Simply Mary
Meditations on the Real Life of the Mother of Christ
James Prothero
Simply Mary
Meditations on the Real Life of the Mother of Christ
Copyright © 2019 James Prothero. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Painting on cover, “The Annunciation” by Henry Ossawa Tanner
[Scripture quotations are from] Revised Standard Version of the Bible, New Oxford Annotated Bible, copyright © 2010 Oxford University Press. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 12/10/19
to
Fr Luke Dysinger, OSB
of St Andrew’s Abbey, Valyermo
and
Fr Patrick Crerar
beloved Rector of St Clements by-the-Sea Episcopal Church
How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing . . . it is irresistible. If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?
—C.S. Lewis
We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.
— Madeleine L’Engle
Meditation One: A Surprise Visitor
I am writing this book because I have been looking for it for years, but no one has dared to write it. I was always injudicious, so here I go. Certainly, I am not qualified, which is why I thought I should do it. Mary herself, by any measure of her time, was not qualified. It seems to be a good qualification to not be qualified. Ok, let me explain more clearly.
You don’t have to believe me, but . . . . Lots of stories start that way, and belief is a complex thing. So you have the disclaimer. Ready? In 2005 one evening I was going to bed in my bedroom, in the house I still live in. At the foot of my bed I strongly sensed a human presence. I neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary. But I knew with an absolute certainty that Mary was standing there. There was no apparition as at Lourdes or Guadalupe. There was no message in particular. Beyond her presence, all I could sense was that she was interested in me. That stunned me. Interested in me? A high school English teacher in a southern California Mexican-American barrio? A no-reputation, part-time college professor in a massive herd of marginally-employed, part-time college professors? A nobody? Why? After about fifteen minutes, the presence faded.
About this time, I ceased to experience the symptoms of Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a heart arrhythmia which is more a nuisance than a threat, and a condition that had been with me at least since my middle twenties. Tachycardia was the most annoying part of it, though it can become dangerous in later life in combination with other problems. At my cardiologist’s advice, I was treated for it by an arthroscopic surgery. Yet, when the specialist who performed the surgery found his way to my heart, there was no WPW to treat. He could not explain this when I talked to him later. My cardiologist was stumped. He’d seen the EKGs. It was there. An ER doctor and another cardiologist had seen it on the EKGs years before, and on vastly separate occasions. Only my cardiologist at the time and the specialist doing the surgery ever met each other of the four physicians who plainly read WPW on my EKGs. If this was a hallucination by my physicians, it was a mass-hallucination, and across time and space. Years later, I went for a third opinion. The fifth physician threw every WPW-associated test at me known to humankind, and found no evidence. He couldn’t explain it. He shrugged. I was perplexed. My visit from Mary roughly corresponds with the time of the disappearance of my WPW. A healing? I can’t be sure, but I can’t help but wonder.
So you’ll perhaps forgive me if from that time, I have had a burning curiosity about this girl from Nazareth. Frankly, I think her prayers did heal me, though I could not begin to prove it. Nevertheless, I want to explore Mary not only with the eyes of faith, but with an eye to what she really was and is, and not what we would project upon her. I’m hoping to look through windows and avoid mirrors. I was raised Presbyterian, spent fourteen years in the Catholic Church, and all of the rest of that time up till now, I have been Anglican, a member of the Episcopal Church. I will not be taking any denominational stance in the many-faceted Body of Christ. In fact, if you find this book infuriating, and you just might, it’s because I will steadfastly refuse to take a stance that is either Protestant or Catholic, nor much anything else other than seeking the truth and why we are so taken with this peasant woman from first century Nazareth. But this woman came and visited me. And I’m totally stumped by that. I want to shed even just a little bit of light. Each of these diverse Christian traditions, as well as others, have added accretions and layers of myth and tradition over this simple village girl from Nazareth, much of it for the purpose of rendering her in our own image. In this book I’d like to see if we can get beneath those accretions to the real woman. Let’s stop looking in mirrors and look out of windows instead.
And let me add clearly, I am not trying to find the “Historical Mary” in the same sense that a group of scholars some decades ago tried to find the “Historical Jesus” by eliminating all the supernatural elements in the story of Christ and reducing him to a deluded country preacher, a Jewish Buddha, whose teachings had been allegedly warped into modern Christianity. I am very devoted to the thought of C.S. Lewis, and agree with him that the impulse to try and take Christ and fit him into a materialistic denial of the supernatural is useless. Such a Christ would not interest anyone for long and would have no long-term relevance to any one of us. It is an Arian impulse and nothing new. If Christ is not the original ET, God visiting us, all matters of Christ, much less his mother, are vain and worthless. I write from a standpoint of faith. I have witnessed what science can’t explain. I do not think that we can only believe that which we can scientifically prove. But that doesn’t mean we have to believe without discernment. We are told to test the spirits.1 That’s what I intend to do here.
More delicately here, the road I’m going to travel will probably disappoint my Christian sisters and brothers on both sides of the Reformation. I am one with my Catholic and Orthodox siblings in that I have found Mary to be an active force of holiness in this dark world. For a “dead” woman, she is remarkably proactive. And I am keenly aware of her love and activity. But I will disappoint because I feel all that symbolic theological frosting we’ve added to Mary over the centuries, starting with the idea that she was ever-virgin in spite of the obvious reading of scripture, has made her distant and untouchable to many Christians. She doesn’t share our pain, but instead floats in an ever-virgin bubble, hands folded and eyes closed, in endless bliss.
I will disappoint my Protestant sisters and brothers in that though I see Mary as a real woman who lived out all the pain of our existence, I think she was gifted with an unusual degree of holiness that no one can explain. And she has stayed engaged with us up till the present, though I can’t explain how. But she’s not just another woman. Both these views of Mary seem to me to miss the mark on opposite sides.
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