You only have to turn on the television to be reminded that these are not easy times for Christianity. There is a critical mood in the air whether it’s in the news coverage in advance of the papal visit or the sinister trailer I saw for Richard Dawkins’ forthcoming programme on faith schools. What was once unquestioned and assumed to be good or benign is now viewed with great suspicion. And yet questions of religion and spirituality are very live. I’m reflecting on that increasingly as I prepare to work among young people many of whom are open to spiritual or religious meaning in life, but who, for the most part, view the traditional church as irrelevant or even as a destructive force.
The recent statements of the American author Anne Rice has been an interesting articulation of that zeitgeist. Rice reverted twelve years ago to the Christianity of her childhood but came to the conclusion a few weeks ago that the Church was not the place for her. She wrote:
“In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”
Very interesting language, because although some prominent atheists jumped on Rice’s statement as a vindication of their position, she makes clear that she is leaving the church because of her commitment to Christ. She quoted Mahatma Gandhi’s famous line, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.” Rice knows that there is something important at the heart of all this, too important to be obscured by any of the shrill debates that dominate the contemporary church. She recognises that there is something to be re-received.
I have come to the conclusion that we live in an age in which it is increasingly urgent that we receive afresh what the Christian faith means and how it is lived out in the church. Too much of our Church life is dominated by the conflicts and prejudices of the past. And Although Rice is writing out of the peculiar American context, there is still much in the English Church that unhealthily obscures what is at the heart of the gospel. We too have an urgent need to re-receive the truth that the heart of the faith and overcome the shrill debates of past and present.
One of the particular areas in which we need to do that in the English Church, is in relation to Mary. For centuries this woman has been hijacked and distorted, manipulated for political purposes and co-opted for sectarian agendas. To some she has adopted a quasi divine status that has truly obscured the centrality of Christ as Redeemer. To others she has been denigrated to the other extreme, a mere vessel for God’s purposes, implicitly casting the male God as one who would simply use a woman for her body and then cast aside.
All of this has fuelled Christianity’s despisers and added to that sense of the destructiveness of church teaching:
• Mary becomes the unattainable ideal of femininity: virgin and mother.
• Mary, as the virgin ideal denigrates sex and the body for all of us in the Christian life.
• Mary, as quasi divine figure, reinforces the notion that the real God is wholly male and can only be understood in masculine terms.
So in the 21st century it’s time for us to say: Will the real Mary please stand up? It’s time for us to let go of the distorted arguments of the past and re-receive Mary as the central character that she is in the story of our redemption.
Our knowledge of the tradition should help us grow in faith, not hold us back. So the question for us now is, What does Mary have to offer to Christian life today that will make the world a better place and not one scarred by the kind of destructive Christianity that Anne Rice, and so many people today, have rejected?
I want to suggest three ideas that I’m associating with three Latin words, grounded in Scripture but emblematic of the traditions of Mary. And they are: fiat, magnificat and stabat.
So first, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum – Mary’s words to the Angel Gabriel “let it be to me according to your word.” Mary’s fiat was the password to the salvation of the world. It is sometimes described as her “yes to God”. But it’s not quite as strong as that. It’s not a positive ascent after weighing up of considerations. It is merely, as the Beatles reminded us “let it be”. It is the recognition of one who knows that she is not the one in charge here. She simply has the wisdom to know that to oppose the divine plan is neither in her interest nor the interest of humanity. So she says, Amen, let it be.
So how might we conceive of this willing submission in our lives? Strangely, I think Mary’s fiat is most paralleled in the kind of acceptance people might find on the diagnosis of a terminal illness. This is the realisation (so counter to our popular mentality) that we cannot fight the inevitable, that we human beings are not in control of everything. But Mary tells us that we can make that kind of surrender at any point in our lives, not merely accepting death (though surely that’s part of it) but more especially accepting that our lives are in the hands of God, that we are not the master of our own universe. And Mary teaches us that it is through this realisation, and the submission it entails, that we gain life in all its fullness, and life for others.
Too often in our consumer society, people view religious choices alongside all our other lifestyle choices. And I’m the last person to advocate a mindless assent to a religious code. But Mary reminds us that believing in God is not intellectual assent, or even in some ways an act of volition. It is an act of surrender, of submission to God simply because God is God.
What follows from this fiat, this surrender, is magnificat. I never quite understood these familiar words that we say every day evening prayer. How can a human soul magnify the Almighty? But as a prism refracts light, so a soul that has surrendered to God makes the colour and depth of God visible to the world. The purpose of Christian life in the world is to channel the life of God through the Spirit, of which Christ was humanity’s clearest expression. The fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace – are divine qualities that are given a room to grow in us, only as we put the egotistical self to death and make room for our true selves to be channels of God. Magnifying God is reminiscent of what St John writes about in his epistles of the love of Christ being perfected in our love. God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God is magnified in them just as he was magnified in Mary.
The greatest scandal of the Christian faith is that those who are most likely to magnify God are those who live out of vulnerability and poverty. That is how God has brought down the mighty from their seats and lifted up the lowly. So this attending the powerlessness and inadequacy in ourselves and in the world around us leads to the last word associated with Mary: stabat, which comes from the mediaeval sequence stabat mater dolorosa, “At the cross her station keeping, stood a mournful mother weeping”. Standing at the Cross, Mary teaches us to own our pain and, more than that, to own the pains of the world, offering them daily to God for healing and redemption.
We live in an age of compassion fatigue where we have been so bombarded with the pain of others that we have hardened ourselves to it. But God calls us always to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn, and the church is not the church unless it is in full solidarity with the marginalised and oppressed, as well as those whose physical and emotional pains are too much for them to bear alone.
So, in 3 moves, fiat, magnificat and stabat, Mary takes us from surrender to God to living for others. As such, she has much to teach us about living the good life in the 21st century. And I’m sure that Anne Rice would subscribe to the kind of gospel interpretation that I’ve just set out. But we can’t live this kind of life on our own, as individual Christians. Some believe that in presenting Mary and the beloved disciple to one another from across as mother and son, Jesus was inaugurating the church, forging relationships between his followers even as he died.
And so I don’t think there can be any true understanding of believing in Christ as isolated individuals. Those of us who believe in following Christ after the example of Mary must be the church and must re-receive the truth of the Christian faith for our generation. Yes, there has been damaged done by the church and by Christian teaching, not least to women in its teaching about Mary. But there is also much good that has been done and, furthermore, there are in the gospel great reservoirs of untapped wisdom and truth and love to be shared with humanity in the fragile future of this world.
In Mary’s words, “let it be”.