I want to say a few things about Mary herself and then about her song in today’s gospel.
- She was a teenage Jewish girl from a fourth world country, a country under brutal occupation by a foreign power.
- Despite the efforts of Western artists to portray her as white, she in fact had dark skin, dark brown eyes, and dark hair.
- Some English translations say she was a handmaiden, which sounds nice, but the Greek word Luke uses is “doulos,” which means slave or servant. She was a servant girl in a fourth world occupied country.
- And her name was Mary, a Hebrew name with two meanings. The first meaning is bitterness. She lived in a bleak time of struggle. Like many of her fellow Jewish women from Miriam on down, Mary knew the bitterness that her own people experienced under the slavery and oppression of foreign nations, from Egypt to Babylon to Rome. Like them she struggled to keep hope alive in her people.
- The second meaning of her name is rebellion. Not the Mary meek and mild of Hallmark Christmas cards, she is the one who rebels against anything that crushes the human spirit.
And this young woman is betrothed to marry Joseph when, in a powerful moment, she suddenly has an extreme makeover. She becomes not only pregnant and a mother, but also a powerful prophet who sings the revolutionary words of the Magnificat.
God, she says,
...has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
Words you might not expect, from a slave girl in an occupied land. Where did this powerful song of hers come from?
These words emerge not from the hot political winds of her day, but from a deeper place, a moment of solitude. Away from all the ruckus and the noise, in an annunciation she had heard an angel say to her: “Rejoice, highly favored one!” She took those words in. They transformed her.
Seeing herself as a beloved child of God with an infinite beauty and dignity, she is able to discern the ways God is moving and acting in her own individual story and that of her people. She says Yes. Out of her solitude she embraces a new calling, steps into a new, larger identity as both a mother and a powerful prophet.
It starts in solitude. Her words are grounded in a profound relationship with God, with the child in her womb, and with her own people.
In our society we are inclined to avoid this kind of hidden solitude. We want to be seen and acknowledged. We want to be useful to others and influence the course of events.
As Henri Nouwen writes: “When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are. Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense. When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies. Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant. Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are "somebodies." But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people's responses to us but God's eternal love for us. To claim the truth of ourselves we have to cling to our God in solitude as to the One who makes us who we are.”
In the normal comings and goings of our lives, responding to other’s reactions and evaluations and judgments of us can leave us alienated from ourselves, distorted. We can lose touch with our true selves. We can create what early teachers in the church called false selves, distortions of who we were called to be.
I’ve mentioned before the story of the guy who went to buy a suit. He’s standing in front of the mirror and says to the sales clerk, “The sleeves are too long.” The sales clerk says, “Oh, no, sir. The sleeves are fine. Look, you just need to hold your shoulders a little higher and stretch out your hands a little farther. Like that. See, the sleeves are fine.” The man says, “Yeah, but, look, one pant leg is longer than the other.” The clerk says, “No, no, sir. If you just slightly bend one leg, like this, the legs are fine.” The man says, “Yes, but look, one shoulder seems higher than the other.” “Oh, no, sir,” insists the sales clerk. “If you just hold your left shoulder like so… There, the shoulders are even now.” Reluctantly, the man decides to buy the suit and to wear it home. As he is walking out the door, trying hard to keep his suit in place, two elderly women are watching. One says, “Oh, did you see that poor man, how crippled and twisted he looks.” The other woman says, “Yes, but did you notice how nice his suit looks!”
In our day-to-day lives, responding to all the reactions and evaluations and judgments others have of us can leave us alienated and distorted like that guy with the suit. We can lose touch with our true selves.
But if we can step away from the crowd, as Mary does in that moment of annunciation, then solitude can be a place of purification where we can find our true selves as beloved sons and daughters of God. We can connect with the source of our strength, discern the fullness God is calling us to.
In our neighborhood right now, many poor families and senior citizens are being evicted from their homes. With all the new luxury condos being built, the market value of property is going up. Landlords are seizing the opportunity to raise their rents sometimes by 50 and 100%.
And in our neighborhood and all across the country, many young people of color continue to die from gun violence, often at the hands of the police. From Ferguson, to Charleston, from Michael Brown to Amilcar in our own neighborhood, we’ve seen some bleak moments this past year.
In the bleakness of her own times, with her own people at times being slaughtered by the Romans, Mary moved into a moment of solitude, and there she heard a call to become larger, more loving, prophetic. I wonder what we might hear today if we, in our own context, listened in solitude as she did.
James Baldwin, the African-American writer, was an insightful critic of both Christianity and of religion in general. He rightly rebelled against the ways religion, in the face of cruelty and injustice, was often used to constrict and paralyze the human spirit, especially the spirits of African-Americans. He wrote at one point, “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
He’s right. If your own image of God crushes you with anxiety, diminishes you in the face of the world’s challenges, constricts your compassion for those suffering around you, and diminishes your joy, then you’re better off being an atheist. Better to have no God than a God who diminishes you like that.
Because this cannot be the true God. This is not the God whom Mary encounters in her solitude and from which emerges her powerful Magnificat. This is not the God who waits to speak to our own hearts in this neighborhood and this country at this critical moment.
One of the early teachers in the church said that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.”
This is the God that Mary encounters, the one who calls her to be more fully alive.
This is the God that St. Paul says gives us “not a spirit of timidity, but one of power, and love, and a good mind.”
This is the God who speaks to us, calls to us, as he did to Mary.
The popular American spiritual writer Marianne Williamson puts it beautifully. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Mary emerges from her solitude with a new stride, a new and larger sense of herself, a new song, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” We should take her words at face value: that God becomes bigger, magnified, by this young woman's unique soul. Over time, the unique shape of her life will make God more God than before. This was the calling she heard and said yes to in that moment of solitude when she was able to hear the angel’s words.
I wonder what song would emerge from our own hearts if you and I-- as individuals, as a parish, in our own contexts--entered into the kind of solitude that Mary did. What would we look like?
Would we emerge larger, full of more life, more love, more joy, more compassion, more justice?
In the new expansiveness of our own souls we discovered there, how would we in our own ways make God bigger?
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