by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Welcome in this holiday season--

Come into this circle of love and justice,

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Mary, the Mother of God.  The Virgin Mary.  The Queen of Heaven.  Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe.  And on and on.  There are many names for the woman who birthed Jesus.  The truth is, we are told very little about Mary.  She shows up very seldom in the scriptural accounts.  She is visited by an angel, who tells her that she is to birth the messiah, and that the father is to be the Holy Spirit; she gives birth in a humble manger, she disciplines the 12-year-old Jesus when he disappears to teach in the temple; she asks Jesus to perform his first miracle (turning the water into wine at a wedding feast); she is at the foot of the cross during the agony of Jesus’ crucifixion; she is present in the Upper Room with the disciples after the resurrection.  That’s about it. 

Who was she?  She is called the Virgin Mary.  Was Mary a virgin?  It was only in the 5^th century that this doctrine was accepted by both Western and Eastern churches.  The doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary was developed during the 6^th century, along with the belief that she had a lot of power in heaven.  When the Reformation came along, veneration of the saints, including Mary, was rejected by the Protestant Reformers, but still she was given honor and respect.  The reformers also rejected the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception—that is, that Mary was born without original sin—and they rejected the Assumption, but they accepted the Virgin Birth.  Some traditions claim that she was a perpetual virgin, and others say no, because Jesus had brothers and sisters.  Some call her Theotokos, or the Mother of God, but to others, this calls into question Jesus’ full humanity.  So you see, through the years, the church has just taken Mary and made her into what suited them for their various theological purposes.  They had a story to tell, and she needed to play her part.

This reminds me of a story told me by my in-laws.  The father of the family was a minister and must have been trying to explain all of this complicated theology to his young daughter, my little niece, who was about six years old.  The family was at a church wedding, and after the ceremony, the bride and groom went triumphantly down the aisle, at which time, my niece stood up in her pew, turned around, and said to the congregation, “And now we go downstairs for the conception!”

As a little Catholic girl, I used to pray to Mary, as I counted off the beads my rosary, to make up for my sins—and there were ten “Hail Mary’s” to every one “Our Father.”  Her form was everywhere, in every church—but she wasn’t exactly a role model for the woman I have become.  She was contrasted with Eve—you remember, Eve of the Garden of Eden—Eve, who consorted with the snake and disobeyed—and Mary, the compliant one who obeyed.  She was presented as a sweet, passive saint in blue and white flowing robes, generally holding the content Christ child in her arms. 

But now I see her differently.  Here she is, a young peasant woman, engaged to Joseph, and the Annunciation comes to her on the wings of an angel: “Blessed art thou among women,” the angel says—and Mary draws back in fear.  And the angel says not to fear, that she is to conceive and bring forth a son and his name shall be Jesus, and he shall be great, and he shall be called the Son of God, and his kingdom shall never end. The important thing to note here is that God’s grace falls upon, not the high and lofty, but on a poor girl from an oppressed race in an occupied country.  Who is she to be told that she is to birth the Messiah, she thinks.  She makes excuses. (Isn’t this typical of us, when we receive a call to new life?)  She says, “How can I have a baby, I haven’t known a man?”—in other words, “I’m still a virgin,” she says.  Fair enough question.  But the angel tells her that the baby will be born of the Holy Spirit.  He tells her, “With God nothing shall be impossible.”  And she believes this, and she answers:  “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”  People argue over the question of whether Mary was a virgin.  I have my opinion—but truthfully, I could care less.  To me, the heart of this passage is in her complete renunciation—her being willing to be a vessel of God: “Be it unto me, according to thy word.”  This is the essence of the spiritual life:  “What does my angel want of me?”

But something strange has been happening in the past few decades.  Mary is moving into the world consciousness in a powerful way.  We have, in fact, a whole area of theological study called “Mariology.”  She has captured the imagination of scholars and common folk alike, and common folk all over the world seem to be seeing her visage everywhere in recent years.  Near the end of the last century, Newsweek ran a cover story on Mary in which they stated: “In many ways, the 20^th century has belonged to Mary.  From almost every continent, visionaries have reported more than 400 ‘apparitions’ of the Virgin—more than in the previous three centuries combined.  One might expect Mary to appear in countries that are predominantly Catholic, but apparitions have been reported from Japan to Africa, from Korea to Australia, from Egypt to Iraq to Syria—even in the former Soviet Union and in India.  One thing all these visitations have in common is that all these people are allegedly being visited by a figure who might be called Mary—but she may also appear as the Queen of Heaven, or the Virgin of Guadalupe, or the Black Madonna, even Quan Nin, the Buddhist bodhisattva.”  

What is happening here?  I think Mary has become a symbol for the divine feminine in the many forms it takes in various traditions.  And why is this divine feminine emerging at this time in the world?

I can only speculate, but I believe that patriarchy has simply worn out its virtues, and we need a new way.  I see the emergence of the feminine as an evolutionary necessity, an inevitability brought about by psychic suffering—or in religious terms, the suffering of our souls.  We know we are out of right relationship, with one another and with the earth.  No promises of the marketplace, no shining tinsel and ribbon, can distract us for long from the angst we feel at the center. In quiet moments, we know our pain. In our dreams, we are troubled.  Any given culture clings to what has been, because it is known, but when the suffering becomes too great, when the systems of life no longer serve life, something new is born.

And what would characterize this newness of which I speak?  I would say “balance”: a balance of the masculine and feminine modes of consciousness, of yin and yang, of anima and animus.  I’m speaking from a perspective of Jungian theory now—understand that these ways of being are not restricted to sex or gender, but are present in both men and women.  In psycho-spiritual language, the terms masculine and feminine are metaphors for the opposite energies which give the necessary tension and therefore vitality to our lives.

