Mary the Apostle

Does anyone really exist, or are people only who we make them into?

Yesterday a bunch of folks in my quirky Twitter world were tweeting away about St Mary of Magdala, the apostle to the Apostles. A lot of people in my circles are set on exonerating Mary, and with good reason. She picked up a bad reputation throughout the middle ages. I was fascinated to discover that a rise in a presentation of a penitent Magdelene occurred during the Catholic Reformation, when the whole Church was repenting and looking for a model of contrition.  In retrospect, learning that was probably the turning point toward a favorable view of Church history and a frustration with retroactive indignance: no matter how we’ve messed up, there is always a reason why.

And boy, did we mess it up with Mary of Magdala. For better or worse she is part of our collective consciousness as a loose woman, a characterization which is found nowhere in Scripture. Better writers than I have documented the conflation of various biblical women into Mary. If we look at the evidence, we see that she was a dear disciple and a leader among the Apostles, but even those of us who struggle to proclaim this are evangelizing the in the shadow of myth, aware that what we are trying to do is fundamentally an un-doing.

Yesterday I was also privy to conversations about another Mary, and her sister, Martha, both stars of one of the few Bible stories that features two women.  Unfortunately it also features sibling rivalry and the chastisement of a hard-working woman, something hard-working women everywhere have been trying to explain away ever since.

I couldn’t help thinking, in the midst of both of these discussions, “how much does any of this matter?” If we get these women figured out, does it really change anything? They lived 2000 years ago and have long since gone to a place where their reputations cannot harm them. Reimagining them doesn’t change them – but it does change us.

We rely on our sacred narratives for permission on how to behave.  If Mary and Martha is a story of passivity vs. activity, we know who wins. And for women, that’s what we’re stuck with, because so few of our sacred stories have female characters. I wonder if men pore over the characterizations of Peter, Thomas, or other Apostles, go searching for the “stories about men” the way some women scramble to find in “stories about women” evidence that God loves us, and that we matter too.  I doubt it – all history is “stories about men”. Why would they imagine themselves Matthew or Zaccheus when they could be Paul? They could be Jesus.

This is not to disparage the exegetical or imaginative skills of the wonderful men I know who look to the Bible for guidance.  They are lucky to have so many models, and in truth I often share their models – loving Zaccheus as inspiration to short people everywhere, and Peter as a model of loud-mouthed-bozo-makes-good. We should take inspiration where we get it. But I won’t pretend that women and men are on a level interpretive playing field.

The woman at the well tells me it’s ok to question and to challenge. Phew. The woman with the alabaster jar tells me I can be lavish in my giving. Good to know. The woman with the hemorrhage (are we noticing a theme of namelessness here?) tells me I can take initiative. That's a relief, since I probably would have anyway.  When I look over my academic history I realize most of my Scripture study has been focused on these women.  I have spent countless hours picking apart these stories, searching for historical context and literary types, and anything else that would help me understand these few, mostly nameless female characters.

So who is Mary of Magdala, and why does it matter? The historical Mary is long gone, lost forever to the mythologies that make figures a reflection of our age.  Can our age allow her to be what the simplest evidence points to: a faithful follower of Jesus who stayed with him until the end, and a proclaimer of the Gospel? 

Every year we read or sing the Easter Sequence, in a translation packed with facile rhymes. And every year when we get to the line “Speak, Mary, declaring what you saw, wayfaring” I literally thank God. Tucked away in that tiny couplet, in which the Church talks back to the Scripture that week by week talks to us, is permission to proclaim what we see.  Sometimes that sliver of guidance is all we get, and it’s up to us to figure out the rest of what it means, for us and for history.

St. Mary of Magdala by Eileen Cantlin Verbus. Copyright FutureChurch. For more information about St. Mary of Magdala celebrations, go to www.futurechurch.org

In all things, charity

In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity. - Attributed to St Augustine.

Something awful happened today.

