"Betrothed to a man named Joseph" - 3rd Sunday of Advent

Note: For the season of Advent and Christmas, I've decided to focus these reflections on the Virgin Mary rather than the weekly Gospel.

"Betrothed to a man named Joseph"

There’s an old story about Mary that nobody really tells anymore. A text called the Golden Legend from the Middle Ages described how, when Mary was ready for marriage, a whole host of suitors ― Joseph included ― lined up before her with branches from their homes. Whoever’s branch, when laid upon the Temple altar, produced a flower would be the one she married. It was said that a young man named Agabus was so crushed by Joseph winning Mary’s hand that he snapped his branch over his knee and fled weeping into the desert. He swore never to love another woman and lived the rest of his days as a celibate monk. You can find this legend painted in churches across Italy. In Raphael’s depiction ― a copy of which still hangs in Germany ― a youthful Joseph slides a ring onto a blushing Mary’s finger as Agabus annihilates his branch in front of the wedding party. It’s all very dramatic.

It reveals something about us that we don’t tell this story anymore. We don’t usually think of Mary getting caught up in these kinds of things, of her blushing over a boy. We don’t think of her as a heartbreaker. We’re not totally wrong here. In Mary’s time marriage had little to do with love. We didn’t marry for love until the nineteenth century. The odd thing is that the medievals who told this story didn’t marry for love either. Yet they translated this story into numerous languages ― they told it far and wide. Several dioceses even held feast days for it. The point is that ― and many historians have pointed this out ― just because the ancients and medievals didn’t marry for love doesn’t mean they never fell in love. How much of their art, music, and literature is about love? 

In crafting this story about Joseph winning Mary’s hand ― even if it’s not historically true ― the medievals had grasped something profoundly true about the marriage of Mary and Joseph that we modern Catholics often forget, namely that they were in love with each other, even romantically. Even if the ancients didn’t usually marry for the purpose love, how could the Holy Family not have been a locus of real married love? Indeed, Mary and Joseph are the spiritual parents of Catholics. We should not be afraid to imagine that our parents loved each other. 

Do not mishear me. Mary and Joseph’s marriage was a continent one. The medievals held this as dearly as we do. But they also knew love and intimacy cannot be reduced to sex. Why don’t we meditate on that more often? Did Mary not find Joseph handsome? His voice soothing? His arms safe? What keeps us from imagining a Mary who can’t stop smiling when she thinks of her Joseph coming home soon? He was very much her Joseph, her beloved. And what, on the other hand, prevents Joseph from thinking he’s the luckiest guy in the world? He was certainly luckier than poor Agabus! The way her hair falls upon her shoulder, the joke she tells that he doesn’t quite get but laughs at anyway, the odd way she dips her bread in their oil. It was all uniquely her. How many times did Joseph stop at his work just to think about her? She was his Mary, his beloved. 

It was no mistake that God decided to become human within a marriage. He could have become incarnate to Mary alone, without the addition of Joseph. God could, when Joseph learned of the strange pregnancy, have let him “send her away quietly” (Mt 1:19). But God decided to enter the world in the context of married love. God wanted to be raised by two people whose hearts beat a little faster when they looked at each other, whose hearts were vowed to each other through thick and through thin. Whatever that phenomenon is ― we could call it romantic love ― God is part of it. Indeed, God decided to be born within it.  That’s worth remembering.


Click here to subscribe to these reflections by email

2nd Sunday of Advent (and the Immaculate Conception)

Note: For the season of Advent, I've decided to focus these reflections on the Virgin Mary rather than the weekly Gospel.

On Mary's Immaculate Conception

There’s an unfortunate misconception about Mary, namely that she was a bit of a wimp. We tend to think of her as delicate, as someone who never spoke louder than a whisper. With her hands folded and head bowed, we’ve imprisoned a very fragile and lifeless Mary into our figurines and into our imaginations. Caryll Houselander was an old Catholic writer from the 1940s who talked about how, as a little girl, people encouraged her never to do something the Blessed Virgin wouldn’t do. The trouble was, she joked, “I simply could not imagine her doing anything at all.” The Mary in our minds is not very dynamic.

On account of this, the real Mary, the one who actually walked around, has become difficult for us to imagine. We forget that she was once a desperate refugee who escaped her hometown in the dead of night (Mt 2:14). We forget that Mary gave birth alongside animals (Lk 2:7). We don’t think of her as the kind of woman who, when she sings, sings about “scattering the arrogant in their conceit, throwing down the mighty from their thrones … and sending the rich away hungry” (Lk 1:51-53). Mary was no delicate little thing. When nearly everyone else fled for their lives ― even after they swore never to desert him (Mt 26:35) ― Mary remained with Jesus at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25).

This confusion about Mary, in part, comes from a misunderstanding about her “Immaculate Conception,” which Catholics will celebrate this week. We often point out that the Immaculate Conception refers not to Jesus’ conception inside of Mary, but to Mary’s conception inside her mother. Indeed, the teaching is that, from the first moment she was conceived in her mother’s womb, Mary was “preserved free from all stain of original sin.” But there is a second way of misunderstanding the Immaculate Conception that applies to our problem. We misunderstand Mary’s sinlessness if we think it makes her totally unlike us. 

