The Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary (transferred)

One of the realities of walking the Camino de Santiago is that I cannot pick up a zillion guidebooks, picture books or even postcards. The Camino is one unending feast of Romanesque churches, an architectural style that I studied while in college and later as a grad student, both in France and in Spain but I can’t show you many photos because of the above limitation.

Another reality of the Camino and the Chemin de France is that it is populated with 12th and 13th-century statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary with her child, Jesus. (c.f., photos of the Black Virgin in Le Puy, France and a postcard that shows some of the Virgins and Piètas that are on the first half of the Chemin in France.) Some may find the style odd but I like it: she always looks straight at you, with big eyes, and so does Jesus, perched from his spot on her lap. Their gaze is direct, inviting and, in some ways, demanding. Her right hand is always raised in a blessing.

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The statue of Mary in Nájera, Spain lives in a grotto that is in a church that is built up against a red stone cliff. As always, there’s a story behind it. Kerry Egan, in Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, explains:

The statue, according to legend, was found in 1052, by King García while out hunting. His falcon found her lodged in a limestone crevice.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Spain, the religious importance of images, like this statue, soared. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, devotion to saints was directed at relics, which tended to be in churches.… [W]ith the rise in western Europe of the notion of images as markers and even sources of the sacred in this world, little shrines to Mary exploded out into the countryside, statues here, paintings there. Throughout Spain, statues of Mary were found in caves or in fields. A shepherd out wandering found her image in a crevice, or a farmer would dig her up. Story after story tells that upon finding a statue, the people in the nearest town would try to move it into a church or a private home. Somehow the statue would escape and be found the next day, stubbornly in the place where it was first unearthed. Mary, apparently, wanted to be in the countryside.

Relics were in church buildings, but Mary was out in the places where people lived and worked. An image of Mary could transform any space into a sacred place. She belonged to the people, to the poor and the illiterate, as well as to the elite who could afford to buy relics and the clergy who controlled churches. (1)

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While this church, Saint Mary’s Parish, may be named after a judge’s wife, for that is what our history tells us, it doesn’t really matter now because we claim a close relationship with Mary, Jesus’ mother, the God-bearer. I find special delight in being part of a congregation that bears Mary’s name for precisely some of the reasons that Egan enumerates:

Mary belongs to the people. She has been an icon of hope for countless ordinary people, who have been inspired by the words of the Magnificat. I see that again and again in El Salvador. I also witness that here.

I love the stories of the migratory Maries: she just doesn’t want to be contained in a church, she wants to be out in the countryside, amongst the people.

I don’t think the statue of Mary that lives over by the columbarium is all of a sudden going to emerge in the rectory garden or somewhere else. But perhaps we need to think of how Mary can move figuratively beyond the walls of the church. How can Mary’s words in the Magnificat inspire us? How can we bring her words of reversal to the world? How can we bring her among our people, our town? How can she live amongst us?

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Mary today is extremely popular. Egan muses:

Statues of Mary used to show up in caves, and then apparitions used to appear in meadows and forests, and now images of her show up on the sides of mirrored high-rise buildings. Now you get Mary everywhere: she is uncontainable. People see her all over. I have no idea if Mary really chose to show up on a potato, but I do know what it tells me about the human desire to see Mary everywhere. The hope of what Mary symbolizes, the possibility of human beings to carry and give birth to the divine in this world, to be creative in the sense of creating with God, explodes out into everyday life. This happens not in places of power but everywhere. It throws open where we can do God’s work, where we can turn toward God. And if she is showing up on tortilla chips and bank buildings during rush hour, she has a killer sense of humor. (2)

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Now the people who sell on eBay for thousands of dollars their potatoes with Mary’s image on it, or Jesus’ face on a piece of toast, have totally missed the point of the image. There, it becomes an object of idolatry.

Instead, the images we have of Mary are icons of, as Egan says, ‘[t]he hope of what Mary symbolizes, the possibility of human beings to carry and give birth to the divine in this world, to be creative in the sense of creating with God….’

Oscar Romero, whose birthday shares Mary’s feast day preached on this feast day in 1977: ‘Mary serves for us as a beacon for our eternal destination, and… she illuminates our humanity and our rights. Like Mary, we are called on to defend this dignity, this liberty, and these rights because we know we are not destined to be earth’s toys but are destined, like Mary, for God’s realm, because we, too, are God’s chosen ones.’

How does Mary inspire us to defend human dignity and rights? How does Mary inspire us to create with God? What do we create with God? How, with Mary, do we bring about the new creation that God desires for all of the world and its creatures? (If you look at the Salvadoran cross in the parish hall, you will read the words, in Spanish, the New Creation, for that is what we are about.) How do we say ‘Yes’ to God without qualifications the way Mary did? On a more personal level, how does our soul ‘proclaim the greatness of the Lord’ as did Mary’s? How can we spread the joy of God’s wonders around? Because that is what Mary invites us to do.

We can do all these things because Mary is our star of certain hope for all of God’s people who are still on pilgrimage on earth — and that includes you and me.

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour…

Let us join Mary in her song, and let us proclaim it to the world.


Photo: Nájera, Spain [click on it for larger image; it is high resolution]

END NOTES
(1) Kerry Egan, Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2004), 154-55.
(2) Ibid., 157.

(This makes my 400th posting!)