With apologies in advance to all the theologians, I just want to add another thought from a non-theologian trying to make sense of Mariology in general, and, especially today, of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I'm currently trying to work through a collection of writings by Pope Benedict XVI and von Balthasar gathered in Mary: Church at the Source for a reading group formed out of last June's meeting of Catholic legal scholars at Fordham. The richness and depth of the ideas suggested by these readings is overwhelming. Quoting Newman: "When once we have mastered the idea that Mary bore, suckled, and handled the Eternal in the form of a child, what limit is conceivable to the rush and flood of thoughts which such a doctrine involves?" I probably should have started with Michael S.'s recommendation, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary of Nazareth, but I didn't...
What is emerging from my reading, though, is the emphasis that both Benedict and von Balthasar place on the theological significance of Mary's "Yes" to God (and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception) for both Christology and ecclesiology. The probably much more accessible essays offered by Rob and Rick both made the same point about the significance of the Immaculate Conception that Benedict makes in the book I'm reading:
Without this free consent on Mary's part, God cannot become man. To be sure, Mary's Yes is wholly grace. The dogma of Mary's freedom from original sin is at bottom meant solely to show that it is not a human being who sets the redemption in motion by her power; rather, her Yes is contained wholly within the primacy and priority of divine love, which already embraces her before she is born. "All is grace." Yet grace does not cancel freedom; it creates it. The entire mystery of redemption is present in this narrative and becomes concentrated in the figure of the Virgin Mary: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" (Lk 1:30).
Von Balthasar addresses the Christological significance of the Doctrine:
As Christ's mother, Mary seems to enjoy a prius that no one else can equal. But let us not forget that she got this prius, not from her physiological motherhood taken in isolation, but from her total personal attitude of faith as perfect readiness to serve. And where does she get this faith if not from the grace that God communicates to the world thorugh the work of Jesus Christ? Mary is, then, as much redeemed as everyone else is, only in a special way grounded in her mission to become the Mother of Jesus. She is 'pre-redeemed' so that she can give birth to the Redeemer.
And Benedict addresses its ecclesiological significance:
At the moment when she pronounces her Yes, Mary is Israel in person; she is the Church in person and as a person. She is the personal concretization of the Church because her Fiat makes her the bodily Mother of the Lord. But this biological fact is a theological reality, because it realizes the deepest spiritual content of the covenant that God intended to make with Israel.
And, in a wonderful essay on the encyclical Redemptoris Mater, Benedict expands on the significance of Mary's maternity to the birth of the Church:
"...Mary's maternity is not simply a uniquely occuring biological event; . . . she was and, therefore, also remains a mother with her whole person. This becomes concrete on the day of Pentecost, at the moment of the Church's birth from the Holy Spirit: Mary is in the midst of the praying community that becomes the Church thanks to the coming of the Spirit. The correspondence between Jesus' Incarnation by the power of the Spirit in Nazareth and the birth of the Church at Pentecost is unmistakable. 'The person who unites the two moments is Mary."
So many quotes (I apologize), but the point I am trying to make is simple -- the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is, I think, as significant for making sense of the possibility of the birth of the Church as it is for making sense of the possibility of the birth of Jesus.
Theologians are probably cringing at the mash I'm making of this, so let me try to atone by sharing a favorite poem about Mary, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Yes, I know, its title refers to a different Marian feast day, but it's still relevant (and beautiful).
The Annunciation
Not the angel entering frightened her
(take note of this). However little others
startled at a sunbeam or the moon at night
peering into their room, she was
filled with indignation
at the form in which the angel
came; she scarcely knew
that such a sojourn for angels required effort.
(Oh, if we knew how pure she was.
Did not a hind lying in a forest once glimpse her, unable to take its eyes off her
so that, without pairing, a unicorn was conceived,
a creature made of light, the purest of creatures.)
Not his entering, but that he,
an angel with a young man's face,
bent closely down to her; that his gaze
and her raised eyes collided
as if suddenly outside all were empty,
and what millions saw, did, carried,
cramped into the two of them: just she and he;
looking and looked at, eye and feast for the eyes
nowhere but here at this point: behold,
this frightens. And they were both frightened.
Then the Angel sang his song.
