Our
Heritage of Prayer
Praying
with Mary
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When I became a Catholic, my
non-Catholic friends were aghast. ‘What about Mary?’ they would say, and it
was a question which went to the heart of my discomfort about Roman
Catholicism. What about Mary? Twelve years on, I cannot imagine life without
her. As a woman I find her presence in the Church enormously important, and I
am always struck by the absence of any womanly symbols when I go into some
non-Catholic churches. But I also think that it is impossible to come to a
full appreciation of the meaning of the incarnation without recognising the
significance of Mary’s role as the person who freely assents to become the
Mother of God, and I want to consider what it means to pray with Mary in the
light of that claim. However, first I want to say
something about the idea of praying with Mary. If one believes that the
communion of saints encompasses both the Church on earth and the Church in
heaven, then to pray in company with the saints in heaven is as natural an
expression of faith as praying in company with other believers on earth. If I
can ask a friend to pray for me then I can ask a saint to pray for me, not because
I believe the saints answer prayer but because I believe that prayer is
sociable. It unites us with one another as well as with God, and it can be a
shared expression of faith and concern. If I can pray to any saint at all
with some certainty that he or she is now with Christ, I can surely pray to
Mary as the one who in her earthly life was chosen by God to be the person
closest to Jesus. With this in mind, I want to
consider how praying with Mary deepens our understanding of what it means to
say that God is incarnate in Christ in a way which invites us into a richer
prayer life. I am going to focus on the patristic title ‘rational
paradise’ which was used by some of the early fathers to describe Mary,
because although it never achieved widespread popularity the way some other
Marian titles did, I think it encompasses everything that Mary symbolises
with regard to the incarnation. Mary is rational because in assenting to
become the Mother of Christ she acts as a thinking human being who is
responsible for her decision. She is paradise because her flesh represents
the restoration of all creation to its state of original goodness in Christ.
The title ‘rational paradise’ reminds us that the incarnation is
holistic, that our redemption is not just a spiritual truth which is somehow
separate from nature and the body, but it is something that affects the whole
of creation. So how might the idea of the rational paradise help us to pray
with Mary in a way that expresses an incarnate and living faith? First of all, I want to consider
Mary as a person who in the annunciation faces a moment of encounter and
decision before God. In praying with Mary, we pray with a person who knows
what it is to stand in a place of radical choice, face to face with the
mystery of God, on the brink of a future which seems momentous with only a
whisper of faith to sustain us as we plunge into the unknown. Like every one
of us, Mary had to begin her life’s vocation with a free decision to answer
God’s call, and to take that first step along the road of faith. Because she
has faced a choice between the trusting abandonment of faith and the comfort
and security of this world, she is with us as we too make that first
faltering step towards Christ. And because Mary’s faith led her along the darkest
possible road, she is also the mater dolorosa, the mother of
sorrows, who stands silent before God in the finality and abandonment of the
crucifixion. For everyone who finds themselves in that space of desolation,
forsaken by God, Mary is there in the darkness, keeping faith when others
have fled. Today, in an age when many people struggle to keep faith, when
philosophers and scientists alike are quick to proclaim the death of God,
Mary teaches us how to believe through the Good Friday and Holy Saturday of
disbelief, as we await the resurrection promise of Easter. In the intense joy
of the annunciation, and in the ultimate heartbreak of the crucifixion, Mary
has touched the heights and depths of human existence with her presence and
we find her there praying with us in those experiences when faith takes us to
the far horizons of life itself. But Mary is also present in the
faithful discipleship of everyday life. Raymond Brown, the biblical scholar,
suggests that the author of Luke’s Gospel portrays Mary as the model disciple
who shows us what it means to live according to the beatitudes. Mary is
blessed because she is the one who hears and keeps the word of God (see Lk
11:28), and Brown sees in Mary’s Magnificat a celebration of the
same qualities of blessedness that Jesus describes in the beatitudes. By
Mary’s example we learn what it means to become beatitudinal disciples. This
means that praying with Mary is not necessarily a comfortable experience,
because it can bring us face to face with questions of poverty and injustice
which set us at odds with the values and priorities of the consumerist
culture which surrounds us. Both the beatitudes and the Magnificat
tell us that if we would discover the Kingdom of God among us, we must look
not at the powerful, the rich and the successful but at the poor and the
powerless, at those who are written out of the pages of history because they
are too small and insignificant to be noticed. Mary can teach us the prayer
of poverty and humility, not in terms of the cloying sentimentality of so
much modern Marian devotion, but in terms of celebrating God’s preferential
option for the poor through a way of life which refuses to make its peace
with the violence and oppression of worldly power, recognising that the path
of discipleship is a path of struggle and consolation which wends its way
through the lives of the poor. When we pray with Mary, we find her beckoning
to us in the form of the homeless person, the social outcast, the refugee,
the prisoner, the victim of violence. She reminds us that she too has been
there as the cost of following her Son. However, since Vatican II there
has been a tendency to see Mary in terms of human discipleship to such an
extent that we risk losing sight of the awe and wonder of her role as the
Mother of God. While it is true that the Gospels show us Mary as the human
mother and follower of Jesus and give no indication of the enormity of her
