In this episode, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Rev. Deborah Duguid-May explore the varying manifestations of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and interrogate whether the version the Church has propagated is empowering for women or oppressive.
DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
MET [00:38] Hello, today we are talking about Mary, as in Mary, mother of Jesus. Okay, so I’m not going to lie, when Debra recommended months ago, we do an episode on Mary, I groaned so hard, because I figured it would be Debra thrilling about motherhood and spiritualism. And I would just kind of be sitting here throwing in a few comments about Mary versus whore in the Western canon. Okay, the thing is, I am completely uninterested in Mary as a character.
MET [01:15] And I know that is probably blasphemous to some of our listeners. And it may well be blasphemous to Deborah. That’s what we’re talking about today. But let me tell you my experience with Mary.
MET [01:28] The way Mary was always described to me was that she was quintessentially good. That was Mary’s whole shtick. Mary was so good, so holy, so pure. Now, I wasn’t taught that Mary was sinless, just that she was good.
MET [01:49] So good that God chose her out of all of the women in the whole world to be the mother of his child. Honestly, what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to feel any connection with a character whose defining characteristic is goodness, so beyond the standard of normal human goodness that God says, hey, bear my child. This is not something I get.
MET [02:17] And maybe it’s not something I want to get. That is weird. And it makes Mary not like other people in a way that makes her particularly difficult to empathize with. If we don’t talk about Mary as being so freaking good, we tend to get Mary wrapped up in the cult of motherhood, right?
MET [02:36] Okay, so let me be very clear on something. I love being a mother. I love my kid more than life itself. But I absolutely do not put any stock into what is often called the cult of motherhood.
MET [02:50] I don’t know if you are familiar with that phrase. But the cult of motherhood is this weird narrative that women get sucked into that everything about kids and raising kids and being a mom and pregnancy is great and beautiful. And somehow you are less of a woman if you show any dissatisfaction with any of that. The cult of motherhood leads to things like the mommy wars, where you have women battling tooth and nail to show that they are the most invested in being a mom, and they love motherhood more than anyone.
MET [03:22] And for these women, they appreciate the magic and the mysticism of motherhood all the time.
DDM [03:29] And you know, even if people aren’t aware of that phrase, the cult of motherhood.`
MET [03:35] Right, we know what that is. We feel it, we know it. We’ve been online,
DDM [03:36] We feel it.
MET [03:38] Right? This is patriarchal nonsense. Here’s some reality for you, okay? Pregnancy is awful.
MET [03:47] I absolutely do not buy into that womb goddess or whatever nonsense some women try to sell me because I have been pregnant and I know the score. It is murder on your feet and your back and even your teeth.
MET [04:04] It is profoundly uncomfortable and even dangerous. Your body does weird stuff you absolutely are not prepared for. When I was pregnant, I did not commune with some spirit of creation. I communed with whatever would help me not feel sick, right?
MET [04:18] I mean, I remember, so funny story. I was all proud of the fact, oh, I don’t feel all that sick all the time. And Carl and I were walking through the grocery store and we walked by the olive bar and the smell of sweet pickles had me running through the store. I thought, this is it.
MET [04:35] I am going to lose every part of my body. Oh my gosh. And I had to go on bed rest, which I absolutely did not do well. And I treated Carl terribly when I got hungry.
MET [04:48] When I got hungry, I became a monster of a person. I mean, I will be asking for forgiveness for the rest of my life.
DDM [05:01] For those of you can’t see, he’s nodding. Absolutely.
MET [05:02] And childbirth sucks. It is not beautiful. It is not a mystic experience. It is awful.
MET [05:08] And people die that way.
DDM [05:10] I split. I split.
MET [05:11] Oh my gosh, yes.
MET [05:13] And breastfeeding sucks. It’s hard and it’s painful and half the time it doesn’t work. The first year of your kid’s life is awful. Sleep deprivation is literally a form of torture used by the army.
MET [05:24] But somehow I’m supposed to find it magical when I’m scooping poop every three to four hours? Right, who convinced us of this? I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Now we have convinced women that they are supposed to be in love with this supposedly beautiful spiritual process when any objective observer will tell you that this is ridiculous and we deserve to get paid.