What I see happening now is that the male is no longer able to project the anima, or his feminine energy onto the female, and so he is having to discover and integrate the feminine into his personality; at the same time the female is discovering her warrior side, her dark energy.  We are beginning to understand that the extreme dominance of the masculine mode has not served us well, and we realize that the gifts of the feminine are crucial—I think I can say crucial to our survival.

What are the gifts of the masculine principle?  And again, I am not talking about men, per se, but rather about the structure of our consciousness.  Masculine creative energy is characterized by analytical thinking, independence, linearity, innovation, assertion, abstract ethical thought, and concern with law and order.  It initiates, it thrusts, it enters, it stands. 

The masculine principle is further characterized by objectivity, detachment, and non-involvement.  Pulled away from the concrete, the earth, the sensual, the body, this principle concerns itself with clarity and moderation and is wary of an excess of emotion, which might cloud one’s thinking.  It calls for will, honor, strength, and sacrifice to an ideal.  The masculine principle has brought much of what we call “civilization” to the civilized world.  But it has been taken to the extreme, and has brought much suffering as well, war being its most terrible invention.

The excess of the masculine principle is all too apparent—in the way we have desacralized the earth, for example, and turned her gifts of life into products for short-term gain.  In the way we have filled our air and food and water with noxious chemicals.  In our foreign policy, which is devoid of any relational principle, and seems focused on the clear and unambiguous goal of proving that we are the alpha monkey.

Let’s now look at the anima, the feminine principle.  How has it been characterized?  The feminine principle draws us to, entangles us with, all living things.  Rather than detachment, it speaks to the soul’s need for emotion, spontaneity, ecstasy.  Subjective feelings and intuitive sensing are seen as paths to knowing.  Wisdom is valued over knowledge, the flow of life over rigid principle.  The body/mind split, so pervasive in our culture for so long, is rejected, and the body is seen as an avenue of intelligence.  Descartes’ declaration, “I think, therefore I am” might shift in the feminine mode to something like, “I love, therefore I am.”

The feminine principle is open, receptive.  It is relational in all matters, and relationship is not a means to an end, but exists for its own sake.  It affirms an underlying unity to all of life.  It is mutual and it is participatory.  Its knowing comes from presence, presence in the moment, rather than from the aesthetic perfection of abstract law and principle.

To illustrate, I heard a discussion of NPR the other day about the responsibility of the journalist.  The question at hand was the following:  “If a journalist was covering a human tragedy of some kind—like a flood or earthquake, for example—and by some small deed could save a human life, should the journalist get involved, or should the journalist remember his professional obligation, keep his distance—just snap the picture and take the notes, and not get involved?”  This question came out of a masculine consciousness—it concerns itself with objective truth and principle, it is detached and concerned with the proper order of things.  To me, this is a ludicrous question.  The feminine principle would say to follow one’s instincts in the present moment and reach out to another flesh and blood person who would be lost if you did not intervene.    

I want to reach back now to the term virgin.   Esther Harding, a physician writing about feminine psychology, points out that in ancient times the word virgin had a different meaning than it does now.  It didn’t mean being chaste.  Rather, being a virgin meant “belonging to oneself.”  It meant relating to others out of that soul-centeredness.  It is the anima taking its proper place of strength, to balance the masculine energy that has been so dominant.  It is that balance that we need.

But you may question my thesis here—you may say, “Marilyn, how can you say things are changing?  Look who’s in power!  It’s masculine energy run amok—it is a casting aside of everything vulnerable and sensitive and relational.  And what about Fundamentalist groups of all stripes?  They are growing like crazy!”  Yes, these things are true, but I believe this is part of a cultural backlash.  It is fear that drives the Fundamentalist groups into their safe assurances and dogma, clinging to their ideology of male dominance, their religious rules, and insisting that their women obey the godly laws of submission.

So, yes, I think it is a cultural backlash—it may seem to flourish, like a fire consuming paper, but it flashes brightly and then dies out—because it is not congruent with the evolutionary motion of our time, it is doomed to fail.  Gays and lesbians will be able to marry.  Women will be elected in larger numbers to Congress.  Empire just won’t float anymore—the time for that is past.  The world is one.  It’s just going to take a while for the pendulum to begin to swing.

What the Virgin has come to say is very much kin to her ancestor, the female deities worshiped many thousands of years ago, before the rise of the Hebrew religion.  She has come to say that all these various places where she is appearing are as one, that we are to be at peace with one another—that is the single message that she brings most often, “Peace, may this world be at peace.”  Being a woman, she symbolizes the innate holiness of the earth; the sacred dwelling in nature, matter, flesh.  She is the one who liberates, for she seeks an end to suffering, an end to injustice; she calls for a new kind of community, one in which the last is first, one in which the excluded will be included, one in which the high ones will fall from their places of honor, and the ones brought low, discarded, will take their rightful places among us. 

She is the Great Mother, who is making herself known to this world as precursor and as prophet.  A new day is coming.  We are to put love over law, she says.  We are to walk gently on the earth.  We are to lift up the lowly, and care for the weak.  And justice will be done.  And at last, peace will come o’er all the earth.  Alleluia, Alleluia, Amen.

PRAYER

Mother God, we are your tired and needy children.  We have so often gone astray from your ways of peace, as we have thrashed about in our pain and uncertainty.  Help us in this holy season to be present with one another, to remember the sacredness of each person we look upon, to give from the heart. May we be a part of the healing of this world, a part of the evolution to a better world than we yet have seen.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, may you be held by the love of the Holy Mother and may you in turn touch others with love wherever this holiday may take you.  Go in love and go in peace.