Lisa
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Yesterday on the First Things blog Wesley Smith posted a striking comparison of two ways of looking at the life of a child with Down Syndrome -- that of an actual parent loving such a child (Simon Barnes, chief sports writer for the London Times) and that of Peter Singer. Smith closes his remarks with the powerful claim that, "The choice we make about these contrasting paths will determine whether we remain a moral society committed to the pursuit of universal human rights."
Because I can't figure out how to link directly to Smith's comments (and because they are so wonderful) I'm pasting them below. I also encourage you to read Barnes' whole article.
November 28, 2006
Wesley J. Smith writes:
Like Fr. Neuhaus, I too was taken with the article “I’m Not a Saint, Just a Parent” by Simon Barnes in the Times of London. It recalled to my mind a speech I gave several years ago to a medical school in which I urged the students to always look at their patients through the lens of universal moral equality.
After the speech, an earnest young man approached me. “I am a genetic counselor,” he said. “What am I supposed to do when I meet with a woman carrying a baby with Down syndrome? I mean, I have to counsel her.” I suggested that perhaps he could bring in parents who have actually lived the experience of parenting a child with Down to keep the “counseling” from becoming a one-way street.
Barnes’ loving tribute to parenting a Down child is precisely the kind of input that I had hoped the earnest young genetic counselor could provide to his clients. Five-year-old Eddie has Down syndrome, and Barnes reports that he “is not to be pitied” for having to father a disabled child “but to be envied.”
Here are three key paragraphs from Barnes piece:
By the way, I hope you are not too squeamish. This piece is not going to pull any punches. If you find the idea of love uncomfortable or sentimental or best-not-talked-about or existing only in the midst of a passionate love affair, then you will find problems with what I am writing. I am writing of love not as a matter of grand passions, or as high-falutin’ idealism, or as religion. I am writing about love as the stuff that makes the processes of human life happen: the love that moves the sun and other stars, which is also the love that makes the toast and other snacks. Love is the most humdrum thing in life, the only thing that matters, the thing that is forever beyond the reach of human imagination. . . .
What is it like to have Down’s [sic] syndrome? How terrible is it? Is it terrible at all? It depends, I suppose, on how well loved you are. Like most other conditions of life. Would I want Eddie changed? It’s a silly question but it gets to the heart of the matter. Of course you’d want certain physical things changed: the narrow tubes that lead to breathing problems, for example. But that’s not the same as “changed,” is it? If you are a parent, would you like the essential nature of your child changed? If you were told that pressing a button would turn him into an infant Mozart or Einstein or van Gogh, would you press it? Or would you refuse because you love the person who is there and real, not some hypothetical other?
I can’t say I’m glad that Eddie has Down’s syndrome, or that I would wish him to suffer in order to charm me and fill me with giggles. But no, I don’t want his essential nature changed. Good God, what a thought. It would be as much a denial of myself as a denial of my son. What’s the good of him, then? Buggered if I know. The never-disputed terribleness of Down’s syndrome is used as one of the great justifications for abortion: abortion has to exist so that we don’t people the world with monsters. I am not here to talk about abortion—but I am here to tell you that Down’s syndrome is not an insupportable horror for either the sufferer or the parents. I’ll go further: human beings are not better off without Down’s syndrome.
By contrast, let us now consider Peter Singer’s harshly sterile views about the options parents should have if faced with a Down baby. One acceptable answer, Singer asserts in Rethinking Life and Death, is establishing the right of parents to have their unwanted Down child killed if they would prefer not to raise a disabled child:
To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s abilities. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player. Even when an adult, a person with Down syndrome may not be able to live independently. . . . For some parents, none of this matters. They find bringing up a child with Down syndrome a rewarding experience in a thousand different ways. But for other parents, it is devastating.
Both for the sake of “our children,” then, and our own sake, we may not want a child to start on life’s uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded. When this can be known at a very early stage of the voyage we may still have a chance to make a fresh start. This means detaching ourselves from the infant who has been born, cutting ourselves free before the ties that have already begun to bind us to our child have become irresistible. Instead of going forward and putting all our efforts into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning.