MET [05:47] So the reason I think Mary plays into this is because often Mary gets used as this kind of mother goddess figure or whatever to make us feel better about the fact that we’ve been doing this work for generations and many of us have been doing it without any help or without any credit. So we’ve made it into spiritual work to make ourselves feel better about the fact that nobody is coming to our aid. You know, so we elevate it to something holy because otherwise we would have to acknowledge that it is dirty and it is hard and the patriarchy has made it virtually impossible to do.
MET [06:23] Now, I am very lucky. I have a partner who has been there for me at every turn. My partner has been active and an equal helper in child rearing. And I am well aware of how rare that is.
MET [06:36] And maybe that’s why I never got sucked into that cult of motherhood. I didn’t need anybody to convince me that it was amazing and great and spiritual and perfect because I could be realistic without losing my sense of self. And because I have been honest with myself about motherhood, I have a much better relationship with my kid, I think. I don’t see them as evidence of my martyrdom or my holiness or whatever.
MET [07:00] They are not proof of just how good a mother I am. They’re a fully realized person, irrespective of whether I breastfed long enough or gave them a Pinterest worthy nursery. My kid is amazing. I value them not just for their achievements, which, yeah, make me look good, but because they are kind, empathetic, and a great conversationalist.
MET [07:22] We have an honest relationship, not one designed to make me feel good about being a mom. So when I do something for my kid, it’s because I want to, and I hope it enriches them or their day, not because I am invested in making myself look good in front of other mothers. I have a teenager who really does like to sit and share a cup of coffee with me. And I can’t say that would be the case if I had spent their entire life invested in motherhood instead of them.
MET [07:50] So let me be very clear about this. I love my kid. I love my family. I love, truly love, love, love being a mother.
MET [07:58] But I am honest about what that entails. And because I am honest with the world and my family about what motherhood is, I have a much stronger relationship with my kid and my husband. I think this hits on an episode about Mary because she kind of comes in two manifestations generally, holy virgin or holy mother. And I think both are kind of bogus.
DDM [08:23] All right, so as Elizabeth said in the very beginning, we knew coming into this topic, we would probably be on opposite ends of the subject. But honestly, the irony is, Elizabeth, I actually agree with you a hundred percent and wasn’t expecting to when we first planned this conversation. Totally, totally, sister. Like you, I love my six kids. I love all the foster kids that I raised, but I never defined myself in terms of motherhood,
DDM [08:52] and never was a traditional mother by any classification, which was much to the irritation I often think of my children who used to moan every morning. Why can’t you be like other mothers? Why can’t you pack us a school lunch? Why can’t you do this or that?
DDM [09:08] The reality is I was working multiple jobs and really doing a lot of that traditional stuff I don’t think was my skill set either. You know, motherhood, I agree with you, has been so co-opted by patriarchy that it is often very unhealthy for both women and children in all those ways and more that you were naming. But now this is where we differ. I don’t see Mary being chosen to bring the Christ child into the world because of her, and I’m doing air quotes, goodness.
DDM [09:40] If we in Christianity define sin as alienation or being fragmented from the world, from ourselves, from any sense of sacredness, then to say Mary is without sin, which really only the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions do, we know Protestant traditions don’t, To say that is to say that God could see in her a woman, and this is how I understand it, who was not fragmented, who somehow had managed to not become alienated from her own sense of self, had somehow not managed to become alienated from her others, or from a true sense of what is sacred. And that in some ways ties in with her holiness, air quotes again, which again is not so much about being good but about the root of the word holiness which comes from wholeness.
DDM [10:32] So Mary had somehow, even though she was probably only about 14 years old, had managed to maintain a sense of wholeness and of integrity in a world that very often made it almost impossible for people to do that. And that’s why I think in some ways for me that she was chosen because of her capacity to hold her own wholeness and not become alienated from her true self despite living in a very patriarchal world. Which is why, ironically, we see her not consulting anyone, even though she was still a young girl, about whether or not to say yes to carrying the Christ child. You know, in all of the Gospel texts we see that Mary asks no one’s permission.