A politician was shot and people made it political and then they were criticized for being political. We heard she died and were horrified, we heard the reports were wrong and were relieved, then were sad again as the death toll rose to include a child, then relieved again to hear that the shooter was likely not motivated by politics but by mental illness - as if the lunacy of the violent one could undo the reality that was present long before this event: we live in a world that is horribly broken, and it is our own brokenness that makes it so.

I am partisan and constantly wavering between being proud and ashamed of the fact. When I am in a good mood I truly believe that most people want what's best for all people, and we just disagree on how to achieve it. I tend to side with one political party, but I try with all my might to look for the best intentions in the agendas of those with whom I disagree politically. Believe me, this suspension of contentiousness goes against all of my natural inclinations.

It is hard for me, but I do my best, which leaves me frustrated with those who won't at least try to be charitable in their discourse. Politicians get elected by fearmongering and mudslinging, playing to the worst parts of our nature. Our society and our government become about a Them - sometimes nameless, sometimes those who voted the "wrong" way, or "activist" judges, or "Kenyan" presidents - anyone who is out to get us. We should hate Them, defend ourselves from Them, target Them, maybe even destroy Them.

Coming under fire today (pun intended) was Sarah Palin. I try not to comment much on Sarah Palin, for a number of reasons. First, I honestly don't know where my general distaste for the far right ends and a legitimate critique of her begins. Also, I am sensitive to how rare her aggressiveness is in a female public figure, and I don't want to come down hard on someone with whom I disagree when she is demonstrating a brashness that I adopt myself. It was reading some excerpts from her recent book that convinced me of a mean-spiritedness in her public persona that is offensive and unhelpful.

We use politics as an excuse to be mean-spirited, and that us-vs-them lack of charity bleeds into our other interactions as well. That mindset in Christian circles will be the subject of another post. And while I don't expect politics to follow the same rules as faith, it would be nice if the ubiquitous lip-service paid to Christianity manifested in something other than a further widening of the imagined chasm between us and them.

A Soul that Shouts

One occupational hazard for a church musician is that we rarely come across traditional hymns that are new to us: we’ve literally heard it all before. But just a few years ago I got the gift of a new Advent/Christmas hymn when I heard Gabriel’s Message for the first time. I like the tune (when it’s not done too slowly!), the refrain is catchy, and the poetry is above-average. When I got to church last weekend I was happy to find it on the song sheet.



Like many singers, I have the capacity - either enviable or regrettable - to sing on auto-pilot while thinking about any number of things (for instance, yesterday I discovered I could sing the entire Halleluiah Chorus from memory while deciding what to have for dinner). Last Sunday I found myself analyzing the text to Gabriel’s Message. “Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head/to me be as it pleaseth God, she said.” At the word "meek" I groaned, thankfully silently, since I was singing into a microphone.

“Mary was that mother mild.” “A Virgin pure both meek and mild/In Bethlehem brought forth her Child” “gentle Mary laid her child”… There are plenty of problems with the idea that all women will feel an unqualified affiliation with Mary, who is often presented as the only role model Christian women are allowed to have. There are even more problems with the relentless stereotyping of Mary as docile and tame. Do we really believe a shrinking violet would have had the nerve to do what she did?

This week we are hearing the Gospel readings from Luke 1, starting with the Annunciation on Monday and concluding with the Canticle of Zechariah. Today’s Gospel is Mary’s Magnificat, an unapologetically bold declaration of praise. This is a saint I can get behind. So with all due respect to late Romantic Marian piety, I’m taking Mary back.

The idea of an ideal woman as meek and submissive may seem like an anachronism, but we’ve kept her alive in our religious iconography, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’m sick of it. Give me a role model who questions an angel, bravely says yes, deals with a life lived in the rumor mill, does some bossy maneuvering at a wedding to restock the bar, and proclaims God’s praise and promises. When my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord it doesn’t do so timidly - my soul shouts, and there’s a possibility that Mary’s did too.

