Image: Scott Griessel (c) 2013 creatista.com
There’s no such thing as a nobody.
That’s the message of Mary.
Until her immaculate conception, until she howled out the Magnificat, she had become accustomed to being treated as a nobody.
Then came the miracle. Quite suddenly she was fully aware, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, that she was a somebody. A divine consciousness was implanted within her. Call it Christ consciousness. The consciousness that she mattered, that everybody matters.
"My soul magnifies the Lord," sang out Mary, a peasant, and a woman, at that -- considered a second-class citizen in that time in that backwater of the Roman Empire. She sang out a world turned upside down – in which the rich would be sent empty away, the hungry would be filled with good things. In magnifying the Lord, Mary magnified her microfied self.
Her conception was a crystal-clear concept to Mary: the new and electrifying concept that her life really and truly made a difference. As handed down to us, her Magnificat is a political document -- it's the immaculate conception of the principle of democracy, of the equality of all human beings. Read the Magnificat and you'll get a hint of the Bill of Rights that followed from it, long afterward.
The old Westminster Catechism, an old Protestant primer on what it means to be a Christian, begins with this wonderful line: "The chief end of man is to praise God and enjoy him forever." I'm here to do no less, and maybe not much more, than that.... to magnify the Lord.
But when I magnify the Lord I become more fully realized and fulfilled as an individual. I am more who I am supposed to be, more who I am meant to be, in such moments. Praising the divine love who is God brings us all up to a higher level of being. People who magnify the Lord are not nobodies: they are each and all somebodies whose lives have dignity. When you magnify the Lord, you put yourself in the company of divinity, and surround yourself with God's glory, and the shine rubs off. Mary magnified the Lord, and in doing so, the Lord magnified her.
That concept is one that doesn't come easy for a lot of people -- folks who for various reasons feel outside looking in, who feel less-than, who feel shut out, who feel ignored. I got an interesting taste of this experience years ago. I prefer to dress casually almost all the time. Very casually. It may just be a bad habit, but I've gotten away with it this long, so --- Anyway, I was the pastor of a church. I was wearing a pair of boots, ripped levis and a plaid vest and a baseball cap, stacking up chairs to get ready for the carpet cleaners who were coming the next day. While I was doing this, a group of upper-middle class women was in the building. I had welcomed the group to come play with their babies in our building once a week. Not one of the mothers greeted me, even though I was within a few feet of them. I was not accustomed to being ignored at my church, so I found this treatment to be odd. It took a while for me to realize that the ladies believed I was the janitor.
I did not exist. I was a nobody. It was fascinating! I was right there, moving around among them, and they saw right through me and right past me and paid me no mind whatever. Now, mind you, I think these women were perfectly nice, decent people. They were acting just like I have acted many times -- ignoring people who are members of a different economic and social status than their own and my own. I learned something that day. If you want to be invisible, stack chairs while wearing scruffy clothes.
There may be some of you who have this experience all the time... being out in the world, but not seen, treated as a nobody instead of as a somebody. In any case, I think everyone, including myself, has treated others like nobodies plenty of times -- in restaurants, in hotels, in airports, dealing with faceless "customer service representatives" on the phone -- we're all guilty of "microfying" people instead of magnifying them. That day at the church, I woke up to this experience -- and had a taste of what it would be like to be treated like I was nobody. I realized how deeply that could affect a person -- how it would get to my head, and make me feel small and less-than and devalued. And it makes me think about the Magnificat, and how God became visible to an invisible woman, and how that moment made her fully visible to herself, and to others.
The Magnificat is a political document that ought to give rich and powerful people the shivers. But they aren’t shaking, because in their churches they’ve paid for stained-glass windows of a Mary meek and mild. Find me a stained-glass image of Mary howling out the Magnificat, instead of just looking quietly beatific while hovering over the manger. The rich and powerful have curated Mary’s image, they’ve hired publicists to sanitize her. Did you know that there is an office for the Virgin Mary at the Vatican? The brother of an Italian friend of mine is in charge of it. Need we say more? A man is in charge of the way that Mary is presented to the world.
There are two distinct ways to magnify people. One is to lift everybody up, at the expense of no one. The other is to lift up some folks by pushing down others. Lifting up everybody is democracy at its best. Lifting up some by pushing down others is populism. I’ll just go ahead and say it: it’s Trumpism. Those vermin, those coastal elite people (himself not included, somehow), those socialist communist Democrats, they are your enemies, they are the reason you feel one-down. They mock you for living in flyover states, they think you are nobodies. They are the bad guys. You are the good guys, the real Americans. Vote for me because I’m your defender. Through me, you are a somebody, not a nobody.
This is very powerful and effective rhetoric. It’s also incredibly dangerous and destructive rhetoric that pits half the people of this country against the other half. So it is time we listened to Mary’s rhetoric, which distinguishes 99% of the population from the less than 1% who held the levers of power at the time, but does so without demonizing anybody – she just says they’ll be brought down from their thrones to mix with the 99%. Welcome to the real world, King Herod! Welcome to our world.
When the British army came to America to put down the American revolution, its soldiers came face to face with ours. And there are accounts of how the British were shocked by their encounters with Americans, whom they had considered up to that moment to be fellow subjects of King George. The British could see by the demeanor and the bearing of the American soldiers that they were not dealing with subjects. Not King George’s subjects, not anybody’s subjects. The Americans had obvious and striking personal dignity. They were magnified. The British officers found this to be both impressive and disturbing. In Europe, they were accustomed to send their subjects into war with the subjects of other kings and queens. The Revolutionary War was revolutionary for the British, because they’d never gone to war with an army of somebodies.
You are nobody’s subject but God’s. And to be God’s subject is to be your own subject. Because God is the loving relationship between you and yourself and other people and all other beings in the cosmos. That loving, accepting, forgiving relationship ennobles you as a crown of creation. By magnifying that relationship of divine love, you are magnified, and you magnify the others around you. Not half of them. All of them. Such are the politics of Mary!