December 8^th
is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Roman Catholic
community. It is a doctrine that deals with the question, if Jesus
was sinless at birth, would the vessel of his birth need to be
special as well? While Protestants don’t hold to the doctrine,
all Christians come to think of Mary at this time of year when we see
her glowing face in so many manger scenes.

A fine book by the late
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, sparks much of this
piece (Of course it’s in our library). Since Mary is obviously
important, but since we do not have a great abundance of biblical
material about her, she has served as a projection point for the
religious needs of people over time. For instance, the god that was
presented to me in my youth was a forbidding figure, and Mary’s
image of kind protection helped feed the part of my soul that need
nurturing.

My mother was baptized
in a church that celebrated Our Lady of Czestochowa, the famed Black
Madonna. It was an ancient icon enshrined in Poland since the 1300s.
Its face was darkened by smoke, and it is known as the black Madonna.
It was even thought to win a battle in one of the many wars of its
bloody history. No matter how much defeat, it was a symbol of Poland.
When Lech Walesa fought tyranny with the Solidarity movement of the
1980s, he carried an image of the Black Madonna, with the scars on
her cheek.

The great early church
theologian Irenaeus saw Mary as a second Eve. Eve’s name may
mean life. Ironically the sin of the first couple brought the death
of relationship with God. Through Mary’s obedience, our lives
were resuscitated. Through her son, “mortality was absorbed
into immortality.” We rightly look at all of the damage done by
the church to women over the years. On the other hand, the church
lifted Mary up as the very emblem of humanity at its best, for Mary
embodied the woman of great worth from Proverbs 31. After all it
links a noble woman to the very wisdom of God, a wisdom given
feminine attributes in the first nine chapters of Proverbs. She was
considered the very model of the 4 cardinal virtues of temperance,
prudence, justice, and fortitude.

In a time of spiritual
searching, the Mystic’s Mary appears Hopkins would write that
with Mary “new Nazareths appear…new self and nobler
me.”. Mary provides a key to union with Christ, so in a
spiritual sense Christ lives in us. When injustice grinds down the
poor, Mary appears as the speaker of the Magnificat in Luke, the
defender of the poor who wants a reversal of the power that be. Think
of the Guadalupe vision where Mary speaks to the Indiana n the native
language, not the language of the Spanish, Christian, oppressors. –In
age after painful age, three is Mary who stood at the cross, a woman
of sorrows who saw her first-born son die terribly. The Pieta stands
for all who see a child die before them, for those countless
forgotten victims of so many wars fought that end up depriving
families of their loved ones when they are dismissed as collateral
damage. . When gaps appear in our conception of God, the mother of
God’s own arises to fill the gap.

Pay some attention to
the depiction of Mary in all of the manger scenes, in all the
Christmas paintings on Christmas cards. You’ll see a face of
serenity that will anchor you through all the hectic madness of this
season that starts, after all, with her delivery.