Remembering the Four Churchwomen

"The church's role is to accompany those who suffer the most, and to witness our hope in the resurrection." - Maura Clarke

On December 2 we remembered the four churchwomen killed on that date in El Salvador in 1980. Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran military during the terrible period of oppressive violence that lasted in that country for more than a decade.

One news report commemorating the event mentioned that the killings of these women opened the world’s eyes to the atrocities being committed in El Salvador. It’s important that we look at the context in which this awful event occurred, and that there is plenty of blame to go around. Conversations I've had this week about these women often turned to a number of topics- the School of the Americas, Oscar Romero, US involvement in Latin American conflicts (with a healthy dose of my guiltiest pleasure: Reagan-bashing).

At what point do our saints stop being people and become symbols? Can we remember these women as individuals in their own right and as part of a grander narrative? I think there’s a tendency in hagiography (particularly when it comes to women) to miss the trees for the forest. We miss the particularity of their holiness by focusing on What The World Learned From Them.

"I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Something worth living for--maybe even worth dying for." -Ita Ford

If these women were merely victims caught up in the world-wide turmoil of the late Cold War, if this were only about the lingering effects of European colonization of the Americas, or the American support of oppressive regimes, or a civil war in which few were acting morally, we wouldn’t admire them. Through the memories of those who knew them and through their writings, we find evidence of an integrity that both put them in harm’s way and gave their lives purpose. They knew who they were and what they were called to do, and they didn’t let the world around them muddy the waters.

Integrity is the quality we need from our modern saints. To stand firm among the swirl of our complex world, to remember one’s mission while being bombarded by competing values, to keep the spark of divine love alive in our hearts while being told that we should fill our hearts with only ourselves, that is to be holy. We may think that we have something new going on here, but wasn’t Jesus also caught up in a complex political and social environment, and put to death for refusing to deny who he was?

The four churchwomen followed Jesus by not denying who they were, even though the path they were on led to martyrdom. Their conviction is admirable (or foolish, depending on how you look at it), and shouldn’t be ignored when examining the bigger conflict in which they were caught up. It’s a horror that simply living an honest life of service can lead to a brutal death. We do a disservice to the women’s memories if we focus only on the salaciousness and drama of their death and fail to notice the simple holiness of their lives.

We're all sinners, everyone of us, and a radical change is needed for all of us. - Ita Ford

[I will never be a successful blogger if I don’t lose this habit of thinking things through before I post about them. What good does a post about the four churchwomen do two days after the anniversary of their killings? If I don’t cut out my processing time I may never be a successful blogger, but I just might turn into a writer. ]

Retroactive indignance

A dear friend who works in politics once admitted he occasionally tells people he is a social security actuary in order to avoid the ridiculous political comments people make when he reveals his true line of work. I have considered doing the same thing at times, because when I tell people I teach Church History - or even that I am committed to the Church - I get negative responses ranging from disbelief to horror, from an implied “But you seemed so normal!” to a sputtering “But- but- but - WHAT ABOUT THE CRUSADES??”


Uh, they were bad?

Seriously, I get the Crusades question a lot, almost as often as I get invasive lines of questioning about my take on sexual ethics, a field in which I have no academic background, no professional purview, and which is the topic of another post entirely. Either way there are a lot of assumptions made right off the bat, and as often as not a visible disapproval of my line of work This disapproval frequently manifests as a list of wrongs committed throughout history. Clearly, my interlocutors would have handled things differently.

Of course they would have, because they were born in the 20th century in America, they’re mostly middle-class, mostly well-educated, swimming in the postmodern current like all the rest of us. So I find their retroactive indignance alternately annoying and amusing. It’s almost childlike the way they imagine time-travel, that they could plop themselves down in the driver’s seat 1000 years ago.