What a stark difference between the attitudes of these two men toward the weakest and most vulnerable among us, a difference that can be described literally as the distinction between loving and killing. And indeed, for those familiar with Singer’s writing, it is striking how often he writes of satisfying personal desires and how rarely he writes of sacrifice and love. Which, when you think about it, provides vivid clarity about the stakes we face in the ongoing contest for societal dominance between the sanctity/equality of life ethic and Singer’s proposed “quality of life” ethic: The former opens the door to the potential for unconditional love, while the latter presumes the power to coolly dismiss some of us from life based on defective workmanship. The choice we make about these contrasting paths will determine whether we remain a moral society committed to the pursuit of universal human rights.
Lisa
Friday, November 17, 2006
CNN is promoting an upcoming Sanjay Gupta special on "Happiness and Your Health" with a teaser article that made me think of the Wesley Smith column about growing support for euthanizing disabled newborns that Rob brought to our attention recently.
Smith discussed, among other things, NYT columnist Jim Holt's suggestion that " the decision to kill ill or disabled babies should be governed by “a new moral duty,” namely, “the duty prevent suffering, especially futile suffering.” Holt writes: "To keep alive an infant whose short life expectancy will be dominated by pain — pain that it can neither bear nor comprehend — is, it might be argued, to do that infant a continuous injury."
I think that experience with abortion decisions based on prenatal diagnosese of disabilities clearly shows that Smith is right in observing that "The concept of suffering is not limited to pain, but must also take account of “quality of life,” as more liberal advocates of infanticide would surely point out." Which brings me to the CNN article on happiness. Although it's light and frothy, it references some serious research that's been done on how people actually living with disabilities are just about as happy as the general population. Why are these kinds of findings persistently ignored by people trying to justify euthanasia or abortions based on disabilities?
Lisa
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
True nerds like me will probably already have seen this in their daily e-mail from Oxford University Press with "Garner's Usage Tip of the Day" (to which you can subscribe at: http://www.us.oup.com/us/subscriptions/subscribe/?view=usa&view=usa ), but those of you who have lives might appreciate today's "Quotation of the Day":
"Now and then you may be tempted to write passionately for a great cause. You should resist the temptation. A few writers have managed great passion for great causes, but success is rare in passionate writing because so few writers control passion well. Passion becomes bombast if it is angry. It often becomes fulsome sentiment . . . . Few readers are convinced by superheated prose; they are more often embarrassed, and sometimes they are enraged." Richard Marius, A Writer's Companion 19 (1985).
That strikes me as probably true, but, boy, is that hard to remember when you're writing about convictions that stem from your deepest beliefs, isn't it?
Lisa
Sunday, November 12, 2006
I apologize, Mark, for the inartful way I juxtaposed my questions about what you meant by "equity" with my attempt to explain why I don't think equity arguments alone are going to provide corporations with the incentive to address the gender inequities you obviously appreciate. It appears we both agree that there are good reasons for corporations to make efforts to restructure something about the way corporations work, and that doing so would most likely eventually have the effect of increasing the number of women on corporate boards, and that this would probably be a good thing. (But maybe I went to far with the last "and" -- maybe you're not convinced of that.)
Another thing we both seem to agree on is that anyone interested in pursuing this debate needs to work harder at articulating exactly why it would be a good thing to have more women on corporate boards. On March 16, 2007, the University of St. Thomas Law Journal is hosting a symposium on "Restructuring the Workplace to Accommodate Family Life," providing a forum for thinking through some of these issues. While the focus of the conference is much broader than the issue of gender inequities in the corporate workplace (we will be addressing topics like just wage, immigration reform, welfare-to-work laws), it will provide an opportunity to explore some of the convergences and tensions between secular feminist legal theory and faith-based complementarity arguments. Our two confirmed keynote speakers are Joan Williams (whose work on gender inequities in the workplace Mark alluded to in his last post) and Sr. Prudence Allen (author of the two-volume "The Concept of Woman" and thoughtful writer on complementarity).
We haven't yet completely constituted all the panels, so anyone who is interested in exploring these issues, or has suggestions for good contributors, should contact me ([email protected]). And if you're interested in participating in this discussion, mark your calendar for March 16 and buy some tickets to Minneapolis, where the weather that time of year will alone be enough to make it worth the trip.........
Lisa