DDM [11:16] She doesn’t go back to her father, she doesn’t go to her mother, she doesn’t go to her fiancé. And that ties in, for me, with what I believe is the biblical meaning of virgin. You know, virgin actually in the Hebraic scriptural sense was not so much about whether a female hymen was intact. Virgin with woman, all these virgin martyrs we have in the tradition, really spoke much more about the sense of autonomous.
DDM [11:46] So to be a virgin was to not be under the control of somebody else, invariably a male figure. So in the Christian tradition where we have all these virgin martyrs, it actually really didn’t have really hardly anything to do with their sex lives, which, let’s be honest, we actually know very little about. And it’s probably better that way when we start to unearth some of the stories. But it’s more to do with the fact that they were no longer under the control of either a father or a husband.
DDM [12:19] So they were seen as independent women functioning outside of the patriarchal system. So I see Mary as, despite being young, this incredibly strong, independent woman who makes her own choices and who has somehow managed to retain a sense of wholeness and yet deep connection, despite living in this world that so often leaves women feeling fractured and powerless.
MET [12:47] So I think it’s super important to think about what words mean. And I’m actually going to refer to the last podcast we released kind of along those lines, Carl and I talked about literature. and I’m going to make a connection to that because what I’m going to be talking about now is Mary as kind of a character and kind of continuing that when we think about what words mean and also stories and narratives, it all gets wound up. So I want to talk about Mary, in terms of the stories that we weave, because as we talked about in the last episode with literature, I think we can’t really separate Mary the biblical character from Mary the stories that we tell about her.
MET [13:45] And I think when you talk about what words mean, that becomes an important part of that. So anyway, like I said, if you listen to the last one, most of you know that I didn’t start my scholarly career in communication or rhetoric. My undergrad and master’s degree are actually in literature. And it’s funny, our pastoral assistant came in earlier and was giving me a hard time, and he was saying, you just really don’t know how to not talk like a professor, do you?
MET [14:13] Well, no, Joe, I do not. So I apologize for my academies. It’s just who I am as a person.
MET [14:21] But that being said, if you know anything, and I mean anything at all, about women in Western literature, You know that they fall into one of two categories, and that is Madonna or whore. That is just what we do with women. For the last thousand years or so, we have basically been categorizing women in literature, movies, poetry, music, whatever, in one of these two categories: “holy and blessed and pure virgin” or “Whore of Babylon.”
MET [14:52] And really, this kind of is ultimately my biggest problem with Mary. Mary isn’t a saint or an intercessor anymore. She is an archetype. And I’ve talked about archetypes before, and I’ve talked about things like public memory before when we talked about Mary Magdalene, and some of this all comes to a head here. The version of Mary that has been at the heart of Christianity for almost 2,000 years has so infiltrated our society that it has defined all women. And that version of Mary, not the version of Mary you’re talking about, but that version of Mary is not empowering. And it is not even holy.
MET [15:37] That version of Mary is pure and submissive and chaste, and some of you may even remember from your intro to Lit Classes what I’m talking about. If you don’t remember this from your intro to Lit Class, I’m guessing it’s because you weren’t paying attention, because I guarantee your TA or Lit Prof talked about this. Women in the Western canon have been defined by these kind of two polar opposites of womanhood for thousands of years, right? The virgin or the woman of ill repute.
MET [16:05] And those were pretty much the only categories for women to fit into. So Mary has never been an intercessor for me. She’s always been a tool of the patriarchy, to be perfectly honest. Ultimately, no matter how you dress her up, this version of Mary that the church sells is designed to keep women obedient.
MET [16:23] And I know, Debra, We want to protest, and we want to tell each other all about the series you did on Mary, and how it’s not the case, and Mary’s great. You know, a month at Trinity doesn’t contradict the bazillion years we’ve been telling this story. And that hurts me. The narrative of Mary as quintessentially good isn’t just bad theology from my background, and we can’t really excuse it that way. It is the way women’s roles have been defined for generations.
MET [16:56] Mary is not the mother of God in Western culture, that’s just a MacGuffin. Mary is a substitute for what men want out of women. I wrote this article years ago about a theory I proposed called a constitutive character. You could say that word constitutive if you wanted to.
