Missing Mary

Mary has been mugged of her message. 

I think we’ve dulled the blade of Mary’s Magnifi-axe (Luke 1:46-55). It’s too subversive, generous, street-born and earthy in its longing and ache. 

We hear her song like a sacerdotal supplication from the cream of the religious graduates. 

The immaculatizing of Mary is a mirage that keeps us from seeing her as she needs to be. 

She’s no longer a down and dirty voice for the poor but a sermon of precepts for the dour do-gooders. 

She doesn’t shock us or make our scruples squirm. She’s forgotten in her worshipful exaltation, lost to the losers, baptized right out of Bethlehem.

Mary’s marvelously messy, like an exhausted to bitchiness traveler, a burstingly-pregnant, bloodshot-eyed woman in need of a bed. 

The tired commercialization and nostalgia of niceness has sterilized the provocative power of this muffled voice of Christmas. 

Mary has been mugged of her message. 

Is it possible to get her back since there’s no room in the catadazation of the holiday season?

Holiness is no longer something vigorously washed like cloth diapers but something virginal and unsullied in the minds of today’s churchianity. 

Mary’s premarital state has become the noose of the naughty, instead of the profound gift of revelation that humanity can’t make a savior out of our own passion. 

The purity of Mary wasn’t a victory for the prickly, pious prude but a promise to those who know the shame of the whisper-weary, unmarried and pregnant young mother. 

But all this doesn’t fit in a Christmas carol or card, but it’s a heavenly masterpiece to those sleeping in the stalls of our cities. 

Can we hear what Christmas is trying to say:  “Mary’s still birthing Jesus in the back alleys of our faithful festivities and righteous revelries.”

Let’s remember this Mary in all our good and joyful merriments this Christmas season. 

If we try, we just might discover Jesus buried underneath all the wrapping paper, used paper plates and forgotten plastic toys. 

I think that’s why God made the Shepherds and Astrologers search for a baby in a manger and called it all...a sign.

Do we have ears to hear and eyes to see?