Amy and ‘Did Mary Consent?’
Did Mary Consent?
She was thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind a greeting like that. (Luke 1:29 MSG)
September 8 is the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The commemoration of this Feast within the Episcopal Church is by no means universally observed. As the Episcopal Church considers itself both catholic and reformed, you might imagine that the celebration of Mary, Mother of God, and devotion to Mary, is probably more important to Anglo-Catholics in the Episcopal Church, rather than those whose piety is more in keeping with the Protestant or Reformed tradition of the Church.
Who was Mary? Scripture is silent on details of her birth or any aspect of her early life until the angel Gabriel visits her when she's around 14 years old and announces that she will become pregnant with Jesus, Son of God. (This is the assigned Gospel for the day - Luke 1:26-38)
For me, what's compelling about the lives of people in Scripture is that they are as fully human, fully flawed, fully embodied humans just like the rest of us. They ate and drank and got in fights and cried and laughed and got sick and got well.
Beyond how the Church might think about and interpret theologically who Mary is as Mother of God and what the events of her life might teach us about Jesus, Mary was first and foremost an ordinary 14-year old girl, not endowed with special, superhuman powers, not particularly spiritual - just a regular 14 year old girl. Indeed, she celebrates this about herself in her Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56).
When I think of my own lived experience as a young girl and woman, I imagine Mary in a more powerful way as having lived experience as a young girl and woman in ways that resonate with my own experience, and the lives of all girls and women. While this is powerful, indeed, it also makes me deeply uncomfortable when I pray with Mary's encounter with the angel Gabriel (Luke 1). Part of me wants to celebrate her "saying yes to God" and yet part of me recognizes this: how could a young girl, faced with an overpowering male figure, in a culture in which she as female is considered property of her father, and then later of her husband - how could she even say yes when she may not - likely could not - say no? If she does not have the freedom to say no, might her yes be something more along the lines of resignation, acquiescence, acceptance of what she cannot control in ways that are disturbing?
I wonder how you hear the story of Mary's encounter with Gabriel today. Was Mary fully free to say yes or to say no? Did she feel coercion, social and cultural pressure to answer a certain way? How might thinking of Mary as a young girl of her time shape how you hear this story and how you mark and remember Mary?
