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Happy feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary today! I’m sometimes troubled by this feast which celebrates & holds up virginity as the ideal for womanhood & how that has been mobilized for misogyny. However:
when I hear my male clergy friends speak or chant the Magnificat, putting first-person female language in their mouths, I realize (again) how queer this feast day can be.
How often do you hear men in general and male priests in particular put themselves in a feminine, specifically motherly, role? I know it’s just words, but rhetoric matters and acts on us in liturgy whether we know it or not.
Also, if the church believes Jesus was fully divine AND fully human, the BVM feast (at least in the Episcopal church where it doesn’t commemorate the Assumption) reminds us that the female IS necessarily part of Jesus’ makeup.
I mean, he had to take his humanity from somewhere—logically, it’s from HER! (I know this is perhaps spurious and heretical.)
There’s also the social justice aspect we can take from the Mag, IF we take the idea of casting down the mighty from their thrones seriously instead of BEING the mighty, a position the church has found itself in often.
And finally, this feast reminds me to ask: how am I bearing Christ in myself? How am I giving birth to the incarnation? Any time any of us, of ANY gender, put ourselves in Mary’s position by saying her words, we’re forcing ourselves to reflect on this.