role in future interpretations of the incarnation, by the second century
Christian writers had begun to see Luke’s account of the annunciation as a
retelling of the Genesis story, so that Mary became identified with the New
Eve in relation to Christ as the New Adam. Thus Mary has acquired theological
significance for the Christian faith in such a way that she transcends the
time and place of her own existence to become a revealing symbol for all
generations. As the New Eve, Mary is the first creature of the new creation
in Christ. But the symbolism is more complex than this, for not only does she
stand alongside the New Adam as his partner, she is also the mother of the
New Adam. Just as God created the first Adam out of the virgin earth of
paradise, so God created the New Adam out of the virgin body of Mary. The
idea of Mary as the virgin earth of paradise reminds us that the incarnation
is a cosmic event. All of creation is renewed when Christ takes flesh from
Mary. Today, we are perhaps more aware than ever before of the extent to
which human greed and exploitation affect the natural world as well as our relationships
with one another. We need to rediscover the patristic insight that the
incarnation extends throughout creation, so that to proclaim ourselves
redeemed in Christ implies not only a transformation in our relationship with
God, but also a transformation in our relationship with nature. St Paul
writes that ‘creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us,
from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the
children of God’ (Romans 8:21). When we pray with Mary, she invites us
to see that the whole of creation takes part in a cosmic symphony of praise
to its creator. However, the title ‘rational
paradise’ reminds us that, unlike the Garden of Eden, Mary is not simply
the lifeless clay of creation renewed in Christ. God does not force
redemption upon the world by becoming incarnate through an act of divine will
without human involvement. Rather, God appoints Mary as spokesperson for all
creation so that Christ only comes when Mary welcomes him into herself. To
quote Saint Anselm’s prayer to Mary, ‘He who was able to make all things out
of nothing refused to remake it by force, but first became the Son of Mary.’
If all creation fell through a free act of human disobedience, then all
creation is redeemed through a free act of human obedience. So when Mary says
yes to God, she is the voice of creation saying yes to its own redemption in
a moment when the human being, the rational agent made in the image and
likeness of God, must speak on behalf of the cosmos. What does this tell us
about praying with Mary? Mary plays a unique and decisive
role in the incarnation. She alone conceives and gives birth to Jesus, and
she alone is the Mother of God. But there is a sense in which every Christian
is called to incarnate Christ in the world and to gather up all the voices of
creation into humanity’s ‘yes’ to God. The Church is identified with Mary
because through the sacraments it continues to make Christ present in the
material realities of this world, and in this way the world is transformed
and redeemed in Christ. But if this is true of the sacramental life of the
Church, it is also true of the daily life of every believer. Like Mary, each
of us is invited to respond to God’s invitation to body Christ in our world.
Teresa of Avila expresses this when she writes: ‘Christ has no body now
on earth but yours; yours are the only hands with which he can do his work,
yours are the only feet with which he can go about the world, yours are the
only eyes through which his compassion can shine forth upon a troubled world.
Christ has no body on earth now but yours.’ Prayer is a moment of
annunciation, a moment when we freely open ourselves to the presence of God
and ask that Christ might be conceived anew in us, that his life might find a
place of nurture and growth in our hearts so that we too might become
God-bearers like Mary. But like Mary, we are not only rational beings who
speak for nature, we are ourselves creatures who speak with nature because we
are united in creaturehood with all God’s creatures. We are our bodies, and
when we pray we pray not only with our rational minds but also with our
creaturely flesh, for there is in reality no distinction between the two.
This is the great paradox and mystery of human existence. To be a rational
paradise is to be a creature whose bodily existence is a hymn of praise to
the creator, while at the same time being invited to participate in the
divinity of our creator. Olivier Clement explores this idea of divinisation
in his book, The Roots of Christian Mysticism. He quotes Basil of
Caesarea who says that ‘The human being is an animal who has received the
vocation to become God.’ We express our godlikeness through our stewardship
and care for creation, through our creativity by which we participate in
God’s own work of renewing the face of the earth. Like Mary, we are redeemed
in order that we might continue the work of redemption. Praying with Mary can be as
intimate and familiar as the most routine aspects of our everyday lives. Her
faithful discipleship serves as the perfect model for the Church and for
every believer, and from her story of faith each of us can learn the great
and the small lessons of following Christ in all the circumstances in which
we find ourselves. But praying with Mary can also invite us into a sense of
awe before the cosmic majesty of God, when we find ourselves in that strange
space of human existence, neither creatures nor gods, but knowing that when
Christ was conceived in Mary’s womb, a ripple of redeeming love spread out
through the beginning and end of time from the most fleeting desire of the
human heart, to the most distant star in the universe. To hold together this
sense of the universality of redemption with the smallness and vulnerability
of the incarnate God in Mary’s womb is to glimpse the very essence of the
incarnation. To quote James of Sarug, writing in the early part of the sixth
century, ‘Blessed is she in whose little lap lived unadorned the Great
One with whom the heavens are filled, in comparison with whom they themselves
are tiny.’ |
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Dr Tina Beattie |
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Dr Tina Beattie is the author of Rediscovering
Mary: Insights from the Gospels (1995) |