A few years ago I was able to visit the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. The tour guide leading us through each room was talking, far longer than I cared, about Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” Looking around the room, in the far corner was another Botticelli painting, an Annunciation. I immediately walked over for a closer look.
It shows Mary and Gabriel in very different roles than most paintings of that event. Gabriel is kneeling, submissive, imploring Mary to consider his proposal. Mary is the powerful one, with her hands set to push away this intruder, the creature invading her private space. She is strong, yet clearly caught by the power of what was occurring. She is not rejecting Gabriel’s invitation out-of-hand. But she isn’t a push-over either.
I can identify with this Mary and her defensive pose, knowing that is how I would react. She must have had some spunk, and a lot of courage. She would have known that to become pregnant before marriage, she would face lifelong gossip about who the father of Jesus was. She would be flaunting the sexual morals of her community by agreeing to this call from God. So Mary had good reason to say “no” to Gabriel. She was taking a very big risk for God, and for her whole life could not know that anyone would really believe her story. Once she had said “yes,” once she became pregnant, there was no turning back.
Her famous song of the heart, the Magnificat, reflects her understanding of her society’s treatment of the lowly and powerless. Yet, she also proclaims a new social order. The mighty and powerful will lose their power and their riches. Those who were ignored and excluded by the religious community will be exalted, and brought forward to a new life and relationship with God filling their needs. It is not Mary meek and mild who is singing this song, but Mary of courage who says yes knowing it will change the world.
I have sung many versions of the Magnificat in various settings, including English cathedrals. It has always had mixed meanings for me. I enjoy many of the riches of the world and power in my job and as a male. Yet, as a gay male, I also experience people and a society that reject and demonize me for the same perceived sexual misbehavior that Mary encountered. The rich and powerful reject me in a similar way. So it both condemns me and it offers me hope.
For most of my life, Mary had always seemed distant, a plastic statue focused somewhere else. The candles surrounding her statues in churches were there to keep me away, to treat her as somehow different and no longer human. The Roman Catholic pronouncements of immaculate conception and bodily assumption seemed designed to further remove her from being human like me.
When I first saw that painting, for the first time I saw that a different way of relating to Mary is possible and the story could be read very differently. I began to sense that she is my sister, someone who shares with me a common bond of life experience. She is a feisty, strong and courageous woman who knows what it is like to make a decision to agree to God’s call to her.
So, how can any of us living now find any commonality with Mary? Can her story speak at all to our sense of relationship to God? Or is it easier to place her in such a high position that we can avoid dealing with what she has already shown us?
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