Lessons from Mary

How different it was for Mary, who knew her husband but not yet intimately. Customarily he would have severed the relationship if she were pregnant by another man, wouldn’t he? But he protects her and raises the child with her and so the holy family begins its journey.

Pregnancy is risky, always risky when the child is unwanted, or if wanted only by a jealous king, its peril is increased. Mary took on the risk, as did Joseph, and what we see in Mary is more than courage: it is humility and obedience. She sees herself as of lowly estate, as a simple daughter of a village family. She is not the daughter of the king, not a daughter of Herod and certainly not the child of Caesar Augustus who was called “son of God, King of Kings.” (Read or watch “I Claudius’’ and you’ll see just how wildly different two young women can be.)

Mary is a woman of honor and great strength. To say, “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” is to take on a great burden for any woman. To bear a child in time of danger, to take on the grace and favor that is not her due but her desire now to serve God as God calls her to serve.

Mary Holmes, art history teacher at Cowell College, said that the virtue our society needs now is obedience — and I think she meant it in the Marion sense of docility: accepting the reign of God and the power of the spirit is not passivity. Mary is already empowered by her creator’s love and her sacrificial response. She will now know no ordinary life, nor will her son. All that is changed now and forever. She is a woman clothed with the sun: made shining and glorious by her simplicity and her humility, her obedience and her courageous response: “Here I am, Lord.”