by CCW | 28 March 2019 20:00
Chapel and classes resumed after the March break on Monday, March 25th, an auspicious occasion in the Christian calendar and yet one with a considerable resonance with other religions and philosophies. One can’t help but observe that it is exactly nine months to Christmas! At once ‘hooray’, and ‘oh, no’, I suppose! It marks the Feast of the Annunciation, the annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Mary that she is to be the mother of God, the mother of Jesus, a story which we ordinarily hear in Advent and at Christmas. Yet the feast of the Annunciation marks the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not by way of biological and sexual intercourse, but intellectually and spiritually and in ways that redeem and sanctify the physical and the natural; hence the significance of the symbolism of nine months to Christmas, to the birth of Christ. “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” as Medieval wisdom puts it. Mary plays a significant role in the Christian understanding of Christ and who Christ is for us. As such she is a central figure in the question which all the great religions and philosophies wrestle with, the question about what it means to be human.
Many of you have just returned from various adventures and travels, journeys to far off places and climes, journeys to Africa and Europe and elsewhere, journeys that are global; others of you have travelled in other ways, through books and thoughts, through dreams and the power of imagination. Yet the one important and interesting thing about all the journeys of our lives is that while we talk about getting away from things, the one thing we cannot get away from and the one thing that we always take with us wherever we go and however we go, is ourselves. You. And so there is the critical necessity of thinking about what it means to be a ‘you’, a self. Mary plays a crucial and critical role in that kind of thinking.
We cannot think of Mary without looking back into such figures as Hannah and Miriam in the Old Testament as well as host of other figures and images such as Deborah “who arose as a mother in Israel” and Jael, “most blessed among women”, whom the Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges celebrates, a book which we will be exploring over the next little while. Mary, too, as the mother of Jesus, is present in the Qur’an; she is actually mentioned there more times than in the Christian New Testament. But far from being merely a role model for women, Mary is the great exemplar of what it truly means to be human. She is part of our current quest to think about what it means to be a ‘self’ or whether that is simply an illusion. Perhaps, there is no ‘you’; perhaps, as Yuval Noah Harari suggests, you are merely an “organic algorithm”, and, whatever that means, it means that there is no ‘you’. Your March break journey was, perhaps, merely a fantasy!
But Mary reminds us of a deep and fundamental religious, intellectual and spiritual insight. No God, no self. As we have been at pains to argue in Chapel, to think about ourselves and one another means to think about God. We live, as has been observed by many, in a post-secular world where the assumptions of secularization theory as displacing and dispelling religion have proved utterly false and incomplete. The religious editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Rupert Shortt has recently observed (TLS, March 22nd, 2019[1]) the remarkable return of religion in the global world the more that“post-secular thinking”takes hold. He notes three forms of awareness that belong to the phenomenon of the post-secular world:
“First, that we are embodied beings with the capacity to grasp meaning and truth; second, that our status is to be viewed as a gift prompting awe, gratitude and a heightened sense of ethical responsibility; third, an acknowledgement of this gift as grounded in a reality that freely bestows itself on us.”
These are features, he argues, that are present and manifest in such things as Neoplatonism which gathers up so much of the thinking of the ancient world, particularly in terms of Plato and Aristotle; the three great Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; the Vedantic and Bhaktic traditions of Hinduism; Sikhism; and certain aspects of Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism. Quite a list. And yet all are very much about a sense of the transcendent, recognising that all forms of contingency depend utterly upon the absolute. They are also very much about the primacy of the ethical over and against the merely legal.
In a way, these three forms of awareness and the questions to which they belong coalesce and meet in the figure of Mary. She embodies, I use the word intentionally, the wonderful harmony of intellect and sense, of our knowing and our willing, of the proper relation between truth and power. She reveals the idea that grace, what comes from God, does not destroy nature or creation but perfects it. As such Mary signals the vocation of our humanity: to be who we truly are through our response to the One who is and whose word defines all reality; in short, to be defined by grace. Here is the counter to the folly of thinking we can create or recreate ourselves, or its contradictory corollary, that we are simply victims of circumstance and fate, constrained by the oppressions of any number of ‘others’. The paradox is great. We assume our complete autonomy as selves free to be whatever we think we want to be, free to change our sexual identities even, and yet always, always the victims of some sort of oppression. The contradiction is arresting.
Mary, in a way, cuts through all of the cant of our culture and day by virtue of the simplicity and directness of her ‘yes’ to God. As such she shows us the real and true dignity of our humanity. It is found in the free and active response to the divine will. We are defined not by circumstance and the evil of others but by grace, the grace that lifts us up to a true and joyous vision of ourselves in God and with God without whom we are truly nothing. Mary recalls us to the vocation of our humanity. It is about our being with God in our being with one another; it is about service and sacrifice grounded in the God who bestows himself upon us freely and joyously. In such an awareness we may say with Mary, “behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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