Mary: Virgin Forest
I’ve been reading Sarah Jane Boss’s fascinating book, Empress and Handmaid: Nature and Gender in the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Boss traces how shifts in the portrayal of Mary echo corresponding changes in cultural understandings of gender, nature and grace.
Boss is well aware that Mary can be depicted in ways that normalise feminine submission, especially if she is seen as the passive consort of a masculinised God. And this plays into other distortions: seeing nature as malleable stuff in the hands of a God equated with domination lends support to human attempts to ape that godlike control over the environment.
The solution, for Boss, is not to discard Marian devotion. Indeed, the Protestant rejection of Mary has hardly helped correct the distortions. If anything, extreme forms of Protestantism see nature as utterly incapable of co-operating with grace, while maintaining masculine ideas of headship and female domesticity.
One alternative is to see Mary as the first believer, a model of faith and a type of the Church. This has become increasingly popular, no doubt in part driven by some of the excessive claims and reactionary motives of some Marian devotees in the conservative wings of Catholicism. And, as far as it goes, it is fine. But: there are plenty of saints and faithful people in the church’s tradition. The difference is that Mary gives birth to God, carries God in her own flesh. Her discipleship cannot be separated from this.
Instead, then, we need to recover the centrality of Mary’s divine motherhood in a way that is not simply co-opted to conservative and exclusive readings of gender and church power. She is the Mother of God: a phrase which was absolutely crucial to understanding the true nature of God’s incarnation in Christ at the council of Ephesus in 431. This is a council accepted as part of the authoritative tradition of the church by Catholics, Orthodox and mainstream Protestants alike.
To affirm that Mary is Mother of God is radical. It affirms in turn that creation is capable of bearing the divine. That matter is not separate from spirit. That God invites us into co-operation. That surrender to God and self-possession (in its true sense, abandoning the fragile ego) are two sides of the same reality.
Mary is not just a symbol of this, but its unique embodiment – an embodiment that includes her whole being, body and spirit (which finds fulfilment in the Assumption). Her agreement to God’s will is also the fulfilment of her deepest desire (hence the coincidence of her calling and her beginning in the Immaculate Conception).
Crucial here is that Mary is not the assenting woman over against a male God. God is not male, and not an individual with an ego and will which competes with Mary’s (or ours). God is utterly immanent in all we are, as well as being unbounded by any projection or definition we may put on Her. And if the use of a female pronoun there put you off, ask yourself why.
God does not take the place of a man for Mary. Rather, Mary conceives without male or any human intervention but her own. Fulness of grace and nature’s own desire are one here, and they are not heteronormative.
I think Boss traces these implications really well. As she puts it, the Holy Spirit does not ‘fertilise’ Mary but ‘brings to fruition the embodiment of divine life which has arisen inside her. For this reason, the comparison . . . between the Virgin Mary and a virgin forest seems apt. The virgin forest is uncultivated by humanity and abundantly fruitful in itself. The fecundity of God’s activity is thus not imposed on Mary, but springs up within and as a part of her, so that her desire, her conception, her gestation and childbearing are radically her own at the same time as being divine. Mary is, as it were, an icon of freedom from domination, who not only inspired in the devotee the hope for a world transformed, but already embodies that transformation in her own life.’ (Empress and Handmaid, p. 219).
Hail Mary, full of grace.