[Date Prev][Date Next][Date Index]
Dawn mass Xmas day
Christmas Day - Dawn service
H o m i l
y G r i t
s
December 25,
2005
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary -
( at Dawn)
Isaiah 62:6-7, 10-12 (8-11 excised: "foreigners shall not
drink the wine for which you have labored.")
Psalm 97 or 97:1-4, 11-12 Dominus regnavit. Light has sprung up for the
just
Titus 3:4-7 When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour
appeared.
Luke 2: (1-14) 15-20 Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in
her heart.
____________________________________________________________________________
Mary was (indeed, is) a Jew. We used to say Jewess, to
diminish her and Judaism all at once. As Harry Golden pointed out,
we never talked about an Episcopalianess. Or maybe they're saying
Episcopalienne when they invent that improper noun. No one ever
heard of a Lutheraness, or a
Presbyterianess, or a Quakeress. The sacramental bread in the hands
of a woman priest
does not become a Hostess, or a twinkie. We are
Anglicans, members of the Episcopal Church, a/k/a the Protestant
Episcopal Church, and spiritually we are all Semites, as Pius XII
expressed it. We have been adopted into Mary's family, not
she into ours.
Mary so far as we know was never baptized, neither by immersion,
affusion, nor aspersion, and never gave up being a Jew, nor did Jesus,
though he underwent John's immersion "for the forgiveness of
sins" which was at the time not footnoted to disclaim the
implications. Baptism re-affirmed his
Jewishness, as it gives us ours, in a decent substitute for circumcision,
and a more inclusive one for the females of the species. The
imperial Church nevertheless promoted our Jesus to be Pantokrator in the
Greek Pantheon. Nor did Saulus ("slut-arsed") stop being
a Jew when he changed his name to Paulus ("short
stuff"). He indeed says Jesus was "born of a woman,
born under the law" -- the meaning is that he was born the same way
we are born, not only biologically the same way (Paul, being a Jew, had
no idea that virgins could have babies--it was a credential required by
the
pagans for their deities, as heterosexists require their gods to be made
in their image) but culturally in the same fix--"under the
law." Not, like tyrants or fixers, like Boy Bush,
"above the law", but born a minor, in solidarity
with the rest of us who had no grown-up rights to assert, so that we
nevertheless might be adopted as God's adult children and escape our
slavery to "the elemental spirits of the world". The RSV
asterisks this as "rudiments" of the world, and extends the
invective: "enslaved to beings that are not gods, weak and
beggarly elemental spirits" and again footnoted
to "or beggarly rudiments". That means all the religion
of paganism that Julian the Apostate lamented the passing of, and tried
to revive, indeed did resuscitate on its deathbed for a short
spell. Except for the enchanting customs of the liturgical year
which have saved us all from the ikonoclastic puritanism
which nearly swept away all the dear of paganism along with the
daft, we are bereft of our Olympian friends. I especially
miss Pan, since I read that wonderful chapter in Kenneth Graham's
"The Wind in the Willows" that I sometimes use for lectio
divino.
"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean," wrote Algernon Charles
Swinburne at last, "the world has grown grey from thy
breath." So Romanticism also wept at the graves of the old
gods. The sweet breath of Jesus, breathed onto his apostles in the
Upper Room, soured on the nostrils of millions
persecuted for dissent in the Church's imperial history.
