Virgin Mary, Mother of God

GospIf thtat doesn'tel reading: Matthew 2.1-12
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As for myself, I have come to think of Mary as the patron saint of "both/and" passion over "either/or" reasoning, and as such, she delights my poetic soul... What Mary does is to show me how I indeed can be both virgin and mother. Virgin to the extent that I remain "one-in-myself," able to come to things with newness of heart; mother to the extent that I forget myself in the nurture and service of others, embracing the ripeness of maturity that this requires. This Mary is a gender-bender; she could do the same for any man.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

One of the ongoing tasks in life is prioritization. Ardelle and I are constantly talking about what we should prioritize. Evenings at home with the kids. House projects. Relationships. Activities. It seems like much of life is about setting priorities. Saying no to this in order to say yes to that.

Maybe it's because I'm so convinced of the necessity of prioritization that the phrase "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" secretly delights me. Priority means that one thing comes before another either in time or in importance. And simply speaking the words "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" instantly makes a jumbled mess of whatever order we've attempted to impose on our religion.

The phrase is most common among Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. But it just states with scandalous clarity what all sorts of Christians have confessed for centuries. And, as Freud might say, the problem is with the mother. Or maybe I should say the problem is in the relationship with the mother.

If we're up at the God end of things, everything comes later or after, right? God creates mothers, and mothers bear virgins. That's getting our priorities right biologically, theologically, and grammatically all at once. But our phrase of the day suggests that somehow virginity is possible after motherhood. And the One who created our world from nothing can have a mother.

So maybe something in this Christianity is about losing our priorities.

Mary reminds us that all bets are off when it comes to the mystery of God. God isn't limited to the eithers and ors that we are.

Kate Alexander, our curate here at Christ Church, told me once that she still feels a little scandalous at the altar sometimes. Her own religious upbringing taught her that the male priest was the icon for Christ. Thankfully Kate didn't let the priority given male clergy in our either/or world cut off the possibility that she might be called to just such ministry.

I guess that in the end, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God doesn't show us how to pretend that we don't live in a world that demands that we sort our eithers from our ors. Her life was limited in ways few of us can imagine. What she shows us is how to keep ourselves open to possibilities we can't yet imagine, to "come at things with newness of heart."