There’s La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Mary of Mexico. Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Czestechowa, our Lady of Aparecida, Our lady of Kineho, Our Lady of Pontmain, Our Lady of Siluva, Our Lady of La Salette, Our Lady of Medjugorje, and so many more.
But there’s no Jesus of Simi Valley, no Jesus of Peru, no Jesus of Omaha, no Jesus of Rwanda. Sure, there are all sorts of depictions of Jesus with different ethnicities and characteristics. And of course people report having visions of Jesus. But they aren’t “of” anyplace or anything.
Yet there are always new apparitions of Mary, specific to certain places and events. The very nature of Mary, it would seem, is shape-shifting. Mary shows up where and when she is needed, and in the form that is needed.
That’s certainly what happened with the Mary of Mexico, la Virgen de Guadalupe. In 1531, only a decade after the bloody conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, an indigenous peasant baptized as Juan Diego went to the site of the ruined temple of the Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, to pray. Ponder what he might have been praying about. He had lived through a holocaust. The violent invasion by the Spanish and the ruin they imposed on a whole civilization was the least of it – because nearly half of the indigenous people of the Aztec empire were wiped out in a very short period of time by the smallpox virus that came with the invaders. Juan Diego had a lot weighing on his soul. While praying, he encountered the Virgin Mary, who appeared to him as a dark-skinned indigenous woman. He went to the bishop to report what had happened, and was sent away dismissively. Again he went to the place called Guadalupe, where the Aztec temple had once stood, and again encountered la Virgen. Again he went to the bishop, and was ignored. Finally, after an encounter in which la Virgen's image miraculously was imprinted onto his peasant tunic – the first tee-shirt art in the Americas - and then she filled his tunic with Castilian roses that did not grow in Mexico, he went once more to the bishop, showed him the tunic with the roses, and then the bishop declared “milagro!” – miracle! And professed belief. A belief that proved convenient for the Catholic church in Mexico. La Virgen de Guadalupe provided an iconic cultural bridge between the native religion and the Catholic faith, across which indigenous Mexicans could move.
The same sort of thing happened in Europe, where, before Christianity, dark-skinned female goddesses were worshiped. Hence the cult around Our Lady of Czestechowa in Poland, an icon of Mary with dark skin. She was a bridge between the old religion and the new. And there is a similar dark Mary next to Poland in Lithuania – Our Lady of the Door of Dawn – whose image above the city gate was said to have protected Vilnius from being overrun by invaders.
I just learned about Our Lady the Undoer of Knots, also known as the Solver of Problems. A wealthy man in Germany in the 1700’s was having marital difficulties and prayed through Mary and he credited her with bringing peace to the household. So the next time your family gets tied in knots with some kind of conflict, consider asking Mary for intercession!
Our Lady of Medjugorje in Bosnia showed up to some teenagers in the dark days of communism there. Our Lady of the Rock, an apparition of the Virgin Mary seen by an Hispanic woman in the sky in the Mojave desert, drew thousands of pilgrims. Stella Maris – Our Lady, Star of the Sea, guides home fisherfolk from the ocean when waters are rough. And La Virgen del Cerro, Our Lady of the Mountain, is the guardian of miners at the silver mine at Potosi in Bolivia.
Mary’s everywhere, sticking up for us when times are tough, showing up when we need her, taking care of us when all else fails, when all others give up on us. As she was there for Jesus from birth through death, she’s there for us through thick and thin.
The Catholic doctrine of Mary indicates that not only was Jesus conceived “immaculately”, without male sperm, but Mary herself also had an “immaculate conception” – and that, therefore, she too was free of original sin from the moment of her conception. Otherwise, how could she have issued a sinless human from her womb? And Catholic dogma also says that when she died, she experienced an “assumption” – body and soul - as distinct from Jesus’ “ascension” into heaven. The delicate difference is that Jesus went up to heaven on his own, but Mary got an Uber ride to heaven with God. The dogmatic difference in holiness and divinity between Jesus and Mary is, to say the least, a fuzzy one. While the Catholic church does not equate Mary with God, as it equates Jesus with God, the distinction between them seems trivial.
In the Catholic church, Mary intercedes. You ask her to pray to God on our behalf, to get stuff that we want and need. The implicit idea, of course, is that she has access to God that we don’t have. So human, eh? You ask a big shot, all too often a male, for something, and you get ignored. So you ask somebody close to the big shot to make the request on your behalf. Better results. So that idea worked its way into Catholic Christianity. And it resonates with the biblical myth of Jesus and Mary at the wedding in Cana. Jesus didn’t want to turn the water into wine. He was done with that party. But his mother ordered him to take action on behalf of the host of the wedding, who had run out of wine. Do something! Okay, okay, all right, already…. So he worked the miracle.
The role of Mary in Christianity points convincingly to the reality that the Christian religion is a mirror of the human psyche, the inner human condition. The truth of Christianity is not factual or propositional. The truth of Christianity is how faithfully and artfully and creatively it reflects our inner spiritual experience, our soul’s journey through life. The figure of Mary is a reflection of that elemental connection within us all with our mothers, within whom we gestated, from whom we were issued forth into the world, and from whose breasts we were fed.
Momma is in there, wayyyy deep, in all of us, whether she is with us in the flesh or not. Mary is her avatar, the mother of us all. But not just of us all, but of us each, because the nature of mother is that she is our mother. That’s why we have specific Marys for specific places and people and moments. Whereas we don’t have specific Jesuses for specific places and people and moments. Which is why the figure of Mary in Christianity is so important. While there was no basis in the Bible for making Mary a quasi-divine figure, the human need for the divine feminine was so strong that the Church had no choice but to adjust. It is a case of theology bubbling up from the people instead of trickling down from the religious big shots. The church had to contort its theology to accommodate the overwhelming need of its people for a sacred representation of motherhood. And in doing so, the church found a means of adjusting to the deep cultural needs of its far-flung constituents. Hence La Virgen of Guadalupe, the dark-skinned indigenous Mexican manifestation of Mary. And the many other Marys of other places and peoples. Mom accommodates, adjusts, intervenes, intercedes, for the well-being of her children. So the church, despite its deep sexism, had to allow expression of the divine feminine.
At its best, Christianity meets us where we are, and how we are, however we are. Christianity is human. It’s us, groping for words, symbols, rituals, music, art that can reflect back to ourselves our quest to be in harmonious relationship with an Ultimate Reality intimate with us yet also infinitely bigger than us. So gender, in all its complex manifestations, is going to be part of that language of faith. And certainly the elemental depth-psychological experience of motherhood is going to be part of it. Which brings us to Mary. And brings Mary to us.
Mary is the star of the sacred myth of Christmas, after all. Jesus didn't even get a speaking part in the play. So may we all have a Mary Christmas. A merry Mary Christ-myth. Amen!