In our time, kindly vegetarian wiccas with no fear of the Inquisition's
flames, or the preacher's persecution, try to dance and chant
the old "countryfied religion" of Nature and its spirits back
to life, with candles, herb tea, and sympathy, but without much success
in changing the world. They forget or never knew the tyranny of the
pagan establishment, any more than Gore Vidal does when he laments the
rumored exit of polytheism and the entrance of monotheism and its own set
of perversions, like the imperial line from Constantine to Adolph
Hitler: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer", and the new
Imperator George II, who now has the sole right to raise the Führer
salute,
"Sieg Heil!" Sylvia Plath indicts it all in
her poem, "Daddy":
"I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo,
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue
Panzer-man, panzer-man, You--
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak
through".(1)
God's act has set us free from all tyrranies, from apron strings
to
daddy patriarchy. It is because we have been set free that we are
enabled to
say "Abba", even "Amma" to God--yes, Papa and
Mama. We have been given the
Spirit to be Mary's children too. Nestorius thought that Mary was
only Christotokos--Christ Bearer, and not Theotokos, God Bearer,
but the
Council of Chalcedon in 451 decided that there are in Christ two
natures--God and Human--and that Mary is mother of both in the hypostatic
union. She couldn't have been mother of only one of the natures, for they
are One Person, one and the Same Son and divine Logos. It
satisfied many for a long time, but there have always been
dissenters. Orthodoxy takes
centuries to sift out all the residue with the orthopraxis of charity.
All of us, each of us, lives "under the law", in some sense,
for somebody else's rules are forced down upon some part of our lives at
least. Some anarchists (no-rule-at-all) say we should ignore the
calendar and the clock, for "time" is an idol we have set up
and which now turns and rules
us tyrannically. Our employer owns the time clock, and sets it to ticking
over his custody of our labor. We are all wage-slaves.
"Born of awoman" is liberative--it reminds us we are one
family, with One Mother. On the cross, Jesus spoke to all of us when he
directed his beloved disciple's attention to Mary:
"Son, look at your Mother." And his mother's
attention he directed to all of
us when he said, "Mother, look at your child." But
"born under the law" is
not liberative; it is a diagnosis of our plight. The time
clock, the calendar, the contract, the ukase, the directive, the
required report, the playpen, the harness, the jail, custodial care, the
pink slip, the
farewell party and the gold watch, are all the sharp edges of whatever
"arche", whatever authority, sits on us. All of this
gives us all a taste of living under the law. But even living
outside the law or above the law makes us slaves--to deception, to
deceit, to offense, to the threat of discovery, the shadow of shame and
disgrace when we are shown to be "out-laws." Jesus comes
to buy us back, his brothers and sisters, from slavishness as well as
> from slavery. He sealed his brotherhood, his siblinghood, to
us on the Cross, when he proved that greater love has no one than
this, and laid down his life for his friends. Being part of
God's family means we no longer have to act towards God as if God were a
slave-master, or an employer, or the high school principal, or Sylvia
Plath's "Daddy". Jesus,
Mary, and the saints show us what God is like. Mary never disowned
her Child, Jesus. She literally "stood by him", when the
world thought him mad, when the world slaughtered him. She had been
with him from before is life on earth began and saw him beyond the dark
garden of his friends'
betrayal, beyond the place of the skull. . . as
Mary "broke her water" Jesus was baptised into our humanity
before he was baptized by his cousin John in Jordan. Mary becomes
the first
Christian herself in that flood she let loose, and the first Christian
priest, who consecrated the Eucharist in her womb and in her arms, as she
offers him to us, the True Bread that comes down from heaven.
The earliest revolutionaries were sure of this when they sang Magnificat
with
Mary and Elizabeth even before Luke copied it into his gospel.
Babes leap in wombs, it tells us in an image only a mother could teach
us When God becomes our Abba, as Paul tells us in Galatians,
then Mary also becomes an Amma to us, the Semite who is our
Mother. In the first reading, we
learn of the joy that comes with the clothing of liberation, the
kind of joy that is unabashedly gender-specific! the joy of the
bridegroom ornamented with flowers, the joy of the bride decked
with jewels, and the image is extended to Nature--the joy of a
garden "as it causes what is sown in it to spring up."
Fecundity and flowering are here with her faithfulness.
In the mural of "Visitation" at Casa Ave Maria, Mary half
kneels in a birthing position at the Cross, birthing an adult
Jesus, a suffering and resurrected Jesus with whom she is in solidarity
in his suffering and in his glory. Issuing from her womb also is a
cascade of the flowers of Nature on one side, and on the other a throng
of young people crowding and clambering their way over the ruins of the
old Managua cathedral on July 19, 1979, the triumph of the revolution.
These images are fraught with
meaning for us still. Thus Mary is both naturally and historically
our Mother in faith and love. In the Magnificat, her song, we
hear of the reversal of values that the gospel is all about, the
lifting up of the
lowly that makes it possible for a woman to be an agent of salvation, a
co-redemptrix, a Theotokos. That we are included in God's scheme of
things, that we are included in the rearrangement of history, is what the
good news to the poor is, for us. God loves us most in our
greatest
need, as does a Mother, and Christians who forget the Motherly in God
will forget
the brotherly and sisterly and finally the Fatherly and the Godly as
well. Mary appears to the poor of the earth at various times and
places, usually
to children, to young people, to women. Rarely if ever has she been
seen
by a field marshal or a banking superintendent. A hundred
years ago, in
the midst of the Potato Famine the starving people of Ireland saw her
on
the porch of their little country church in the village of Knock, where
hungry peasants glimpsed her in the rain, at an altar on the outside
back
of the church, and with her were Saint Joseph and Saint John, and upon
the altar a Lamb, slain and risen, triumphant over the famine in the
land.
And she was the celebrant, offering the Bread of Heaven to the
starving.
It was the first Roman Catholic church where a woman was seen vested
for
eucharist at an altar, even if it was outdoors in the rain. And the
woman
we are pleased to call our Lady.
We didn't wait for the impetus of "Globalization"
to recognize the wholeness of the Catholic religion, that Our Lady of
Knock, Our Lady of Walsingham, Nuestra Señora de Guadaupe, and
Notre Dame de Paris, and a hundred more, are all as it were in
hypostatic union with Mary of
Nazareth. At the time of the protestant Revolt, the connection of
these "localities"
of various "Catholic Ladies" with the mother of the historical
Jesus was so
loose that Bishop Hugh Latimer called for the burning of the
images: "
Our Lady of Worcerster, our great Sybill. . . with her old sister
of Walsingham, her young sister of Ipswich, their two other sisters of
Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster in Smithfield; they
would not be all day a burning," he chuckled. And burn many of
them did, but so
did he at the last, on October 16, 1555, with Nicholas Ridley, to whom he
said "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a
candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put
out." And so it hasn't, and our Reformation lives,
but other candles have been lit as
well, and some of them at the Anglican shrine of our Lady of Walsingham,
where since 1130 pilgrims flocked as to a 'virtual' Holy House of
Nazareth. For Richeldis de Favreches, a widow in alsingham,
once talked to an apparition of Mary there, who told her to set up
a replica of her house and gave her the blueprints. Henry VIII
levelled the site in 1538, but in an 'end run' around English
ikonoclasm, Mary had already appeared in December of 1531 to Juan
Diego, a Mexican peasant, wearing her traje,
and talked to him in Nahuatl and they mispronounced it Guadalupe. Mary
lives on
too in a resurrected shrine at Walsingham, an English lady on a throne of
grace.
The variety of Marys is shocking to protestant sensibilities, and even to
a
spiky Anglo Catholic like me, a good deal of reflection and synthesis
are
required to deal with the phenomena. One December here
in Managua, on
the 8th, the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin--an old
Anglican feast, too, even in the 1662 Prayer Book--I brought out to the
front
patio my statue of our Lady of Guadalupe for the occasion, and started to
set
it about with flowers and candles. Later there would be
firecrackers, and
lots of children singing for sweets out front. Guadalupe is not a
queen,
but a campesina, who spoke Nahuatl to Juan Diego that day in Tepayec in
1531, and has become the symbol of Mexican nationalism and the struggle
of the poor throughout Latin America. The Episcopal Church of
Nuestra
Señora de las Americas in Chicago was dedicated to her when my friend
Rex
Bateman was its vicar. A picture of Guadalupe, touched to the very image
in
Mexico City, hangs in the church now, a miracle in
itself. But that feast
day of our Lady is December 12, and I was surprised when Managua
neighbors
said it was too early for her statue to be honored on the 8th, that
I could borrow a proper Purísima statue from one of them for the
occasion. This is the representation of Mary for the Feast of the
Conception, in flowing robes, flying up a stairwell of clouds, like Judy
Garland on the
yellow brick road in Cinemascope. It's a confusion of the
celebrations
they were objecting to--in a way, it would be like putting out Easter
eggs on Good Friday, or a picture of Jesus weeping in Gethsemane to
celebrate
Pentecost.
Jeremy Sheehy, in "Mary and Locality" (2) cites the Dominican
Edward
Schillebeeckx about this phenomenon of the dozens of local devotions to
Mary, that 'Love gave her a thousand names': "Theology
has to be
critical in its attitude towards the thousand names bestowed upon the
Virgin
Mother by popular devotion. But theology lives in and draws its
sustenance from
the life of faith led by the members of the Church community, and
theologians should realize that this life is more powerful than all the
feeble efforts made by theology. That is why theology, in exercising
that
criticism which is its rightful task, should never criticize in a
spirit
of self-satisfaction or theological 'pride'." Sheehy also
quotes Canon
A.M.Allchin: "Mary in the infinite variety
of her involvement with place, 'our
Lady of this, our Lady of that', embodies in herself this qualitative
catholicty which, far from being opposed to outward catholicity, is its
safeguard
and protection. In her we see that in creation as in the Godhead
itself,
identity and distinction, unity and multiplicity, are not in opposition
to one another." Today as I write this in
Managua our empleada, our housekeeper
Silvia, comes to tell us that an apparition of our Lady has been seen,
apparently
formed from humidity in the plaster, on the walls of a church in
Masaya.
Which reminded me that some years ago, I brought home from Africa a
mahogany statue of the Madonna, as a Black woman, which a Muslim
woodcarver had made for me from a photo of a woman in the parish that I
had with me. When I got back to Chicago, I bathed the image in
linseed oil
before it was mounted in the church, and one day drops began to appear
at
the corners of her eyes, and formed themselves into tears where the
wood
had been incised by the carver, and fell away. At about that
time there
were a half dozen weepy statues all over the United States, and
some
folks in our little mission church thought that we might have a hot
property to
draw pilgrims. My old presbyterianism surfaced and I debunked the
lacrymose linseed oil and put Madonna in the sun to dry her
tears. But
the devotion to our Lady survived at St Andrew's, and in my heart as
well, and she will live 'ad multos annos' in all the sacred shrines where
her
family turns to her as the mother of Jesus and our own Mother as well,
our little sister of Guadalupe, our regnant queen of Walsingham,
Nuestra
Señora, Notre Dame, our Lady. The poet Robert Lowell
tells us how this
happens.
Our Lady of Walsingham
There once the penitents took off their shoes
And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English lane,
Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree,
Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make glad
The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad
And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There's no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with is heavy eyelids. As before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham. (3)
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
grant73@rturbonett.com.ni
GRITS now on-line:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
(1) Sylvia Plath, "Daddy".The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th
ed., ed.by
Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy. copyright 1996. New York & London;
W.W.
Norton & Co.
(2) "Mary and Locality", by Jeremy Sheehy. A paper given at
Walsingham in
1997 to the Ecumenical Society of the BVM; Wallington, Surrey: ESBVM,
May
1999.
(3) Robert Lowell, "Our Lady of Walsingham." from the Norton
Anthology of
Poetry, lst edition.. Arthur M. Eastman and others, editors. New
York:
W.W.Norton & Co., Inc. copyright 1970.
(Revised from a homily I wrote for the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin.
G.M.G.)