MARY SPEAKS: FROM EPHESUS, a poem by Madeleine L'Engle

This is a beautiful poem by Madeleine L'Engle ... a little commentary by me follows the poem.

MARY SPEAKS: FROM EPHESUS

        Now that I have spent these years in this strange place

 of luminous stone and golden light and dying gods,

now that I have listened to the wild music

 of given-son, John, I begin to understand. 

In the beginning I was confused and dazzled;

a plain girl, unused to angels.

Then there was the hard journey to Bethlehem,

and the desperate search for a place to stay,

my distended belly ripe and ready for deliverance.

In the dark of the cave, night air sweet with the moist breath

of domestic beasts, I laughed, despite my pains,

at their concern. Joseph feared that they would frighten me

with their anxious stampings and snortings,

but their anxiety was only for me, and not because of me.

One old cow, udder permanently drooping,

mooed so with my every contracting

that my birthing-cries could not be heard.

And so my baby came with pain and tears and much hilarity. 

       Afterwards, swaddled and clean, he was so small and tender

that I could not think beyond my present loving

to all this strange night pointed. The shepherds came

clumsily gruff and knelt, and brought their gifts,

and, later on, the kings; and all I knew was marvel.

His childhood was sheer joy to me. He was merry and loving,

moved swiftly from laughter to long, unchildlike silences.

The years before his death were bitter for me.

I did not understand, and sometimes thought that it was he

who had lost comprehension of the promise of his birth.

His death was horrible. But now I understand

that death was not his sacrifice, but birth.

It was not the cross which was his sacrifice.

It was his birth which must have been, for him,

most terrible of all. Think. If I were to be born

out of compassion, as one of the small wood-lice

in the door-sill of our hut, limit myself to the comprehension

of those small dark creatures, unable to know sea or sun or song

or Johns bright words, to live and die thus utterly restricted,

it would be nothing, nothing to the radiant Word

coming to dwell, for man, in mans confined and cabined flesh. 

This was the sacrifice, this ultimate gift of love.

I thought once that I loved. My love was hundredfold less

 than his, than the love of the wood-lice is to mine,

and even this I do not know. For has he not, or will he not

come to the wood-lice as he came to man? Does he not

give his own self to the lowing cattle, the ear of corn,

the blazing sun, the clarion moon, the drop of rain?

His compassion is infinite, his sacrifice incomprehensible,

breaking through the darkness of our loving-lack. 

Oh, my son, who was and is and will be, my night draws close.

Come, true light, which taketh away the sin of the world,

and bring me home. My hour is come. Amen.

L'Engle, Madeleine (2009-02-04). The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle. The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

One of the struggles I have had as a small child with Mary was understanding her as a flesh and blood, living woman. It is sort of the way I understood nuns as a child. Because of the religious habits, religious sisters wore that hid their hair, hid their female figure, I understood as a child that there were 3 sexes, male, female, and nuns. Mary, with all of her solemn titles, with her shrines at Fatima, Lourdes, Guadalupe, to name a few, was other worldly, more of a transcendent goddess. Given the Christology that was taught at that time, where Jesus was the severe judge of humankind, a kind of great and mysterious Oz, Mary was more the Glinda, good witch of the North, who watched my back and pleaded with Jesus to prevent my immortal soul from being condemned to the eternal fire of Hell. Mary, transcendent as she was for me, was approachable, Jesus, hardly so.

Things change, and no longer in the present Christology is Jesus the severe judge of the Dies Irae of the old Requiem Mass, but the Good Shepherd in search for his lost sheep. Along with this shift in Christology is a shift in Mariology. Mary remains as ever the Theotokos, however, she is the flesh and blood human being who struggled as we all do trying to comprehend the mystery of life, and the mystery of God. Glorified as Mary may be now, she once was like us in all things, one who ate and drank, loved and hurt, laughed and wept, and so on. Poets like Madeleine L'Engle, Luci Shaw, and Denise Levertov have done much to enflesh Mary as a real woman. The poem above is a wonderful example of what is happening now. No longer is Mary a statue or a stain glass window for me, a "little lady dressed in blue." Mary is very real and just as approachable as she once was.