene Spretnak argues that the Catholic Church made a mistake when, during Vatican II, it decided, in the interests of rationalism, to de-mystify the Virgin Mary, and then goes on to show that as the Queen of Heaven, Mary is actually more than she was ever held to be -- she is the Goddess herself.
It's an ambitious undertaking, elegantly constructed to appeal not only to "the choir" of spiritual feminists but to mainstream Catholics, especially those who grew up in a faith that has been stripped of Mary devotion.
In the first chapter, Spretnak looks at the debate within the Church (the biblicalonly vs. the biblicalplus interpretations of the Virgin's role). The biblicalonly view, which has dethroned Mary, is ironically the "progressive" view of the postwar period, based on a relativistic, scientific worldview. Too late, says Spretnak, pointing to the new science with its description of the cosmos as relational rather than hierarchical. This is a science that summons up the feminine, with her attribute of holding the world in loving relationship. By removing all of Mary's prayers and statues, new Church policy has deprived young people growing up in the church after 1960 of the powerful, maternal figure who had been the heart of the Catholic tradition for centuries. "She is the mother of spiritual salvation in the West, not only bringing forth the Incarnation but embodying the correction to so much that is otherwise unbalanced, incomplete, and ill conceived -- not the least of which is all-male religion."(53) In fact, as Spretnak goes on to show, removing Mary didn't work anyway; people continue to make pilgrimages to Mary all over the world, and attendance at major Marian shrines has increased annually, with a "surprising" number of visitations, or sightings, occurring during the past 20 years.
Spretnak tackles the views held by her "feminist-'progressive' sisters" that the "ethereal version of Mary on a pedestal is an insult to the dignity of women and their very real bodies," that women can relate better to the "real" Nazarene woman, that the Church, instead of restoring Mary, should recognize God as female as well as male, and that the mystical version is a pagan holdover not relevant to Christianity. "Even if one prefers to call the Divine She, or He, instead of It, why should that interfere with appreciating that we have, in Mary, a symbolization of a human who has cosmological dimensions, as do we all." (74)
Missing Mary's most eloquentchapters are the two in which Spretnak shows how deposing Mary is just one aspect of the Church's historic "Goddess Problem," and here she does not mince words. Without Mary, Christianity would never have taken its central place, she points out.
In embracing a full and rich theology of the Incarnation, the laity honored Mary as a profound matrix from which Christ's life took form and in which it unfolded. . . Had they not insisted on increasingly seeing in Mary the Goddess-like powers of efficacious compassion that complement, yet do not overshadow, the spiritual authority of the male Savior, it is likely that "the Jewsus cult" would not have survived much longer than Mithraism. (151)
Indeed, "in Mary the extremely ancient female expression of the sacred has been kept alive in the West." (175) Spretnak goes on to explore Mary's roots in the goddesses which preceded her. "The goddesses Isis, Hathor, Inanna, Ishtar, Demeter and Cybele were all, like Mary, both virgin and mother." Gently inching along her chosen path, Spretnak finally declares that Mary really is the Goddess in contemporary manifestation:
In Mary the cosmological body of grace is merged with the bountiful female body. Grace -- in a cosmological rather than a denominational sense -- is our conscious experience of the unity in which we are embedded. It is our perception of the larger reality, the sacred whole, infused with the divine creativity called God, Goddess, or the Great Holy. (205)
It's nicely executed and in such a way that it may even persuade those who would otherwise shy from these pagan undertones of the sacred feminine. Unfortunately, Spretnak chooses to sidestep some of the most disturbing aspects of the Virgin Mary as she has been portrayed over the years. The notion of an Immaculate Conception, with its implications that the usual way of conceiving a child is less than holy leaves us with the stain of concupiscence (sin) as rooted in sex, something Marina Warner dissected in her classic work, Alone of All Her Sex. And what of the terrible dichotomy of women as virgin or whore? So long as sexual desire is associated with shame, we will be prey to all kinds of perversions, not the least of which is the shady behavior of priests.