MET [17:16] Basically, the idea is that there are figures, either historical or fictional or whatever, there’s a character. And we use that character to define ourselves. So we say who these people are, but when we say that, it’s actually a reflection of ourselves more than it is a definition of that person.
DDM [17:36] Absolutely. I was thinking that about when you were speaking about Mary, you know, it says a lot more about the West than it does about Mary.
MET [17:43] Yes, that’s exactly right. So I use the example of Jesus in this article, right?
MET [17:45] If you look at all the different versions of Jesus being described out there by all of his followers, and there are a lot of “Jesi” out there, right? But that’s not it. It’s that for each group of followers, Jesus is a reflection of them.
MET [18:02] Mary is also a constitutive character, but she is a reflection of the patriarchy. Mary is much less a mother of God than she is the ideal of powerful men. And in my mind, the ideal of powerful men is generally the opposite of what God had in mind. So I just have to assume that whatever we know about Mary has got to be in the wrong.
DDM [18:23] Yeah, no, 100%, 100%. And I agree with you where in so often Mary has become this projection of patriarchy, you know. And in the West, absolutely, there has been this incredibly unhealthy binary dividing woman into whore and virgin. But you know, I think what we’ve got to remember as well is that for the Christian tradition, it really doesn’t begin as a Western tradition, but as a Middle Eastern tradition.
DDM [18:54] And then within Christian theology, there is, of course, the Eastern tradition, there is the African tradition. So, you know, Mary is, in reality, so much more than just the product of the West. There is Mary in so many ways before the West. There’s Mary of the East, there’s Mary of Africa, and not all of these traditions have defined women in such binary ways as the West has, which despite its continual belief that it is the society that defends women’s rights, has not historically been any less dangerous for women, let’s be honest.
DDM [19:31] Um, the reality is I think that for some women Mary has been incredibly empowering, particularly when you can see beyond the patriarchal narrative or not allow her to be defined by that narrative, you know just as a priest I’ve heard countless stories of women From women of how she’s given them the strength as a role model to make hard decisions that went against every cultural norm or expectation Many have seen in Mary that young revolutionary who proclaims at the very beginning of her young adult life that Song of Mary. Which is interesting because the Song of Mary is actually said in our evening offices every day of our lives throughout the Christian world.
DDM [20:20] East, West, Middle Eastern, African. The Song of Mary is right in the heart of the evening prayer. And in the Song of Mary, or what is called sometimes the Magnificat, there are these words God has scattered the proud in their conceit he’s cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly he’s filled the hungry with good things but the rich he has sent away empty And so Mary, throughout history, despite what I think patriarchy and literature and these narratives, maybe even you might even say priestly narratives have done to her, Mary still remains in her own words the one who proclaims unapologetically that God is not on the side
DDM [21:08] of the proud and the mighty, but the ordinary grassroots people. That God will fill the hungry, but the rich will be sent away empty. And Mary names the God who is always on the side of the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and will judge the powerful who exploit God’s people. And then I have to ask myself this, I mean, where else did Jesus learn this from?
DDM [21:33] Like, hello, you know? I mean, this is in some ways almost what Jesus himself will mirror later on, the same words as his mum. And that’s why I believe for me Mary was chosen. is she saw into the heart of true faith and could be trusted to shape God’s child.
DDM [21:52] But she was never afraid to speak out. And so Jesus goes on to be a person who will not be afraid to speak out. She acts in ways that destabilize the powerful and the mighty. And so Jesus goes on to act in ways that will destabilize the powerful and the mighty.
DDM [22:09] So for many, Mary is the one, biblically, who shows us the courage to stand up against the powerful, to speak out and to stand with those who suffer and are oppressed. And so, you know, I agree with you that in many ways our literature does say less about Mary and more about our Western society and maybe even our obsession with sex and with what women are doing with their bodies, you know. But I want to end with this because for myself there’s another side to Mary and that is the Mary in a way obviously beyond literature but maybe even beyond the scriptural text. You know, there’s the Mary beyond all of our narratives and tradition, beyond archetype.
DDM [22:57] And that’s Mary the woman herself. And, you know, the reason I say this is because some people will know this if I’ve been their parish priest. But when I was 14, I didn’t grow up in the church. I didn’t grow up at all with, I mean, I didn’t even hardly ever go to Sunday school.