We must not think that, because Mary was sinless, she was somehow unapproachable, that she floated a few inches above the dirt. No. Mary was as gritty as her neighbors. She stoked flames and carried water. We certainly don’t think of Mary as the kind of woman with whom you’d split 2 liters of homemade wine, but that is how much the average Israelite drank each day. I don’t know about you, but I can’t drink that much! 

Mary’s holiness does not make her glide above us. It is just the opposite. It is precisely Mary’s freedom from sin that makes her most approachable, most ordinary, most one-of-us. Holiness does not lift one above normal human life, but makes one more richly engaged in the ordinary world. Indeed, to be sinless is not to be inhuman, but to be most human. More than that, her holiness made her most able to endure and engage the harshest turns life can take ― she was a refugee; she endured the public crucifixion of her son. Indeed, this is precisely what makes her able to sympathize with the harshness of your own life. You can talk to her about it. She’s been through it too. 

Mary was a woman, a real woman. She was a mother ― a real mother ― who loved her real son, not in some ethereal and untouchable way that has no meaning at all, but in the same gritty way that all mothers love their children. In my experience, there is nothing delicate about mothers. Mothers are not to be messed with. She wiped Jesus up, fed him, searched frantically for him when he snuck off (Lk 2:41-52). It’s all very ordinary; it’s just like any other mother. Indeed, what makes it extraordinary ― what makes her immaculate ― is that all this ordinariness is directed toward and oriented around the most extraordinary of children. She was willing to give the entirety of her ordinary human existence to the flourishing of her Son. For this “all generations will call her blessed” (Lk 1:48).

Click here to subscribe to these reflections by email

Se quedó - 1st Sunday of Advent

Note: For the season of Advent and Christmas, these reflections will focus on the Virgin Mary rather than the weekly Gospel. 

In Ohio, one of my closest friends had six children. I was once charged with getting Frances, the 2-year-old, to sleep. I sung the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” while she rested on my shoulder. As I finished, a smile spread across her face. “Again!” she screamed delightedly. I obeyed, but got the same response: “again!” And so on I went several more times, singing more and more softly. Each time, the same response. “Again! Again!” It didn’t put her to sleep — it’s never that easy — but, with each one, she got a little less giggly and her eyes got a bit more heavy. She’d begun to settle into the comfort of the song. Indeed, its warmth and constancy — “again!” — was part of what made it comforting. 

It’s an odd way to start a reflection on Mary — by recalling a child lulling off toward sleep. But Frances did teach me something about Mary and why Catholics cling to her. The theologian Roberto Goizueta tells a story about an old Mexican abuelita who was once challenged to defend her devotion to Mary. [1] “Why do you love her so?” After a moment, she replied: “Se quedó. Se quedó ― She stayed. She stayed.” Maybe that’s an odd response, but I think Frances taught me what that abuelita meant by it. Above all, in the song, Frances wanted someone to be with her, to be near her ― she wanted someone to stay. “Again! Again! Don’t leave!”  

In the spiritual life, Catholics — the abuelita included — have always sensed that Mary stays, that she is near to us. Catholic life, of course, is decked out with Mary. We name churches after her, put up statues, sing songs about her. She’s with us in her picture hanging on our walls, in tangled up rosaries the children have strewn about our rooms, in the tattooes painted across our arms. 

But it’s not just because we’ve decided to honor her that Mary’s name has stuck around. Mary, too, has decided to stay. Again and again, she’s appeared to the faithful across the world ― Fatima, Lourdes, Guadalupe, Kibeho, Akita ― often dressed and looking like the people to whom she’s appeared. That is part of what makes Mary, Mary. She has a motherly instinct, an ability to be there.  

And it’s not just that Mary is always there. Even when the going gets tough, Mary stays. Catholics know that, in times of anguish, Mary’s presence is often most keenly felt. It’s worth noticing, for instance, that when Mary has appeared, it’s often been to those who are poor or alienated, or to children. And the fact of the matter is that we are all poor, anxious, and hurting. But Catholics have always sensed that, no matter what, Mary is with us. She is with us when we beg for God’s help, with us when we weep or angrily tell God how we really feel, with us when we just can’t go on. In those times, “se quedó, se quedó ― she stayed, she stayed.” She is an ever-present reality, a motherly reminder that God is still at work in the world and in our lives. 

It is this constancy that marks Catholic devotedness to Mary, the constancy of this reminder that God himself draws near to us in our pain. This is the constancy that we all crave. It is the constancy that Frances craved as I sang to her ― the assurance that someone would be near her, that someone would stay. Indeed, Frances understands why Catholics embrace the constancy and repetition of Mary’s rosary, why, as soon as we finish ― “now and at the hour of our death” ― we start (“again!”) at once: “Hail, Mary!” [2] It is a reminder that Mary is always among us ― that she is always there to hail and to greet ― that she stayed and that she will always stay.

---

[1] Roberto S. Goizueta, Christ Our Companion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009): 11.
[2] See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Threefold Garland (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985), 23 for a similar way of thinking about the rosary's use of the Hail Mary, but from a different theological angle.

Click here to subscribe to these reflections by email