New Year! Mary, the Mother of God

Just like a new person, the new year is full of great expectations. The liturgical year opens the civil calendar with the solemnity of Mary, the mother of God.

The primitive church had an interesting way of saying things. To claim that Jesus is one and God in an univocal way, they said that Mary is, not only the mother of Jesus, the man, but also, of Jesus, the God. In this way, what appeared to be a rather abstract concept becomes a “familiar” one.

At the council of Ephesus, the bishops commented that it was not the business of bishops to do philosophy or to debate with philosophers, but to speak like “fishermen”. Certainly, fishermen would speak of mother and children rather than of substance and divinity. In other words, to say that Mary is the mother of God, is not claiming that Mary is the mother of God the Father, but simply to say that Jesus is one person, one agent, who is both 100% human and 100% God.

Even in this statement, the true mission of Mary is clearly subordinated to her Son. To claim that she is the Mother of God is basically to reveal something about her Son. The Church can hardly say something about her that is not a profession of  faith in her Son.

Today we seldom have debates about the nature of Christ, or about any other philosophical argument for that matter. However, there is an underlying similar dilemma in our culture. Not about Christ, but about us, the human person. Is the human person a thinking autonomous entity, travelling in a material capsule we call body? Are our bodies mere external tools that our mind (soul, spirit) uses? When we say “I” do we include the body as part of the “I”?

The answer to that question is far from being abstract, because it permeates the ethical decisions of our age. If our bodies are extrinsic material characteristics, we should be able to deal with them as we please. In that case, selling human organs would not be very much different from selling any other personal possession. Terminating the life of a body in pain would be an act of mercy since what really counts is the liberation of that soul from than burdensome body. And sexual use of the body would not be a serious ethical concern when “no body is hurt”.

Although our age is not particularly keen in debating about abstract issues, we do engage in those debates unknowingly every time we express our opinion on the above issues. Only one of the two versions can be true. Either the body is an intrinsic dimension of the person or it is not. The big question is, which one is true?

A extremely efficient and speedily way to answer that question would be to ask a rape victim if what they did to her was something done merely to her body, or a extremely severe offence to her as a person. Any state that recognizes that rape should be punished more severely for that physical aggression, acknowledges that intimate dimensions of the body are intrinsically linked with the spiritual intimacy of the person. In other words, that our mind cannot inhabit a different body, because we are our bodies as much as we are our minds. This means, that a living human body is a living human person or nothing at all and that non-thinking or non-autonomous human beings are human persons from the moment their bodies become human bodies until their bodies cease to exist.

Dualism has haunted the history of human thinking for centuries. Today, we are not an exception. The church had found ways to express the unity of Christ with a single word, theotokos (the Mother of God). What are we going to use today to fight our dualism? Shall we start a campaign that says “we are bodies”, “what you do you to your body, you do to yourself”? We need creative thinking to continue the legacy the church has to be the  ”light to Gentiles” (Lk 2:32), even if the Gentiles feel more “enlightened”.

Mary could be the mother of God because she was her body. She did not loan her body to God for nine months. She gave herself to Him in the exclusive manner a wife gives herself unreservedly to her husband. This is why her virginity had to be “postpartum”, after birth as well. She could only do this with a total possession of herself through her gift of the immaculate conception, which, in turn, could preserve her body from the corruption that ensues material bodies not perfectly aligned with the spiritual soul. Virginity, motherhood of God, assumption and immaculate conception are all tied together.

This year, I received a picture of me sent by my mother along with a prayer she was given just after giving birth to her son on the day of the Immaculate conception. It helped me to look back and wonder what I have done to myself, and how much I still need to do before my life is over. New year, new beginnings. May the mother of God, the perfect integrity of body and mind, help us to see who we really are and show us how to live up to it.