There’s always a context. There’s always a culture. There’s always a why. Even our famed “religious wars” (which I frequently remind my students, had little to do with doctrine and a lot to do with “stuff”) was partially prompted by the fact that there were bored knights running all over the empire getting in fights, and Pope Urban thought to himself “I have a way to get them all far away from here…”

We laugh at the 19th century Popes clinging to temporal power (because to our 21st century minds that’s not what a Pope is ‘supposed to do’), but you can’t understand that without understanding the rest of the story. Pius IX acted the way he did because Constantine moved the capital of the Empire in the 300s…because Leo the Great met Attila the Hun in the 400s…because Pepin the Short foresaw a prudent alliance in the 700s… With our 21st century minds sometimes we just don’t get it, and it’s ok to admit that.

I’m not advocating a retroactive indifference either - we should look at history with a critical eye, with dismay or admiration or even horror. But to be smug about decisions made centuries ago is silly. For how will history judge our own era of ‘tolerance’ and ‘prosperity’ and ‘peace’? When in the year 2500 someone judges our social sins of action and inaction will they interpret it in light of our world, or will they immediately condemn us?

There is so much progress still to be made in our world, and I admire those prophetic voices who insist the change must come immediately and without delay. But in my heart I’m not convinced we can change the outcomes without changing the context. When I think of the issues that distress me the most - particularly issues of gender, both in and out of the Church - the great sadness for me is not that I can’t have my way. I mourn that the world is not with me in my desire. I don’t just want the outcome, I want the world to be ready for it, I want the world to want it too.

We will get there, but it takes time. If the study of history has taught me anything it’s that it takes a long time to turn around a big boat. When I started studying Popes I never thought it would make me more patient, but there you have it.

Great women are like meteors

Last week I took yet another tour of the state house, an activity that always brings my civics nerd-dom to the fore. I love history, politics, policy, and majestic buildings, so this oft-repeated trip inspires and interests me. I have no illusions about the inclusion of my people in most of Massachusetts history: women, Catholics, and even the iconic Irish were absent from most of the decision making for a large portion of the history of the Commonwealth. So I know how significant it is when we walk by the sign on Senate President Therese Murray's door, and my heart aches a little when we stand in the House chambers, beneath a ceiling encircled with names of Massachusetts greatest (white, anglo-saxon, protestant) men.

Most days I can be patient about the progress women have made. Things are easier for me than they were for my mother, and were easier for her than for her mother. I went to a college my mother couldn't have gone to and have the freedom to live on my own, have a job that I love, and basically do what I want. Things are OK.

At the very end of the tour, in a side hallway near the stairs, we viewed the Portrait Gallery of six of the Commonwealth's most extraordinary women. It was a challenge to listen to our tour guide and read the quotes and look at the portraits. I was struck by this quotation of Lucy Stone:

In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen that disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

Then I heard the tour guide say "Not only does this gallery honor these six women, it honors all women". I'm sure our well-spoken and bright guide was just following her script, and I'm sure most of the people I was with were thinking "isn't that nice", but I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying something snide. Don't pretend that portraints of six women make up for centuries of grave injustice, and don't imaging that just because Lucy Stone was a woman, she'd be content with sharing her honor with everyone else just to be nice. This is better than nothing, but it's not even close to justice.

I'm glad we honor Dorothea Dix and Florence Luscomb and the other leaders whose faces are on those brass plaques. In no way does that make it right that so many people's voices were excluded from decision making just because of their gender (or race, or religion). It doesn't make it right that we criticize our successful female politicians for being pushy or unbecoming, and then ridicule the other half who we keep in the public eye in order to have someone at whom to laugh and gawk.

Earlier that same day, at the JFK Library, I saw an inscription Jackie Kennedy wrote in a gift to her husband:  "great men are like meteors, consuming themselves as they light the earth". Fifty years after she quoted Napoleon, women deserve their chance to be meteoric and powerful - and it's not because they are women but because they are human, skilled (or not), wise (or not), strong (or not) like all other humans. The meteoric trajectory is not for every woman nor is it for every man, but everyone deserves a chance to have her photo among the legislative leadership, her name painted above the house chamber, her visage sculpted in bronze.

