The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Up in Hampstead we are rather less well known for our devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary than we are to that great twentieth century cult of psychoanalysis. The statue of Sigmund Freud stands at the bottom of Fitzjohn’s Avenue rather like a statue of the Virgin in a Mediterranean village. This is the modern saviour of our town, ever interceding for us in our quest for self-understanding.
But owing to the lamentable divorce between Christian thought and other modern disciplines, I think it’s to our detriment that the insights of this secular saint and his disciples are not more often used to illuminate our own tradition and teaching, not least in this most complex of matters, the role and identity of the mother of Jesus Christ. Trivialised as a mere vessel of the incarnation by some Protestants and exalted to the absurd heights of quasi-divinity by some Catholics, we don’t seem to be able to make very much sense of who this woman really was and what role she played in God’s purposes for the world.

Donald Winnicott, the great analyst of early childhood development, tells us that the role of the mother is neither functional nor supernatural, but is one of the practical shaping of a child’s relationships and reciprocity. The mother (or other primary nursing figure) is the one who takes the fundamental lead in the formation of any human life. So much so, that Winnicott was bold to declare that “there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother and a baby”.

So we should not be surprised that the primary symbol of the incarnation, which is itself at the heart of our faith, is not an isolated baby but that of the Madonna and child the baby who is God resting in the arms of the one whom God has entrusted to be the “bearer of God”, as the earliest Christians called her. And as Winnicott suggests, part of this divine trust was in giving Mary the role of developing her extraordinary child’s capacities for relationship and reciprocity that we come to see on every page of the gospels.

The point at which divine control meets good parenting(!) in this most famous instance of child-rearing will always remain to us a mystery. But what we might find ourselves resisting in Mary what makes us so nervous about idolatry is perhaps this most uncomfortable of truths, that God’s action in Christ must, at some level, have been an incarnation into dependence.

This woman shows us that God wasn’t just playing a game, only partially “trying on” our mortal experiences of dependence, vulnerability and death. This is the real thing God made fully human, born into the same world of dependence as all of us. How else could he raise us to his divinity? This is the scandal of redemption, accomplished by the incarnation of the one on whom all creation depends into the dependence of human life. If we can begin to take that on board, then we see in the Madonna and Child the Creator of the world gazing into the eyes of an ordinary (yet necessarily extraordinary!) woman, from whom he is so paradoxically learning to interact and to love. So Freud and Winnicott simply reinforce what Christians have always struggled to understand and to accept: that this woman was entrusted with a task of unparalleled importance in the life of the world.

More than any other saint, this woman’s depth of character, of faith and of openness to God has had consequences for our lives and our destinies. So how can we not join with Gabriel in his praise of a woman so wonderfully attuned to the ways of God and echo with him, “Hail Mary, you are full of grace”?
Jim Walters