“What if God was one of us?” This question repeats itself over and over in popular culture, especially in the evocative song by Eric Brazilian, interpreted by multiple artists including Joan Osborne, Prince, the cast of Glee, and Alanis Morrisette. We seem to love to ask this question and imagine this possibility.
The next few days set aside by Catholic Christians to remember Mary, posit an answer to this disconcerting question that the human race has been pondering for over two millennia. As we prepare for Christmas, how do the memories of the Christian tradition answer “What if God was one of us?”
The communal understanding of Christians is that God came to be with us on one particular day in history. God came as helpless as all human babies making God’s self-presence in the depth and promise of one specific human life. In Jesus, God emptied God’s self of all power to truly accompany us on our human journey and by all accounts, Jesus had an awesome mother. We remember Mary, the Jewish woman, recalled in the Gospels as one of the marginal “nobodies” of that first momentous century. In the community’s stories she embodies all the powerless and invisible people God came to love. This courageous woman announces that the mighty will be thrown from their thrones and the hungry filled (Luke 1:46-55). The community remembers her standing with her son and his friends as their dreams crumble (John 19:25-27). And the community’s memories recall her nurturing that first group of Jesus’ friends, accompanying them as they listened for the Spirit’s promptings and discerned their future ( Acts 1:13-14).
We are their descendants.
Yet, this biblical Mary transcended time to be taken up into the imagination and experiences of countless diverse communities. As la Virgen De Guadalupe, she reminds us of God’s preference for the small and powerless of the world. She is the pregnant brown woman, whose healing presence is announced by the natural world as the birds sing and the flowers bloom. Once more she will take the side of the broken, she will come to comfort those who grieve, and she will question the powerful who dared not believe that someone as insignificant as Juan Diego could be God’s beloved. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a stirring symbol of resilient life, of hope and of companionship that has endured for almost 500 years. From murals on the walls of bodegas, to home shrines, tattoos, and every creative expression imaginable, she continues to welcome everyone saying, “I am here and I am your mother.”
These December days the Catholic Church also celebrates another memorial to Mary: The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. This may be the single most misunderstood title for Mary. Not about Jesus’ conception at all, it is about the insight, proclaimed by the Church in the mid 19th century, that Mary must have been conceived without the stain of original sin. Mary was one of us, but she was also the very best of us. For centuries Christians had understood themselves to be born burdened with the stain of human iniquity and brokenness. Today, we are much more attentive to a different kind of sin, the kind that Mary addresses in Luke as she proclaims God scattering the proud and acts out as she visits the hillside of Tepeyac in Mexico and encourages Juan Diego to challenge the powerful of his day. Now we understand sin differently, as embedded in our social structures, built into the ways we set-up our societies, glaringly visible in how we perpetuate exclusion, encourage conflict, and misuse power.
As we reflect on these two ways to remember Mary, we may see that her resilient courage and capacity for boundless good is inherently also inside each of us. Like her, when we take the side of the weak and suffering of the world, we are saying, “Yes, God is one of us, see God right there in the one who needs me.” As we honor Mary, may we most of all remember how from a hill in Judea, or in Mexico, she continues to teach us to love abundantly and without boundaries.
Mass for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception will be at 12:05 p.m. in the Chapel of St. Ignatius on Dec. 8. The Mass in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe will take place at 10 a.m. in Sacred Heart Chapel on Dec. 11. For more information contact Campus Ministry.
