Many a song has been written about Mary, many an ode. We know her as Mother, and she showers her maternal care upon all nations. We know her as queen, and her splendor shines forth from heaven; Mary the Queen-Mother, and the theologians rejoice. Yet to understand Mary, I wager, we need to ask a very different question: not who she is, but who we are: who are you, and who am I? The question is not mere rhetoric, or some interjection from afar. It comes pointedly, each and every morning, when I awake and, splashing water into my bleary-eyed face, I gaze into the mirror and decide anew for the day: who am I? Who will I become?
And the answer comes through Mary: more than Mother of the Nations and Queen of Heaven, Mary is the Woman who every woman must confront when she wakes up, and the mother of every man who must do the same. The tenderness of her person is often lost in the abstractions of titles and conceptualizations. When she gave her fiat, it was not some thoughtless decision. Did she know that she, standing in for Eve, was responding for the whole world? Yet, would she have pondered it any less so had it been merely herself she was answering for— “be it done unto me”?
Mary, the living Mary (for all who live in Christ are alive, even now) stood before the angel that day and decided that she would become someone. Her decision led her down the path of helping those whom life brought her also grow to become their own persons. Her cousin, Elizabeth, burdened with her first child— and Mary, the virgin mother, helped Elizabeth become a mother. One very well might see Mary playing and working and laughing with her cousins, the other Mary’s. Joseph undoubtedly became who he was because of the duty he had towards Mary, yet who’s to say that she hadn’t chosen him first, in a spiritual sense, before he had even become aware that he was to guard and protect this woman, in all likelihood a consecrated temple virgin, before even any names had been swapped or meetings arranged between the lovers? And perhaps most gloriously of all, Mary, the living Mary, nurtured and tended and guided the growing Christ-Child into the fullness of his Humanity.
The theologians speak of God as Being, and this He is. But God became man, and he did so through Mary; Mary, then, is God’s Becoming. And as our Mary— Mary, sweet Mother Mary— she is our becoming as well. That question I pose myself as I get ready for work is deeply Marian, deeply spiritual: who am I? Who will I become?
Perhaps I will hold myself to certain standards. My life listed out before me as rights and wrongs in my actions and relationships with others. Or perhaps I am full of dreams (I did, after all, just stumble out of bed), waking fantasies of all the things I’d like to do. Maybe, if I’m particularly mature, by today’s mark, I hone in on my responsibilities. I am a father, a brother, a son. These, I wager, are options we all flirt with one day or another. And Mary, being who she is, will look upon our answers, and not be any one of them. Woe to the Christian whose Christianity is mere answering, for he has already received his reward. Blessed, rather, the man who hungers and thirsts after these questions— and blessed the Marian paps that give him suck.
That is to say, Mary is the life behind our lives, the supporting role that always cheers us on for the sake of who we are becoming. Where God is with us in who we are, Mary is there with us as we change, leading us from moment to moment where God is awaiting, a mother walking her bride-Church to the Christ-groom. Will we walk with her willingly, with all the uncertainty and nervousness that entails? Or will we, so eager to be perfect with what we think is our perfection, remain stuck, paralyzed, and unable to hold her hand?
One of my favorite Marian images is the one following this essay. It’s an incredible tender, compassionate scene, and it makes clear who Mary is in relation to us. Eve, guilty and ashamed, stares down at the ground. Her feet are bound by the snake who first ensnared her, and, unable to walk free, she can do nothing but clutch on even harder to the apple that brought so much suffering into her life. She is stuck in who she was, and unable to move forward, unable to look ahead. Trapped in her own being, she isn’t ready to become the daughter of Christ.
And what is Mary’s response? She sees Eve reaching out for the Life that she herself carries within her womb. She doesn’t guide Eve, as if to say “look here.” She simply comforts her, tenderly caressing her tear-stricken face. Mary has no need to convert Eve towards herself. The Child she is bearing is just that— her child, the secret inner motions of her viscera. In relation to Eve she is a mother, but not Eve’s mother. Rather, she stands as an equal, reminding Eve that they are both daughters, speaking to her in the prophetic words of Malachi: “have we not one Father? Hath not one God created us?”
The depths of this answer resound throughout time, and yet they reach each of us differently. The Motherhood of Mary and the Queenship of the Spirit’s Spouse are both challenges. Challenges to us, in our lives, to grow into the fullness of the call that God is bringing us, to give our own fiat. Each man and woman is called to answer to their own angel, and not even Joseph, the most trusted and faithful companion, can understand that calling. It is a lonesome path— but Mary, Mother and Queen, ensures that it is never a lonely one. She has walked it before, and she walks it again now, alongside us, saying along the way, as once did the faithful Ruth, that “where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.”