Mary's obedience is another difficulty.
Obedience is not to be equated with surrender. Surrender to the divine will is imbedded in all religious traditions, including the new age proverb "let go and let God." Recognition that we are each small players in a very large cosmic design allows us to get free of the demands of persona l ego. Obedience, on the other hand, means doing as we are told, and in patriarchal religions that means obeying male imperatives.
In her moving story, Looking for Mary, published in 2000, Beverly Donofrio tells of her own pilgrimage to the black Madonna of Medjugorje, in Bosnia, undertaken to "do a story" but also to explore her own yearning to re-establish a relationship with Mary. Donofrio is a feminist who left the church in her youth but now, troubled by a breakdown in her relationship with her adult son, she finds herself looking for the mother in her own heart. Her pilgrimage does lead her to that discovery, and she is able to heal her relationship with Jason. But she does so by yielding to his terms. The very last words in the book report her conversation with Jason on Mother's Day:
"Jase, I had a revelation at church this morning. I want to thank you for making me be a mother.""You're welcome," he said. "It's about time."
Jason has the upper hand. As the mother of a son who, like Jason, separates himself from me because of his anger, I read Donfrio's narrative with great personal interest. In our society, with its embedded male privilege, it's a challenge for me to maintain the relationship without meeting his conditions for letting me love him. Donofrio does have some things to apologize for (don't we all), having neglected her son and exposed him to harm from some of her boyfriends. Her love for Mary opens her heart to her own pain, freeing her ability to love. But their reconciliation contains a telling shred of that age-old patriarchal injunction, to obey.
What really freed Donofrio was her journey to the sacred feminine, for which Mary served as the vehicle. But Mary has been compromised, by the male priesthood and by the deep implications of the virgin birth. Instead of choosing Mary to represent the Goddess, why not choose the Goddess herself, she who includes the wild, unruly passion of nature as well as the demure, the modest, the devoted and the pure?
Like Donofrio, Spretnak loves Mary deeply. The Virgin's obedience is not a problem for her. But it may be a problem for the rest of us. Like resignation, which Mary worship also inspires, obedience to a social structure we did not create, and in which we are still invisible, has a price. When we accede to male standards of appropriate female behavior, we risk giving our power away in order to be acceptable. Like the search for women's equality in a male-constructed society, our obedience defers to male expectations, instead of showing that our own free-wheeling female nature has value in its own right.
Lesley Hazelton's book, Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, goes to the opposite extreme, giving us an empowered Mary whose teachings endowed her son with his miraculous healing powers. Given the position of women in the Jewish community of the period, this view seems a bit wishful, as does the conclusion of the book, that Maryam ended her life in the community of the women's circle.
In a very interesting first chapter, Hazelton emphasizes Jesus' role as a political activist fighting for the liberation of his people from Roman colonization and their impoverishment as a result. This part of the story seems real, based on information that is available about the period.
The immaculate conception here is described as a rape, probably by a Roman soldier. Hazelton is not the first feminist writer to choose that explanation for where the baby came from. It's hard to accept a divine birth from an act of such violence. Why not an act of love? Is it so difficult to imagine the young shepherd girl Maryam meeting a handsome stranger on a fine spring day -- and doing as lovers do?
On the whole, this "biography" seems too good to be true, a life fashioned to incorporate the values of an enlightened earth-based spirituality -- and where is the evidence for it? What I do like is that Hazelton recognizes Mary's grief and her Jewishness, which even feminist authors seem to gloss over. Yet, we end up with an idealized Mary, and I have to wonder why we need that?
Instead of making Mary into a priestess or a goddess among goddesses, why not see her as a doorway to the great power who manifests through all creation?
She is revealing herself, and she is using Mary, as she is using you and me, to show us who She is.
Order these books from Powell's!
Charlene Spretnak, Missing Mary
Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex
Beverly Donofrio, Looking for Mary
Lesley Hazelton, Mary, a Flesh-and-Blood Biography