A lifelong devotion to Mary the God Bearer

I was obsessed with the Virgin Mary as a child. This was an odd fascination for a little girl who was being raised as a good Southern Baptist, but my parents indulged me and bought all sorts of books I requested on the subject. The art books were my favorites, full of representations of Our Lady over the 2000 years of Christian history. I pored over the paintings and altarpieces, marble pietas, and monumental frescoes, wondering at the beauty of this young, peaceful woman at the center of it all.

The little church plant we belonged to worshipped in a local elementary school’s cafeteria, with industrial linoleum floors and the weekday tables and chairs pushed against one wall. An overhead projector borrowed from a classroom provided the lyrics for our praise songs behind the heads of the band members. To this day I wonder if one small part of the reason I found my home in the Episcopal Church was because the stained glass, incense, and colorful vestments on display in the first few parishes I visited overwhelmed my senses. The sanctuaries full of art depicting the lives of Jesus and the apostles and Mary—with the infant Jesus, at the wedding in Cana, at the foot of the cross—helped mark these spaces as holy and separate from the everyday world, as a place where miracles can and did happen. Mary was the exotic marker of a faith tradition unlike my own. Even then, I recognized an affinity with the only fully human actor in this holy mystery we call the Incarnation.

As my own childhood devotion to Mary grew, I memorized all the different iterations and names I could find for her:

Untier of Knots
Help of Christians
Refuge of Sinners
Morning Star
Queen of Heaven
Throne of Wisdom
Queen of Peace
Mediatrix of Mercy
Stella Maris, Star of the Sea

And my very favorite, affirmed by the Council at Ephesus in 431 CE: Mary as the Theotokos, most often translated as the God Bearer, because in her womb the human and the divine were inextricably bonded into one in the infant Jesus.

Fittingly for a saint with a thousand titles, her feast day also has many names in the various Church traditions that observe it—the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, the Feast of the Assumption, the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God. It is this last one that I find the most meaningful, probably because of the poetry in its meaning, based on the notion that Mary, as the Mother of God, was spared the suffering or pain of death, and simply fell peacefully asleep before being bodily assumed into heaven, in the manner of her Son.

The official Episcopal Church website contains a glossary, and its entry on Mary states, “Anglicanism has not generally accepted beliefs concerning Mary’s…bodily assumption to heaven after her death, but some hold these views as pious opinions.” But, no matter what we might believe happened in the manner and moment of her death, Mary has been a pillar of strength and courage for countless Christians, including me.

Ultimately it is the association of Mary with the practice of my own piety that is why I especially cherish her. In my lifelong journey of faith, no matter where I find myself, Mary has been there. For an often awkward child with obscure interests, her Magnificat was proof that no one was too lowly in God’s eye. For a young woman of budding faith, she held the promise of trust in the face of uncertainty. For a seminarian in an institution (and priest in the Church) where I often found myself as the only woman in a room full of men, she had been in the Upper Room. For a soon to be mother laboring to bring new life into the world and praying Hail Marys through each contraction, she was a spiritual midwife. For the mother struggling to come to terms with the reality of the death of my child, she was Mary of the Stations of the Cross, my companion in the great sea of my grief. And now, as a mother continually growing into the sacred duty of parenting my living children, she is the mother of the child Jesus before he became the man, who surely had moments of impatience amidst the joy.

When I was elected as rector of my first parish, it was one dedicated to her name. For a decade she watched over my congregation from a rose window in the west wall of the sanctuary during mass, visible only to me, Help of this Christian. Recently a friend described to me a longstanding tradition in her parish every year on the Sunday closest to August 15, when everyone brings flowers and herbs to bless in honor of Saint Mary’s Day, and afterward they cover a bare wooden cross with the floral offerings. What a fitting tribute to the one whose “yes” to God helped bring Our Lord and consequently our Christian Faith into being, that the instrument of his death would be transcended in her name, and made into something beautiful in honor of her faith and sacrifice.