If you're not outraged...

Once upon a time, like a lot of idealistic young people, I lived and died by the bumper-sticker creed “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention”. After a little time and a lot of experience, my bumper sticker is more likely to read “if you’re not outraged, you’ve probably developed a good self-preservation mechanism”. It’s not to say that there isn’t still plenty in this world worthy of lament, but that most of it is not the result of nefarious individuals but of huge systems impervious to our outrage. As I discovered the first time I was crossed by Bank of America, sometimes there is no one responsible, and no one to be mad at, and the anger only hurts ourselves.

Even with individuals I find it hard to maintain anger. Like a goldfish fooled each time by the tapping on the glass, I can easily be won over by a pleasant exchange with someone, even if previous exchanges have been less than pleasant, and even if I am convinced that they are one of those rare nefarious individuals mentioned above. Perhaps it’s because I am so frequently in need of mercy and forgiveness myself, but I am usually pretty willing to start over again with someone even if they’ve irked me in the past.

A lot of people mention Jesus’ anger when they are trying to justify their own. That’s a nice idea, but come on, this is Jesus we’re talking about. Yes, he went recognizably bonkers over the money changers in the temple, but he was also the Son of God. I better be sure my motivations are as pure and my anger as righteous when I start flipping tables.

Is it called growing up? Is it called settling? Is it called getting over it, whatever it may be? I’m not sure. But because I am more willing to let things go now, I give even more attention to the handful of things I am not willing to let go. There are a few incidents in my history that I refuse to forgive or forget, the claws and barbs of which I refuse to release from my gut and my psyche. I have made a conscious decision to keep being angry about these, so they must matter.

One was being told in elementary school that I couldn’t be an altar server because I was a girl, and the other was being told in high school that I should quit singing because my voice wasn’t worth listening to. They involve such wildly different things, but to me they are so similar that I have almost conflated the two incidents into some epic thwarting, an unidentifiable outside voice telling me something about me that I knew was false.

The comment in high school was really crushing. Not only had I shaped a fair amount of my identity around my vocal talent, I also had the intuition to know that this was what I should be doing. Singing was who I was, and had been since long before I had any outside feedback that my voice was “good” or “pretty” or “sweet” or any of the other adjectives that get thrown around. Singing was something I had always done, and part of how I expressed myself. Whether my voice was pretty or sweet had nothing to do with the most important fact which was that my voice was mine.

The issue with altar serving raises whole issues of gender that I’m not sure I am ready to get into here. What I am willing to get into, and what should embarrass me more than it does, is that even as a child I had a strong and bizarre devotion to the liturgy and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. The same way that I will now read any book, attend any lecture, or take any class that has to do with liturgy, when I was a child I would take any opportunity to be involved. It was bad luck that I was in a parish (and perhaps a diocese? I’m not sure) that still prohibited “altar girls”, and I remember being so astounded that I couldn’t even be angry or upset.

One of my earliest memories is of someone at day care telling me that blue was “a boys’ color” and having my now-typical reaction of “that’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard”. I never believed there was anything ontologically different about me because of my gender. There was nothing I deserved or didn’t deserve, nothing I was capable or incapable of, simply because I was a girl. So to be told that this element of my identity that I truly believed to be inconsequential was going to affect another person’s decision about what I could do was an absurdity that passeth all understanding.

In retrospect, neither of these things was truly enraging, more dumbfounding: somebody thought they knew better than me about me, and that somebody was wrong. Everyone has things that they are wired for, and to have those natural inclinations denied or disparaged truly violates the natural order of things. I suppose I hang on to these insults and slights because I don’t want to forget what it is that makes me who I am. I don’t want to forget that no one can tell me what I am capable of or what my aspirations should be. It’s good to let things go, but equally good to know what we should hold onto, what's worth being mad about.



I have avoided putting a “gender” tag up on the blog for a while, because I don’t want to get into something so controversial. But maybe it’s time.