Having grown up as an Italian-American Roman Catholic in the 1950s, I have spent most of a lifetime recovering from what felt like an overdose of plaster statuary. It seemed that statues of the Virgin Mary were everywhere in my childhood — on my grandmother’s vanity bureau, to the right of the high altar at church, on the little prie-dieu where I posed for my First Communion photo.
But I have learned, the older I get, that life is all about paradox, and that you never know when what you thought you left behind will turn out to be the source of your greatest strength, or, to use Gospel language, when the stone the builders rejected will become the chief cornerstone.
“1918 in Petrograd” by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Those statues of the Virgin glow now in a different light. I am still protestant enough to declare that doctrine of the virgin birth tells us nothing about biology. But as the philosopher would say, it is a paradox nonetheless good to think with. It tells us everything about the mystery of God’s presence among us, about what it means to be Immanuel, about what it means for us to be God-bearers, what it means for us to be present to God.
To be a God-bearer: that has been a challenge for all of us in the past several weeks, where we have seen the most vulnerable among us targeted in the streets, where stories of torture, cover-up and vicious bureaucratic incompetence have made us wonder whether humanity is even redeemable. Who are the God-bearers among us? To be a God-bearer: that is the identity that every Christian in this season is being challenged to embrace, an identity mirrored in the image of the Virgin Mother who, in the ancient prayer, puts down the mighty from their thrones, raises up the humble and meek, and shows us the fruit of her womb in this Jesus, the source and goal of all our desires.
The great mystic Bernard of Clairvaux knew all about desire — the desire for God that is mirrored in the desire of one human being for another, a desire that for him was channeled into an extraordinary, even over-the-top devotion to the Virgin Mother.
In the Divine Comedy, that great 14th century epic of desire, when Dante the pilgrim at last approaches the mystical Rose — the stadium of the saints — in the heaven of heavens, it is Bernard of Clairvaux who appears as his final guide into the Divine Light, and he does so by guiding the pilgrim’s eyes toward the Virgin Mother herself, sitting at the very top tier of those celestial bleachers:
Look now on the face that most resembles Christ,
For nothing but its brightness
Can make you fit to look on Christ
And then, in the greatest prayer of devotion to the Virgin ever devised, Dante has Bernard ring the changes on the paradox of Incarnation:
Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
umile e alta piu che creatura,
termine fisso d’etterno consiglio
tu se’ colei che l’umana natura
nobilitasti si’, che ‘l suo fattore
non disdegno di farsi sua fattura.
Nel ventre tuo si racesse l’amore…
Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son,
More humble and exalted than any creature,
Fixed goal of the eternal plan,
You are the one who so ennobled human nature
That He, who made it first, did not disdain
To make Himself of its own making.
Your womb relit the flame of love….
“To make Himself of its own making.” To put it in another way, a way likely more familiar to those of you reading this column: We believe in Jesus Christ, truly God, truly human, born of the Virgin Mary. Does it ever strike you at once how absurd that statement is, and at the same time how absolutely right? Truly God, truly human: We live with that paradox week in and week out as we recite the ancient creed. It is a paradox that puzzles the mind and redeems the heart, one that proclaims that the God whose name cannot be uttered is as close to us as a newborn baby is to its mother’s breast. And that mother is daughter to her own son, at once humble and exalted, a daughter who so ennobled human nature that the God who created human nature did not disdain to Self-create out of the stuff of God’s own making, entering a human womb that relit the flame of love in a world grown old and torn.
Bernard had his faults (a penchant for armed crusades among them, echoing today’s jihadists of every stripe, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim). But he could preach true Gospel when he had to. In a sermon addressed to the Virgin, he imagines the charged moment before she answers the angel, a moment of uneasy silence in which Bernard believes the whole fate of humankind rests.
“Answer, O Virgin, answer the angel quickly; or rather, through the angel answer God. Speak the word and receive the word. Offer what is yours and conceive what is God’s. Breathe one fleeting word and embrace the eternal Word.”
“Offer what is yours, and conceive what is God.” Let that be our prayer as we enter this season of Incarnation, especially in these mean times of prejudice and violence and deep inequality. What Bernard says to the Virgin, we also, in her honor, must also allow him to say to us. In all our sinfulness and folly, can we in this season offer what is ours — offer no less than all that we are — and allow ourselves, in solidarity with Mary, to “conceive what is God’s,” in whose image we are created, and by whose birth, death and resurrection we all of us stand redeemed?