DDM [23:15] So I didn’t have the pictures or the images even in my head. We were a pretty secular family by all accounts. And I remember when I was about 14, I was lying in bed at night and this woman came into my room. She had a blue gown and she had white underneath and she had this shining bluey silver star from her forehead and she was fairly dark.
DDM [23:42] She was really a dark woman. And she came in and she sat on my bed and I was speechless, you know, because I was like, and in my little head, I was thinking to myself, is this God? Because I had no idea what God looked like. I didn’t grow up in the Sunday school.
DDM [23:58] And she sat on my bed to the extent that the pillow actually went down. And she spoke words over me that I will never forget. and she came from the time I was 14 probably about three times in the evening and kind of like spoke these words over me. So in my head she became the first image that I ever had of God and I didn’t know that she wasn’t God until when I was about 15, 16 I went with a friend to a Roman Catholic Church and I saw her in a statue they had this
DDM [24:35] dark statue this was in South Africa of Mary And I remember turning to my friend and saying, who is she? I mean, that’s how unchurched I was. I was like, who is she? And my friend said, no, that’s Jesus’ mom, Mary, you know?
DDM [24:49] And I was like, oh my God, I’ve met her. And my friend was like, what do you mean, you know? And so from then I developed this fascination with Mary. Like I wanted to know everything about her.
DDM [24:59] And I got my friend during geography class to teach me the Hail Mary.
DDM [25:03] And I used to recite this during geography class, which shows you I had no real interest in geography, I guess, but subsequently when I was about to be ordained I was very nervous that what does it mean to be ordained as a woman in a tradition that traditionally men have been ordained into and for those of us who believe that it actually becomes the body and blood of Christ at the consecration I kept asking myself if I consecrate will it become the body and blood of Christ or is this just all a joke? And I was in a retreat and we were in this little cloister room we didn’t really leave much and I was really wrestling with this issue and I guess it was about integrity you know is what I’m doing genuine or is it actually just something fake?
DDM [25:52] And Mary came to me again in that room and said, who do you think brought the first body and blood of Christ into this world? It was a woman. And she was like, of course you can do this.
DDM [26:05] She was like, if I could do it, you could do it. And I never asked that question after that moment in time. And subsequently there’s been so many times in my life when I’ve really been at a crossroads or grappling with something and Mary will come to me, shaping me, teaching me, challenging me and reminding me of who I am. So that’s why for myself, Elizabeth, I adore Mary, not because of scriptural text, not because of literature or even how others see her, not because she’s essentially an archetype.
DDM [26:41] I love her because in a way she’s always been there for me. because I trust her, her love and her care for me. And because of my experience in my relationship with her, that’s something that, you know, can’t be taken away. Not patriarchy, not even our scriptural tradition, not what anybody else says.
DDM [27:00] And so I guess for myself, my deepest wish is that people would actually begin to relate to Mary. for who she is as a person in her own right, maybe to begin to speak to her, to allow her to break through all these different layers of historical narrative in a way to allow her to be unchained from the past and maybe to be encountered again in the present.
CRT [27:29] Producer Carl here and I felt like I needed to share a poem. This is by Jay Hume. I’ve been told I was pronouncing his name wrong. This is the poet that I talked about in the literature episode.
CRT [27:42] This is called The Holy Family. Christ had brothers, do you remember? Half-forgotten in gospel song, bit parts with single lines, denied by those desperate for a virgin mother to remain untouched. Perfection is what happens when myth overtakes the reality, when wanting erases the truth already there.
CRT [28:07] Imagine being venerated by those who deny your children. Imagine centuries of men disclaiming the love of your kin. Imagine it said that you never held your husband, never cradled him close, closer, soft curve, hard flesh, whispered promise. Imagine.
CRT [28:28] Acting on love doesn’t make you any less holy. This wanting cannot preclude a person from faith. I think on dark nights Mary pulled Joseph closer, counted their five sons, their daughters, each one miraculous, the oldest God. I think many times they added to holy creation, their Savior sleeping soundly, a baby still and snoring at their feet.
MET [29:00] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.
MET [29:25] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [29:29] Music by Audionautix.com
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