It’s wonderful to be back at with all of you after my time away in Maine. And it’s especially wonderful to be with you on the celebration of the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin.
Knowing that the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin would be my first Sunday back with you meant that I was on the lookout in Maine for some new picture of or new insight about the Virgin Mary that I could bring back to you today. I quickly found out that I didn’t need to look very far to find this.
I only needed to do what I always do when I go to my little corner of Downeast Maine. I needed to make the rounds at my favorite local galleries. And so this is exactly what I did.
I toured around and saw many wonderful paintings and pieces of sculpture. But the experience that touched most directly on Mary was a show hosted by my former congregation in their gallery space. The show featured the work of a single woman artist and was entitled “Domestic Madonnas.”
I went late in the day right after the show had been hung, before it had been publicized or announced to anyone and so was able to be completely alone in the gallery space. There I saw a dozen or so paintings all the same size and all painted in the same flat icon-like style. Each painting focused on a single dark, female Madonna- like figure with a golden nimbus around her head. In each painting the woman was doing a common household chore with her own hands.
There was a “Sweeping Madonna” holding a broom in her hand. There was a “Cooking Madonna” stirring a pot on the top of a stove. There was an “Ironing Madonna” finishing up a shirt. There was a “Shopping Madonna” carrying bags from the grocery story. There was even a “Madonna with Coffee” on her way to the table with a pot of espresso in her hand.
But just when I thought I had seen it all, there on the very last wall was the “Madonna of the Bathroom,” a woman bending over a toilet holding one of those pesky scrubbers that never do the kind of job you hope it will do.
And while I was completely charmed by what the artist seemed to be suggesting about the dignity of household chores and the down-to-earth nature of household life, I must admit that when I saw the “Madonna of the Bathroom” the first thing that popped into my mind was: “Oh my. What would people at St. Paul’s think of this?” Would they be their irreverent, reverent selves and feel as delighted as I did or would they feel this went just a bit too far?
And as I stood in front of the painting with this questioned, I flashed back to two years ago when I saw another Madonna-like woman doing something similar.
I was in Concord, California, doing a consulting project for a company that makes cleaning products. My business partner and I were conducting a series of in-home observations and interviews with women, learning as much as I could about how they cleaned their homes, how they thought about it and felt about it. This particular house, the smallest and poorest I had visited during the project, was the home of a woman named Gloria, a small, dark, Madonna-like Hispanic woman, and her husband and their four children. Gloria had agreed to let me observe and interview her while she cleaned one of her bathrooms. And so I perched at the doorway while she started that task.
She began in what I was to learn was a rather typical way. She sprinkling powdered cleanser in the bathtub and in the toilet so, as she said, it could work while she did other things. She sponged off the countertop and carefully cleaned the mirrors. She then stepped into the bathtub and vigorously scrubbed it, rinsing it out with the shower head when she was done and getting completely drenched in the process. Finally she stepped back out of the shower and dried the whole area—bathtub, tile walls and fixtures—with a towel.
With the hardest work seemingly done, she then scrubbed and rinsed the sink and began preparing to clean the toilet. And this is when Gloria surprised me. Instead of fishing around for one of those scrubbers, she turned to me, held up two small, strong hands in front of my face and said: “Some people are afraid to use their hands on this. I am not.” And with that, she knelt down on the floor and began carefully cleaning her family’s toilet, inside and out, with a rag held in her bare hands.
The first reaction I had as I watched this small, proud, dark woman do this was to feel ashamed of myself. For what I was seeing was something so private, so intimate, so expressive of who Gloria was at her core that I should not have been allowed to see it.
But right along with this feeling of shame came another reaction. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. There was a kind of beauty and dignity in the act and in the woman doing it. On one level, of course, she was just doing something that needed to be done in the way she wanted to do it. But it was also more than this. It was about the way that Gloria lived her life: a life of direct contact and gritty engagement with who and what she cared about. This was not a woman content to live life at arms distance.
Yes, some people are afraid to use their hands to do any number of things in this life. Gloria was not. And, of course, neither was Mary
The Virgin Mary can sometimes be depicted as a kind passive receptacle for God’s coming into the world. She can also be depicted as a kind of idealized woman who floats above the everyday. But this is not the Mary we celebrate today. As the mother of God, she is the paradigm of direct contact and gritty engagement with the kind of human life that comes into being from having said yes to God. She is all about a willingness to use our own hands in the work that needs to be done within the great household of this human race: in the feeding and the cleaning up and in the mending.
But this is not all. For like a good mother, she is also about an ethic of mercy and justice in the household, one that in a hands-on way lifts up the lowly and helps to send the mighty to their rooms without supper.
And so I believe the energy of the Virgin Mary is not just experienced in the humility of those who have said yes to God in their lives and have served the household of the human race without notice or recognition. Mary’s energy is also experienced in those who are willing to use their own hands in doing what they can in more visible and risky ways to “lift up the lowly and to scatter the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.”
One such person is Cindy Sheehan. Mother of soldier killed in Iraq, the focus of a growing dissatisfaction with the war there, she took it upon herself to go and wait outside the President’s house in Texas to get answers to the questions she has about why her son died and what purpose the war is serving. Whether you agree with her or not about her stance on immediately getting out of the war, I would suggest that this direct, gritty and hands-on approach is another manifestation of Mary energy: energy that is bodily and is about personal presence, energy that longs for peace and justice, energy that does not accept the typical categories of power.
Kenneth Leech in his book True Prayer quotes another theologian who speaks about what Mary’s energy brings to the church. Without it, he says, the church is in danger of losing its humanity and can “become functionalistic, soulless, a hectic enterprise without any point of rest, estranged from its true nature.” Leech goes on to say that the practice of praying to Mary is about longing to be in union with the one who bore the Word of God in her own body, longing for union between the Word of God and our own lives.
Some people are afraid to use their hands in the world, on the world, for the world. We as the children of the most high, as brothers and sisters of Mary, must.
Works Cited
Painting by Nance Parker in a show entitled “Domestic Madonnas” at the Trinity Episcopal Church Gallery in Castine, Maine in August of 2005.
Kenneth Leech quoting Hans Urs von Balthasar in True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality, page 187.
