Mary, Woman of Hope
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December 20, 2020Mother Miriam Pollard, former prioress and now sister of Santa Rita Abbey, who was a member of our community for many years, has a meditation on today’s readings in the form of a prose-poem. It is called, “House of David.” In her inimitable style, she lays out the background: King David, or, as she christens him: “The human condition in a man called David,” having checked off every item on his to-do list of great (or not so great) feats, gets restless on a rainy afternoon and decides that his next project will be to build a house for God. His unruly imaginings are soon put a stop to by Nathan, who gives him God’s take on the matter: “Don’t build for me,” he said, “I’ll build for you.” David thinks he knows what this is about – his sons of course, the fruit of his body! But the unfolding of history undoes this unruly imagining too. Great kings become less great, positively mediocre, and then plain awful. The Davidic line falls into obscurity in a sequence of unfamiliar names, “and wound up in the calloused hands of one Joseph, called the carpenter.”
Mother Miriam pauses a while “before the hurting heart of Joseph, a heart so like our own.” She asks:
“Did he watch his wife on rainy afternoons
as this temple was being built within her?
Did he ask, as we might now,
“Who are you, Daughter of the Promise?
Woman, standing at the crossroads of time and timelessness,
name yourself.”
Mary’s response is worth quoting at some length:
“I am she who waits.
I am the in-gatherer, and in me waits all creation:
the primal exuberance of clashing atoms in a nothingness of sky;
the fingers of lichen
painting circuses on eons of great rock;
snowfalls and the wail of storms;
spotted fawns and millipedes;
jaguars and new leaves that blush and old leaves that take fire
and fall to kiss the soil to life again.
“I am she who enters the cloud,
overshadowed by the Undying One,
she who enters the shade cast by the hand of an immortal lover.
“In me, the People of the Promise longs for its fulfillment.”
“Is longing not a voice?” St Bernard asks.
“Yes,” she answers.
“These centuries haunted and tempered by desire—they are my voice, my song,
They are my thirst—this tribe of animals,
running, two-legged and upright, across an African savanna,
tossing their human joy into the hot sky.
“I am the banished daughter Israel,
mirror of every mortal striving and regret—
beaten and exiled, wounded and adored.
I am the questing heart, the seeker and the sought.
And I am mother.
You have seen paintings of night caves in which the mother’s features
are suffused with the radiance of the Child.
“I am that too—candle lit by the motherhood of God,
human evocation of the eternal feminine.”
Mary names herself the voice of all creation’s groaning, all human longing, all Israel’s generations of seeking and being sought, and even of God’s yearning. In this she is wholly ours and wholly God’s. Mary’s obedience of faith would provide the place for God to build the temple of his body – his human body:
“Not out of stone or wood was this house made
but out of bone and sinew,
darkness and terror,
heroism and tenderness”
And then Mother Miriam poses the kind of question that functions like a thorn in the flesh: “What for?”
She lists the afflictions of her moment: AIDS, cancer, gang warfare, torture, “and the common daily abrasions of conflicting personalities,” to which we may add plenty of our own, and she asks: what does it matter if God built himself a house of Mary’s flesh, if all these things continue to happen? Has the Incarnation bettered the human lot by one hairsbreadth? How do we celebrate a divine birth amid human degradation?
In our historical moment, we stand face to face with a world in chaos, with sickness and death, financial hardship and despair, injustice, violence and destruction. None of this is new, exactly, but since last March we have been forced by the crisis of the pandemic that reaches into every community on earth, to look and look and look at the manifold distress of our brothers and sisters until we don’t want to look any more. We know that if we look again, there will more distress and more tragedy; more, more.
The only answer to the “what for?” question is the content of Mary’s faith:
“It matters, doesn’t it,
knowing that God knows—
that to bloodshot eyes and hearts uprooted and afraid
God is no unruffled bystander?
He knows, he’s been there….
when we say God took a human nature,
we mean his heart is wrapped in history,
in the consequences of what we so desperately call ‘the human condition.’…
It matters that our wounded nature can crawl into his human nature
to be reforged in the blaze of his divine abundance.”
If we look at all this with Mary at our side, something changes. For me, Mary has been less someone I look to as my mother, my consoler, and more someone who teaches me how to look at the world and all people. Wherever she goes, she brings him, as light into darkness; wherever she looks, she sees him, crying out in agony and abandonment. The depth of her compassion and the resilience of her hope reinforce one another. She is the one who knows that the Child in her womb, the Child on the cross, is the Savior of the world. With Mary, we can look and not lose hope. With Mary, we can offer the world its Savior. With Mary, we can look upon his face everywhere. May she draw near to us and all people during these final days of waiting.
