Mary
Vatican overseer preaches to LCWR on Mary's submission to God
Sigh :(
Mary was a person, not a handy object lesson, and if she was going to teach us something, I don't think it would be submission .... when Jesus took off as a kid and worried his parents, she remonstrated with him ... when Jesus and his mom attended a wedding, she influenced him, despite his objections, into taking the first step on the road of his public ministry .... and when he did take to preaching, she apparently wondered if he'd lost his mind ;)
But say perhaps Mary *was* submissive to God in her agreement to be Jesus' mother - even if so, to use that example to force women to be submissive to the church is to conflate God with an all too fallible earthly institution.
posted by crystal | 10:46 PM
2 Comments:
Actually the bishop didn't use the word "submission." That was only the misleading headline.
He talked about Mary's relationship to God, one of self-gift:
"What strikes me about Mary in the Gospels is that she did not place any obstacles between herself and the grace of God. And so she breathed in this gift of God’s loving care, God’s mercy. That itself was God’s gift to her from the moment of her conception, preparing her to be the mother of the Son of God, to be the mother of the savior. No obstacle at all did she place between herself and the grace and mercy of God."
And he goes on to quote Thomas Merton:
“This is precisely Mary’s greatest glory. That having nothing of her own, retaining nothing of a self that could glory to anything but her own sake, she placed no obstacle to the mercy of God and in no way resisted his love and his will.”
We are all called to place no obstacle to God's grace. And sometimes that means denying our self will, as Jesus said in the Gospel: "Take up your cross every day and deny yourself..."
Ultimately the Gospel flies in the face of our modern culture that preaches self-fulfillment.
Thanks for the comment.
I think the problem arises with trying to figure out what exactly God's desire/will for us is. Mary consulted her conscience, apparently, and decided to do what God asked. But in the situation with the church and the sisters, the church wants to decide for the sisters what God's will is for them is instead of letting them discern that for themselves. Saying no to the church isn't the same thing as saying no to God.
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