Modern people often tend to reject the Virgin Birth story. I know some who clam up when that part of the creed gets recited in church. We see several reasons for this. The gynecological impossibility of it, and its connection to other ancient myths about important figures having miraculous births, allows us to imagine that we sophisticated Moderns know better than this silly, quaint story. The story also gets used to erase and devalue the actual experiences of women, placing them on an intentionally impossible pedestal of "purity" to which no actual woman can attain. We rightly want to reject that as well.
The Virgin Birth story remains important, however, for exactly the opposite reasons. I have talked often about how Sojourner Truth shapes my understanding of this story. She famously points out that the coming of Christ into the world happens between God and a woman, that a man had nothing to do with it. I glean from this insight that no patriarchal authority, no member of the male establishment, no Empire, could have any claim or control over, or claim any credit for, God's coming into the world. The Virgin Birth story thus becomes a significant instance of the anti-Imperialism that pervades the Scriptures.
Like so much of early Christianity, the story takes something from the larger culture and radically reframes it as a fundamental critique of the status quo and its powers. I suspect this meaning caused later authorities to white-wash and domesticate the story, shoving it back into its accepted cultural frame as a justification for the inferiority and subjugation of women.
Rather than cut or ignore the story for these reasons, I stand with Sojourner Truth in seeking to recover the deeper and more radical truth revealed in it. In accepting the angel's offer, Mary basically gives the finger to systems of social convention and political power imposed on her and the world by The Man. She rejects the patriarchy which characterizes Empire and even holds it together.
This gives us the political meaning of the Virgin Birth. But we may hear an interior, spiritual meaning as well. For the Virgin Birth also excludes from any role in our acquisition of the Holy Spirit to the same patriarchy and Empire. We must realize that the emergence with us of our Essence does not depend on or even include the values, practices, and goals dictated by the men who dominate society and politics.
Meister Eckhart alludes to this when he says: “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.”
In other words, as "mothers of God" we too participate in the same dynamic as Mary. We do not bear God into the world as an expression or result of patriarchy or power; it does not happen "by the physical desire of a human father" (John 1:13 REB). Rather this happens through our submission, humility, cooperation, assent, freedom, and vulnerability... not to any human authority or institution, but only to God. Obedience to God explicitly refuses the authority and domination of any human power.
In other words, it has nothing to do with what we gain, own, control, extract, or measure; it renounces the money, fame, and power which Empire would have us crave and connive to get. Rather, it concerns what we lose and renounce, divesting ourselves of our allegiance and loyalty to Empire's carrots and our fear of its sticks. Mary has to let go of her fear, her egocentric craving for control, even her own practical goals for her future.
The example of Mary shows us the different path of openness and reception, even to a wildly alien visitation by a supernatural being with an impossible and costly message. She has to open herself to this new thing, really an incredibly arrogant possibility, that she might herself serve as the mother of God. She has to put her ego to the side, and embrace something exponentially bigger than her ego, even in its most grandiose fantasies, could imagine.
Mary shows us that our egos don't dream big enough! Our ego craves independence and autonomy as a little separate, safe entity. But only by letting our egos go can we emerge into an unthinkably larger place of union with and in God, what the early Church calls deification or theosis, the whole point and goal of Christian faith.
This humility and self-emptying become the path for nothing less than the eternal birth of the divine among us. Gaining this new life means losing the old life; the new Self emerges when we let go of the old self. Mary thus embodies in advance what will become the core of her son's teaching.
Finally, only when we let go of ego's grip on us, may we find ourselves in the position also to resist, rise above, and renounce Empire. For only when we ourselves embody the vision of wholeness and inclusion, equity and compassion, justice and joy that we see in Jesus Christ, do we gain the capacity to resist the predations of Empire and model the Creator's reality.
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