Mary as the OG Strong Female Character
His Gospel is peace.
Yesterday, there was a school shooting up the street from my parents’ house (the house I lived in for 17 years). I grew up driving or walking past this school every single day. The media was gathering at our local Kwik Trip, which used to be the PDQ I got Kit-Kat bars at while I pumped gas in high school. A second grader called 911. Please keep the eastern Madison community in your prayers, and for the safety of all kiddos at school today. Thank you. XO - C
This year, our family had the great delight of seeing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in theaters. It was made by the guy who made The Chosen, so I was biased towards adoring it, but it was also based on one of my favorite books of all time. We bought our kids popcorns the size of their heads and curled up in our reclining seats to laugh as Imogene Herdman and her howling troop of siblings caused chaos. I did love the movie, and the part I enjoyed most was Imogene’s desire to see herself in the mother of God.
Imogene, the main antihero of the story, is a rough-and-tumble girl from the wrong side of the tracks. She’s basically been forced to raise her siblings due to largely absent parents, and does everything from starting fires to smoking cigars. She eventually winds up becoming Mary in the small town Christmas pageant and needs to learn the entire Christmas story from scratch.
She frequently finds herself pulled to a painting of Mary in the church’s gathering space. In it, Mary is pictured how we so often depict her in art: light-skinned, blue-eyed, gazing at something lovely off in the distance, her hair a glowy mane. Imogene stares at the woman she is supposed to be and it doesn’t quite compute. Grace, the director of the pageant, explains to her that Mary was in fact quite tough. She had to be—being asked to carry the son of God as a young teen girl in a time where doing so could have easily meant being stoned to death at best and losing all of her social contracts at worst, which in those days was about as tragic as death.
It’s difficult for me to think of Mary as tough. I find it easier to relate to saints who have a bit more meat on the bones—petty gossips like Teresa of Avila or party-animal womanizers like Augustine. Someone who lived a little life. It’s impossible for me to see any ounce of myself in someone who reached that level of perfection.
But that’s because I’m not viewing Mary as a willful participant in the Nativity. It’s easier for me to view her as the sinless wonder; the person who never felt fear or anger or exhaustion. Who was just going to go ahead and do what the angel told her to do.
And yet, God doesn’t force her, does he? He doesn’t whack her with a magic wand and impregnate her. He asks her if she’d be willing. He waits for her affirmative consent.
God wants our involvement. His love does not force; it does not cajole. Similar to when God presented the burning bush to Moses, his call to Mary is an invitation. Freedom is God’s ultimate goal, and that includes our individual freedom. Mary could have said no and did not.