Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Feast of Mary...

Lst year, I posted a link to this lovely article on my old blog...

August 15 is the feast of Mary's being taken up to heaven by God (similar to Enoch and Elijah..or the Rapture)...

And the link is to a UKTelegraph article that explains why Catholics love the feast so much...

....Original sin is thought to have brought death and the corruption of the body. Eve, before the fall, did not die, and Mary is seen as the second, better Eve. So when Mary goes to heaven, she goes straight, physically and spiritually, to be with her son, prefiguring the general resurrection of all our bodies which will happen at the end of time. Logical, perhaps, but hardly the stuff, one would have thought, to stir the simple-hearted.

Yet every Catholic and Orthodox believer possesses some image of the Virgin Mary, and prays to her,"...

.... Life is hard and everyone suffers; and religion is hard, too: it makes impossible demands, it tends to be hierarchically run, and run by men. In Christianity, the Father is, ex officio, stern, and the Son is a figure of suffering most commonly depicted at his moment of cruel death.

One feels that both of them are, as it were, very busy people, whom one hesitates to bother. Here is the Mother. No, she is not God, but she gave birth to God, proving his humanity, leading people to believe that he really was one of us. She does not judge - she understands and feels....

How often a believer who feels rejected by the world or family, or crushed by a priest, finds in Mary what the psychologists now call "unconditional love". ...

Yes, you could make the argument that Mary's humble acceptance of her fate is an engine of female subjection, but that is not how most women see her. The Church itself is often frightened of her. The words of her Magnificat ("He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek" etc) are the theme tune for all the most politically and socially subversive elements in Christianity....

Earlier, I used the word "embodied". It is the key one. One of the most powerful and, for many, most difficult things about Christianity is that it keeps the idea of body and soul so close. It is the only monotheistic religion where God appeared in bodily form, human and divine.

It teaches that he did so through an earthly mother whose body was glorified. It is perhaps not an accident that the body-and-soul Assumption was so strongly asserted so soon after Auschwitz and Belsen had shown the human body utterly degraded.

For most of us Europeans in the 21st century, the degradations are less obvious and extreme. But if you're lying on a Mediterranean beach tomorrow, indulging the disheartening dream of perfecting your imperfectible body, you might find a procession celebrating something more interesting somewhere else in the town....

Yup...fiesta time....and Catholics, who see God in all good things, see no problem with fiestas, dances, and parades of beautiful girls on one float and a statue of the saints on anther, with all of it ending at church to say the rosary...

No comments: