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| The Virgin of Vladimir, detail Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow |
with the Word of God,
comes down the road:
if only you’ll shelter her.”
St. John of the Cross, poem 13, Christmas Refrain.
May is over, but as we proceed I want
to remind readers that in the Catholic world, May is also known as Mary’s
month. That would be the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God and Queen of the
Universe. Notwithstanding the exalted language, she wants to reign in our
hearts from within with our consent, and not over us from without against our consent,
with authority conferred by her Son, who at the same time asks us to take her
into our homes (see John: 19, 26-27; and the last two paragraphs of this post). And
if we did, how could we live proudly or vainly in her presence? All the more
reason to remember her during the rest of the year: "If only you'll
shelter her."
I am thinking of the recent annual
fashion gala at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Not that they and I are
much concerned with each other, but they laid some claims to engaging with what
they called “The Catholic Imagination” in a recent event and ongoing exhibit.
Their Exhibition Overview states: “The Costume Institute’s spring 2018
exhibition-at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters-features a dialogue
between fashion and medieval art from The Met collection to examine fashion’s
ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism.” Exhibit
overviews and artists in general are prone to make hyperbolic statements
regarding the scope and intents of their purposes, so we shouldn’t take any of
that too seriously, except to note that the dialogue which is mentioned is
really an appropriation; and to remember that fashion statements and devotional
practices have very little in common, claims of ongoing engagement
notwithstanding. If we do that we resist bewitching. I have read that the
exhibit is tastefully done, although the opening gala associated with it,
featuring celebrities and fashionistas in “Catholic inspired” costumes varying
in degrees of absurdity, is to my mind the perfect scenario of form divorced
from content, and an unintentionally suitable epigram for our culture.
What has any of this got to do with
sheltering Mary? One can hardly picture the Blessed Virgin Mary involved in any
gala. Perhaps less clear is that she would not despise one either, as I am
prone to; but when I despise I act out of pride, and she never acted out of
pride. At the Annunciation she prayed:
“My soul proclaims the greatness of
the Lord, [italics added] my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has
looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day, all generations shall
call me blessed. The Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his
name. He has mercy on those who fear Him in every generation. He has shown the
strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit, he has cast
down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” [Luke 1:
46-53]
These words of Mary from the Gospel of
Luke are known as The Magnificat. Uttered by a teenage Jewish girl moved to consent by the spirit of God to allow Him to become active in her life, they
announce the true subversion of the world by Love, the ground, as it were, in
which the cross is planted; the sedition for which she would have been roasted
alive, had the powers of the world known her. But they didn’t know her then,
and they don’t know her today. Even now that Christianity is two millenia old,
we rarely see these words as being at odds with the kind of piety generally
associated with the Blessed Mother, and we don’t think about how opposed to the
order of things as we know them that these words are. To speak of casting down
the mighty, scattering the proud, and lifting up the lowly is to speak of
upheaval, of overturning the established order of the world. For all of that,
they are not proud or boastful words. They do not threaten violence or
bloodshed. They are worshipful of God and speak in faith of the mercy He will bring
about through the ultimate injustice, the Cross. Mary believes He will bring
mercy and victory over sin and death, although she doesn’t yet know how. The victory
is won and the outcome is determined – even if all things have not yet taken
place - and the resurrection reminds us that it takes place here, on the
ground.
Make no mistake about it, even when
Christian values are misappropriated by others. For instance, there is a
persistent error afloat which designates appropriately Christian values, like the
poverty of spirit of the Beatitudes - “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, or
charity toward the poor, a Judaic ideal found repeatedly in the Old Testament
and developed by Christians in the New, as belonging authentically to Marxism,
which is a murderously stupid ideology. I offer the history of the twentieth
century, during which it caused tens of millions of deaths, in support my
statement. No state, or body proletariat for that matter, can possibly practice
the virtue of love, which is what is required of individuals who practice
charity and poverty of spirit. That’s why individual communists can seem very
impressive in their passion for serving the poor, while collectively they are
monstrous. Marxism gets human nature exactly wrong. It supposes that oppressed
humans are inherently more just than their oppressors, that it is the act of
oppressing that ushers in evil, and not evil that ushers in acts of
oppression. Therefore, once oppressive ruling classes are removed, there
is no more barrier to justice. The oppressed are inherently just - on the right
side of history, as they say. Even if that were true - and it isn't - the fact
remains that the oppressed never conduct these revolutions. Power opposed to
power, as it were, always hijacks them; political players go to work. The brand
of elitism may change, but the form remains the same. Contrast Communist
inspired revolutions, like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, with the Catholic
inspired Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980’s, in which workers banded
together with the Church took down the mock worker’s paradise of Polish (Soviet)
communism, bloodlessly. Charity and love do not translate into Socialist
revolution. The Blessed Mother would not have fit into any communist movement,
since she trusted the Lord above all things; the party has no use for that.
"If only you'll shelter her." That would be in the spirit, in our hearts. If we investigate and contemplate who she was, we can only be moved to authentic respect and reverence. Then we can begin to form our actions as they arise naturally from that place.
