Maternity's Raw Faith

A month before my son Christopher was born, in December 1969, his godfather-to-be was killed in Vietnam.

It was not supposed to happen. Craig was a medic at command headquarters, in Saigon, but he volunteered for a supply trip inside the lines and was caught in what is inexplicably called "friendly fire." When I heard the news by telephone, the baby in my womb kicked me in the stomach. It seemed fitting and right.

That was the season I discovered Mary.

I learned about her by unlearning. I began by forgetting the blue veil on the holy card pictures, the slouching posture, the downcast eyes, the halo, the insecure demeanor, the vacant look on the statues in my parish church, and words like "handmaiden," "submissive," and "obedient." I needed a vigorous and courageous woman who could help me sort through my outrage and grief; who could help me exchange pain for enlightenment, and I found her.

The process was simpler than I thought. It consisted of yielding a docile, domesticated, and vapid girl and finding a tough young woman who deliberately counted herself among the marginalized, who knew safety was an illusion, who was alive to the tragic, who wept, who laughed, and who chose life every inch of the way.

Why I never noticed the mature and committed side of Mary before, I don't know. Yet when a friend told me of a recent visit to Rome and his surprise and sadness at finding the Pieta behind a bulletproof shield—a security measure after someone attacked the statue with a hammer—something clicked. I recognized that tradition encrusted a barrier around the original Mary, preventing an encounter with a sensible, sensitive, and articulate person and offering a counterfeit instead.

The first clue I had that we needed to crack through a shield to discover the real Mary occurred in the same December 1969, when I decided to fly east to New York from Los Angeles for Christmas. My obstetrician disapproved of the plan: too risky, too bumpy, too far, he said.

When I was finally airborne, I remembered Mary's 90-mile journey from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea, by foot and donkey, in the last days of her pregnancy. Sports columnist Red Smith, or another of his ilk, could have written the story and done it justice; balancing Mary as a mixture of Joan of Arc and Chris Evert-Lloyd: lithe, athletic, graceful, and in very good shape to have withstood the difficult, strenuous, and even perilous journey. Yet no one pointed that out to me before; and frankly, the obvious simply never occurred to me.

Mary was not only in good shape physically, but her political instincts were also finely tuned and flawless. She had an unerring sense of justice and its misuse, and an unnerving appreciation for the meaning of the Word becoming and staying flesh.

Three scenes, for me, depict her story. Each of them tests the unreasonableness of life to its limits, and Mary's response in each setting helps me to appreciate what made her tick.

She appears, almost innocuously, in a visit to her cousin and friend Elizabeth. For the occasion, Luke gives Mary Hannah's prayer of political awareness and shrewdness, the Magnificat; and the New Testament places on Mary's lips the economic, political, and social manifesto that will define her son's kingdom and her place within it (1 Samuel 2:1-10; Luke 1:46-55).

She will endure the poverty of the Bethlehem birth, the squalor of the stable, the rejection by those who control housing in the city—but she will hope, unfailingly, in the time when "the rich will be sent away with empty hands," and "the poor will have all good things" (Luke 1:53). Hers is a raw faith, testifying to the radical, unpredictable; and ultimate triumph of the gospel, and it stands her in good stead while she waits out the unfair and demeaning status quo.

Mary's bouts with injustice had just begun. Shortly after the birth of Jesus, a dream propelled Mary and Joseph with their child to Egypt to escape a ruler's madness. In the flight from Herod, Mary would know what happened when corrupt power was threatened. She would understand the mindset that encourages tyrants to support mass slayings, even of innocent children, in an effort to silence the opposition. She would learn how the weakest and poorest are often the most victimized, if not through officially sanctioned slaughters and their cover-ups, then more subtly through forced family planning, or through the control of diets, or through deprived access to education, employment, or anything else that breathes a future.

Mary would understand that Herod wanted to unravel what it took nine months to knit together in her womb, and she would vigorously resist his malevolent interference. She and her husband would leave Bethlehem clutching their baby and suffering the anguish of knowing that other infants and their parents would not be as fortunate. Grief, and sometimes guilt, are always involved in the survivor syndrome, and there is no reason to suspect that Mary was spared anything less than a piercing sorrow over this tragic course of events.

The last scene is of the Pieta. Jesus is dead, his cause an apparent failure, and Mary, who was once able to save her son by fleeing to Egypt, is powerless to save him now. We need to contemplate this densely packed human moment—to stop, to care, to wonder—as it commemorates a crumbling world for Mary. She has lost a son. They have lost their cause. It is finished.

Yet, in this potentially macabre setting, death insists, as it sometimes does, on its right to be intimate, and Mary pleads for that privilege here. In a courageous gesture, Mary does not veil the pathos from our eyes, nor does she camouflage the circumstances of the execution. Jesus lies sprawled across her lap, and with arms outstretched, Mary offers him to us all.

It is in some ways an unexpected and uncharacteristic pose; would it not be more likely for this mother to cradle her dead son in her arms and caress him to her bosom? I wonder what we are to make of it—or of the fact that Mary's grieving, open-armed gesture is replicated in picture stories that accompany all wars: the Hiroshima mother kneeling with her arms raised to heaven and us while her dead child lies glued to the tar at her feet; the bereft Lebanese mother, running through the bombed and burning streets of Beirut with the charred body of her son outstretched and offered to a culpable world in a moment of unbridled and unassuaged agony; or the Salvadoran mother gently washing the fiberless ribs of her 12-year-old daughter who had been raped before being bayoneted and murdered. Like Mary, these women want their grief to be public; they refuse to shield the atrocities from us or to render the victims anonymous.

A television reporter once approached another mother, in a different culture and a separate time, as she visited the new Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The mother told of her trip from Houston and her need to touch her son's name, engraved among the thousands of dead, "because war is names and not numbers," she said.

This mother from Houston knew the same thing that the mothers from Latin America, Palestine, Beirut, and Hiroshima knew. She knew that the only way humans can allow and support war is by intellectualizing, computerizing, and producing it in an elliptically harmless and antiseptic fashion for television and the press. She also knew what the Pieta expresses: that war is flesh, and that death has a face—the face of a brother, mother, father, sister, daughter, husband, wife or son.

In the end, this may well be the Pieta's strongest and most enduring insight for us. Distance, not death, is the enemy of intimacy. And Mary's most important struggle on behalf of peace may be her refusal to allow death to have the final word. Mary bridges distance by picking up the cause for which her son was killed. And she makes it known early that she will not be bullied into fear and shame by the powers that be.

Steadfast and resolute during her son's agony, Mary invites us, as we behold the limp and dangling body of her son, to meet a person, the peacemaker from Galilee who never bruised a reed and who preached a gospel of compassion and forgiveness. Perhaps she believes such a meeting could transform our perceptions and policy to prevent further war and killing. Then the "enemy's" sons and daughters will have a name and a face and bear a resemblance to a family that is one and the same.

Doris Donnelly was an associate professor of pastoral theology and spirituality at St. John's University in New York City and a visiting lecturer at Princeton Theological Seminary when this article appeared.