Mother accompanies us
It is said that today’s Christians are less excited by the figure of Mary than believers in other times. Perhaps we are unconscious victims of fears and suspicions in the face of distortions in Marian piety.
At times, there was too much insistence on the protective role of Mary, the Mother who shields his sons and daughters from all evils, without converting them to a more Gospel-inspired life.
At other times, some forms of Marian devotion have not known how to exalt Mary as mother without creating an unhealthy dependence on an “idealized mother” and fostering a religious immaturity and infantilism.
Perhaps this same idealization of Mary as “the only woman” may have been feeding a certain disdain for real-life women and reinforcing more male domination. At the least, we should not take lightly the reproaches that are made against us Catholics from various fronts.
But it would be a pity should we impoverish our religious life by forgetting the gift that Mary could mean to us believers.
A well-understood Marian piety does not enclose anyone in infantilism, but rather it guarantees the enriching presence of the feminine in our life of faith. God himself has willed to become flesh in a woman’s womb. Henceforth, we can say that “the feminine is the way to God and is of God” (L. Boff).
Humanity always needs this richness that we associate with the feminine because, even though it is also part of the male, it is concentrated in a special way in the woman: intimacy, acceptance, solicitude, affection, tenderness, dedication to the mystery, growth, gift of life.
Every time we marginalize Mary from our lives, we impoverish our faith. And every time we disdain the feminine, we close ourselves off from possible sources of closeness to this God who has offered himself to us in the arms of a mother.
We begin the year celebrating the feast of Mary, the Mother of God. Her faithfulness and commitment to God’s word, her identification with the little ones, her adherence to her Son Jesus’ choices, her serving presence in the newly-born Church, and above all her service as Mother of the Savior, make her the Mother of our faith and of our hope.
José Antonio Pagola
January 1, 2015
Mary, the Mother of God (B)
Luke 2, 16-21