Lenten Reflection 5: "Hail O' Sacred Heifer..."

The full line from the title of this post comes from the Friday akathist hymns to the Mother of God. "Hail O' sacred heifer who bore the spotless calf," along with many other "Hails," most of which I cannot remember. When you take the kids to church, tending to them becomes an act of worship in itself. I think there might have also been something about an "seashell" and a pearl.

In that spirit, I want to reflect a bit on the Mother of God. This isn't going to be so much a theological reflection for me, which I can do, but I'd prefer it be more devotional. Perhaps an alternate title for this post would be "What Mary Means to Me."

The Orthodox Church does not consider Mary to have been one out of a pool of randomly selected virgins. "At the fullness of time" Mary was born, miraculously though not immaculately. Subject to original sin,* but not guilty of personal sin, she is not the passive victim of (the male) God's omnipotent will. The annunciation does not read for us, as I once heard a Unitarian student suggest, like a rape narrative. Mary actively receives the Word, giving flesh to God. The heavens themselves hinge upon her answer. In a manner of speaking the kenosis of God begins prior to the Incarnation itself, when the Most High waits to hear the answer of a 14 year old girl.

Accordingly, Mary is for me a reminder of what humanity can be, though not in any kind of positivistic way. Narratives of a steadily progressing human evolution are hardly tenable today. Rather, if grace and nature can interact in such a way as to produce her, then there may be hope for us yet. That should mean a lot coming from someone who's usually so cynical.

Therefore, she is also my personal ideal. When I say that, I hear the voice of Feuerbach rise from the grave to accuse me of projecting ideal, virginal femininity onto the heavens. I suppose anything is possible, but I cannot rightly say that I feel drawn toward Mary as a sexual object in accordance with his theory (perish the thought!). When I think about Mary's ever-virginity, I don't think about a physical purity proper to the Mother of God. That kind of thinking looks at sex as somehow inherently dirty or polluting, which seems not to accord with Scripture or the best of the tradition. I see her ever-virginity, as St. Paul suggested, as an expression of her total commitment to God, which for her is identical to her commitment to her Son. During his earthly ministry she has some understanding that he is divine, though she has to grow into this knowledge. Her virginity is thus less an expression of her physical purity as it is her total devotion to God. She thinks about "how to please the Lord," instead of "how to please her husband." It is in this sense that she is my personal ideal. I have to admit that I don't think much about imitating Christ. For a number of reasons (most of them Feuerbachian), WWJD just doesn't work for me. But when I think about Mary, I think that maybe it is possible for me to give everything I am over to Christ.

Finally, I am given hope for the world when I think about the prayers of the Mother of God on its behalf. A Son listens to his Mother. When the Mother of God prays for mercy, I have hope that God will be merciful to us. Not that we deserve it, but when everything I see with my cynical eyes tells me we are doomed – wars and rumors of wars, the poisoning of the earth and seas, the suffering we inflict upon others, and my own complicity with all of that – I have hope that maybe Christ will not give us – give me – what I deserve. Perhaps, by the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos, he will have mercy on us all.



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*Some of my readers will probably want to know why I used the term "original sin." It is true that Orthodox Christians tend to prefer the term "ancestral sin" in order to distance themselves from the Augustinian notion that we all inherit the guilt of Adam (which is the basis of his belief that unbaptized infants burn in Hell). Ancestral sin refers to the "structural" conditions of a fallen world that interact with the weakened human condition to produce personal sins. Though I reject the notion of inherited guilt, I have no problem with the term "original sin." I find the term "ancestral sin" to be overly polemical. It perpetuates an Eastern misunderstanding about Augustine's theology. There is much less of a genetic component to Augustine's doctrine of sin than Eastern (and many Western) Christians tend to think. He does not begin to reflect on sin by thinking about a kind of "sin gene," (to borrow a term from Kira Dault) as many Eastern theologians tend to read him. Rather, he begins from the fact of human sinfulness, which he observes begins at a very young age (with a toddler who would deny his infant brother his mother's milk), to a rather complex anthropology that explains this fact. Inherited guilt is a part of that anthropology, but I would argue it need not be an essential component. Furthermore, modern scholars in the Western and Augustinian tradition are also rejecting the notion of inherited guilt to explain the fact of human sinfulness more structurally. So my self-conscious incorporation of a controversial term from the Western tradition into my Eastern lexicon is actually something of an ecumenical endeavor, an attempt to rehabilitate Augustine to the East and to accentuate the common ground between the two traditions.