The Mary I Didn’t Know

As a young girl, I remember Mary being depicted as passive, submissive, and quiet. She was most revered as a receptacle of God — a useful tool; a humble servant. She quietly accepted her role as the mother of God, then disappeared except for a few references and a rebuke. She reappears at the end, when Jesus acknowledges her at his death, and is never mentioned again.

In my Protestant evangelical tradition, there was a strong backlash against anything that could be described as Mary worship. In fact, I often heard people say that Mary would weep to know people were worshipping her. Catholicism was akin to heathenism and deifying a woman was the worst of it.

 Somewhere along the way, I was told that, in addition to being humble, submissive, and quiet, Mary was also very, very young — barely in her teens, perhaps. There’s no Biblical support for Mary’s age, but we Protestants love historical context when it suits us and I never stopped to question why this particular tidbit seemed to be so ingrained in the tradition. It seemed to be taken for granted that, if everyone else at that time was impregnating teenagers, God would too. The Marys I saw in my Sunday school papers, artwork, and Christmas cards were all porcelain-skinned; many of them blonde with blue eyes. As a brown-haired, brown-eyed girl, I was always drawn to the darker-haired versions, but I still never expanded my imagination to include a brown-skinned mother of God.

In all the Christmas sermons and readings of Luke I heard, I never remember hearing the Magnificat. Maybe it was too Catholic. But if I heard it, I must not have paid attention. What could an illiterate — because I was also told this — pregnant, teenage girl have to say except to be overjoyed that she was chosen as an empty vessel to be filled by a male God with his male child? 

The thing I most understood about Mary was that we should always be careful to keep her in her place. This fit with the other things I absorbed from church. Other warnings about women who might get confused about where they belonged. Loud women in Proverbs, the Jezebels and whores of Revelation. They were ever-present dangers. The traps. We were to emulate repentant Eve and humble Mary. Obedient Sara and patient Rachel. The danger of the powerful woman was never far. She was always under the surface, ready to burst through and take what didn’t belong to her. It wasn’t quite said out loud but I felt that she was in me too, needing to be controlled and suppressed. The dark voice that leaped up when I had thoughts about usurping the authorities that were meant to protect me from myself. 

Years have passed and waves of change have washed over me. My lens to see Mary and myself is colored differently now. 

For a while, I’ll admit I wanted to throw the Bible and its stories about women right out of the window. I saw them only as celebrating my own suppression. But gradually I’ve come back to some of them and read them in a new light. 

When you read the Bible with the narrator in mind, the stories hit a little differently. And when you apply that historical context it becomes downright subversive. When you discover there were older, wilder, feminine stories, earth stories, and mother stories, you begin to see the Bible as a painting on top of a painting. And for the painter who wants to cover up the old and re-shape the characters in his own image, his greatest fears are the old stories bleeding through. 

Now I see the stories that bleed through. Not just the Deborahs and the Esthers but the Jezebels and the Delilahs. The women who named their own power and threatened the narrative. 

This Christmas, as I’ve returned to the story of Mary, it stuns me that I could have missed it all those years. Mary was Her, bleeding through at last — still covered by some layers, but shining out from under them. The Mother, the Maiden, the Prophetess. Her Magnificat, Her Magnification is not just praise for her offspring. It is a cry for justice, for revolution, for the overturning of the systems of power. It’s the cry of the Mother for her children. If we scratch the surface of the Father we find the Mother underneath. 

She has always been with us, waiting to break through.